Margaret tells you about the Direct Action Network that organized the successful shutdown of the WTO in November, 1999
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
Speaker 3 (00:07):
It's a podcast that looks at radical history to help
all of us figure out how to live in a
radical present and build a radical future.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and for the.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Past month or two, I've been investigating the fairly successful
fight against neoliberalism that activists from across the world waged.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
At the turn of the twenty first century.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
But before I even tell you about that, I need
to tell you that we have a producer named Sophie
who isn't on the call today, and we don't have
a guest today because this is one of those Margaret's
talking to a microphone in a podcast closet by herself episodes.
We also have an audio engineer named Eva hi Eva,
and our theme music was written for us by unwoman.
(00:49):
You don't actually have to go back and listen to
all of the parts that we've done about neoliberalism if
you just want to learn about the topic of today,
the Battle of Seattle. But there's a lot more context
if you go back and listen to those episodes. And
I love context, kind of like I don't know, jo
all grew up with Oscar the Grouch singing, I love trash.
(01:11):
It's like that, only I like context. I also kind
of like trash, but that's unrelated. We started off by
talking about what neoliberalism is, and in short, neoliberalism is
a system by which the rich people in developed nations
strip resources from underdeveloped nations and workers within their own countries.
(01:32):
Then we talked for a while about the Zapatistas, the
indigenous rebels of Chiapas, Mexico, who use a diversity of
tactics and ideologies to build autonomy in Southeast Mexico. I
promised you that they helped bring together an international assembly
of grassroots organizations to help fight against neoliberalism, and this
week we're going to talk about some of the fruits
(01:53):
of that organizing. Then last week we talked about the
Black Bloc, a tactic developed by a timeonomists and anarchists
in Western Germany. Essentially squatters and anti authoritarian activists trying
to build a better egalitarian society found themselves under attack
by the state and capitalism.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Rather than rely on what they had.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Seen as the possibilities presented to them in Europe at
the time, which was on one hand, you had mass
mobilizations that use rigid principles of nonviolence, and on the
other hand, the other option that had been presented to
them as available was underground, clandestine direct action, like what
many urban guerrillas were doing.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
During that time.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Instead, these activists forged a third path in which they
made themselves hard to arrest and hard to prosecute, and
then went ahead and did their direct action in the
light of day for all the world to see by
wearing all black and disguising their identities. That tactic, among others,
was used extensively throughout the alter globalization movement that we've
(02:55):
been focusing on, and so this week I want to
talk about the opening salvo of the alter globalization movement,
the successful shut down of the World Trade Organization's summit
in Seattle, which took place on November thirtieth, nineteen ninety nine.
While it was the Black Cloud anarchists who captured media headlines,
the protest was organized by tens of thousands of people
(03:17):
from across a wide range of movements and ideologies, including
plenty of not Black Cloud anarchists. The shortest version of
the story that I can think of is this, When
the World Trade Organization met in Seattle, a new movement
of movements stepped onto the world stage. Tens of thousands
of people from all sorts of social movements like the
(03:39):
anti war movement, environmentalist movement, global justice, and labor showed
up and blockaded the site of the conference. They held
back multiple police departments and held strong. Six hundred people
were arrested. A state of emergency was declared, and the
people won, and the World Trade Organization meeting was shut down,
(04:01):
and the World Trade Organization was no longer the rising
star of geopolitics, and its influence weighed dramatically, while most
of the subsequent protests that happened in the altglobalization movement
were less tactically successful. In many ways, we'd already won
the war, so let's talk about how people did it.
(04:27):
We've been talking for a while about some of the
early altra globalization protests, mostly throughout Europe, at which tens
of thousands of people demonstrated against letting unelected decision making
bodies determine how the world's resources should be managed. In
nineteen ninety five, the World Trade Organization was formed. It
was built originally after World War Two. There was this
(04:49):
agreement among a lot of countries called the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade, which sought to foster a tariff
free trade around the world, and in nineteen nine, the
World Trade Organization was founded out of that with much
more like actual attempts at systemic power and things like that.
(05:11):
I've mentioned this in previous episodes, but it's worth repeating.
Global trade and economic policy are both really complicated things,
and essentially it's possible for right wing forces to do
bad shit with all sorts of positions.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
The reason I bring this.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Up like, right now, what we're looking at the world's
most influential economy, The US is suddenly throwing up trade
barriers and tariffs, and this is greatly disrupting world trade
and it is causing all kinds of havoc that is
affecting poor people. My guess is less that Trump and
all those people are doing this to try and build
up a strong local economy and more that they're just
(05:47):
thieves who've broken into the building and are stripping the
wire out of the walls of the country. That's my guess,
but I don't know. But either way, being pro tariff
is currently the right way position. Twenty years ago, being
pro free trade was. It wasn't just the right wing position.
It was the consensus between the neoliberal Democratic Party and
(06:09):
the neo conservative Republican Party. All people who were capitalists
were in favor of free trade, and both political parties
were very adamantly capitalist when all of this stuff went on. Essentially,
you can use free trade the lack of tariffs to
remove the economic protections that smaller economies might want to
(06:30):
put up to help keep international companies from basically strip
mining them, both literally and figuratively. One of the main
ways that neoliberalism destroys developing economies is by using predatory
lending to trap countries into debt and then force those
countries to accept something called structural adjustment programs to rewrite
(06:50):
their own laws, to remove environmental and labor protections, to
basically streamline their economies to funnel money back to the
lenders stuff. I think it's really important to understand this
right now, because right now free trade looks like guid
right when the fascists are attempting to do trade protectionism
(07:12):
in the US, and it's just it really matters in
what context people are developing trade policies. Anyway, The World
Trade Organization was formed the idea that it would meet
every two years. It's headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, but it
would meet somewhere new For each summit. Leaders from countries
(07:33):
around the world would get together and discuss how to
reduce trade barriers and in the process enrich the richest
people in the world. Obviously, that's not what everyone went
there to do. People from poorer countries weren't like, yes,
please destroy us, but were forced into compromising positions. Let's
say the people running the wto the World Trade Organization,
(07:57):
they probably don't see themselves as cartoon villains, but instead
as people who foster global.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Cooperation and togetherness or whatever.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
If they actually meant that, if they actually meant an
interconnected and internationalist world, they would focus on allowing the
free movement of people across borders instead of the free
movement of capital across borders. The difference between those two
things is very, very important. One of the primary slogans
of the alter globalization movement is people over profit. For decades,
(08:29):
activists have been calling for what is called fair trade
in contrast to free trade. Basically, the argument is that
trade shouldn't cause countries to lose environmental and labor protections,
but instead develop those protections, people have been working to
develop supply chains and pay fair prices to producers and
emphasize working with producers and distributors that treat their workers fairly.
(08:52):
So if you like buy coffee, you know that the
person who grew the coffee isn't living in a horrible life,
and maybe you have to pay a little bit more
for them, and that seems fine to me. Ideally, you're
talking about trying to buy from people who are cooperatives
like so that the workers actually own the means of production.
(09:14):
And I suppose we'll probably return to this point fair
trade sometime during this series, or at least I certainly
hope we do. But these ideas around fair trade have
been around it since at least the nineteen sixties, if
not the nineteen forties and the nineteen fifties. And do
you know, wells who treats their workers fairly some places?
I don't know whether it's the ads or not, because
(09:34):
we don't vet that, because we can't because we actually
don't get to pick our ads. But here they are anyway,
and we're back in January nineteen ninety nine, Seattle was
picked for the every two years meeting of the WTO,
and this is the first time a major neoliberal summit
was happening on US soil. This was also the Millennium Talks,
(09:58):
and it was meant to be Millennial Round of Talks.
You'd think I would have put that in my script,
but I didn't. But it basically was like these are
going to be a big deal. And there's also a
lot of like, hey, we're going to finally start listening
to the smaller countries, and a lot of promises were
being made by the WTO that people were skeptical of.
By February, activists were starting to say things like, I
(10:20):
wonder if we can just shut the WTO down. By
spring they figured out a rough idea of how they
would do it, and by summer this was more developed.
They were like, we're going to build an incredibly wide
series of coalitions, unheardedly wide coalitions across diverse social movements,
and then coordinate mass direct action to shut the meetings down.
(10:43):
And when I say coalitions, I mean that there wasn't
one group, not even one group of groups, coordinating this
whole thing. There were actually a lot of different forces
working together and against each other in complicated ways, and
that means we're going to talk about them because I
like talking about that kind of stuff. I feel like
it's like worth understanding how people organize things. I think
(11:05):
that when we learned from history, we can't just be like,
they did a cool thing. It's like really worth getting
into the recipes, right, It's worth getting into how they
did things. I'm not saying we should do things like
these folks did things. We're in a very different situation,
very different context. But I think there's a lot of
really specific lessons that can be learned and applied. There
(11:27):
were maybe five different groups or five coalitions or what
have you that started organizing on this, both separately and
in tandem with each other, and usually people only talk
about two of them, but I'm a taoo five of them.
One of the ones that had very little impact in
the end was Okay, this is guy Ralph Nader. He
(11:48):
was famous at the time as a consumer protection advocate
and a Green Party presidential candidate, and he ran an
organization called Public Citizen, and in that group put together
a group called People for Fair Trade SLASH, the network
opposed to the WTO, which is too long of a name.
If you have a slash in your name, there's probably
(12:09):
some slashes that are earned. This one wasn't. You should
have picked one or the other if you ask me,
And everywhere people just call it people for Fair Trade.
This coalition, which involved more mainstream nonprofits NGOs non governmental organizations,
has been less focused on in everything I've read, and
they intentionally tried to keep some distance, mostly not antagonistically
(12:32):
from the more direct action focused part of the organizing.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
So that's them.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Then there was the biggest one by the numbers, There
was the labor movement, and they mobilized between twenty and
forty thousand people. Those numbers are very different from each other,
but I've read both. While all sorts of mainstream and
radical unions did show up, there was actually also a
split within the labor movement around this. The mainstream labor
position was basically, we want a seat at the table.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
In these negotiations, and.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
If you don't give it to us, then will shut
you down, although realistically they were like, if you don't
give it to us, then we'll have a big protest
march that is symbolic. The more radical labor unions were like,
actually we hate this corporate greed shit. But they were
still part of this labor organizing. Overall, labor organized independently
and they planned mass marches and not direct action. And
(13:25):
the Clinton administration the president at the time of the
earlier Clinton Bill Clinton, they referred to the labor march
as the legitimate protests compared to the criminal descent of
the direct actionists that we're going to talk about shortly.
So these are presented as the good protesters. But people
oversimplify this stuff all the time. I think that a
(13:47):
lot of narratives around the WTO downplay the importance of
labor and the struggle. The march in Seattle was largely symbolic,
at least it was intended to be largely symbolic, although
actually we'll get to it. There's the rank and file
of labor was a lot more radical than the organizers
by and large. But probably the most economically impactful part
(14:09):
of protests against the WTO was what the Longshoreman Union did.
They shut down every port on the West Coast from
Los Angeles to Alaska, and also the local taxi drivers
in Seattle went on strike, and the firefighters union basically
police were like, hey can you turn the hoses on
the protesters, and the firefighters union was like, we're not
(14:31):
going to do that. That's not going to happen. My
argument here is that labor is cool. Then there's a
coalition that sort of spawned the next coalition. So it's
like a two and one. When I said there's five,
it's blurry. There's a group called People's Global Action PGA,
which got its start in nineteen ninety eight at one
(14:54):
of the Zapatista and Quentros, the encounters, which were global
meetings of grassroots move These have been happening for a
couple of years at that point. I believe this was
the third one. You'd think, I know, it's in my notes,
but not in my script. And the nineteen ninety eight
in Quentro was in Geneva, Switzerland, which is actually the
same place as the WTO is headquartered. And I don't
(15:16):
know whether that was on purpose or not. It probably was,
but no one I read said that specifically. At this meeting,
four hundred representatives from seventy one countries launched a global organization,
People's Global Action. And this was largely people from where
you would say the developing nations or the global South.
(15:38):
The terminology around this is shifting. We it's all bad,
it's all whatever. Anyway Pga chose. I've seen it referred
to as an anarchist inspired organizational structure. I suspect that
was part of it, but I would actually suspect it
as like primarily as Apatista inspired horizontal organizational structure, which
(15:58):
would make it anarchistic, but actually developed from indigenous practices
in Southeast Mexico, although at some point, actually I think
we covered it in the magone episodes. Actually a lot
of anarchist practices in Europe did actually come from indigenous
practices in Mexico, from a Greek doctor who went there
early in the movement. But that's besides the point. I
(16:19):
get really nerdy about the roots of different practices in
social movements. So they chose this horizontal organizational structure in
which no one group or person could control the actions
of the entire group. And this is interesting to me
because this seems quite natural and logical. When you have
(16:41):
a group of peers who come together to interact, it's horizontal,
like you don't assume among your friend group that one
person is in charge, maybe like they're in charge for
the night.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
They're the one who planned it or whatever, right, but.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
They're not the boss. You don't have bosses among your friends.
And the same is true on a larger scale, By
and large, when countries interact with other countries, they assumed
that the other is sovereign and equal. Countries can't tell
one another what to do, except when they use force,
like military or economic force. Like theoretically you're talking to
(17:15):
your peer now, not in a super egalitarian way. Obviously,
countries are constantly at war with each other and like
doing weird diplomatic stuff and all of that, but it's
still like there's this assumption that this person sort of
should be get to be your equal. So a movement
built out of movements naturally abides by a horizontal structure
(17:36):
in which every movement has a right to be heard.
And that's how People's Global Action worked. So they formed
in nineteen ninety eight, and they met again in Bangalore,
India in August nineteen ninety nine, and they were like, yeah,
we endorse actions all over the world in solidarity with
the Seattle protests. And they also sent a caravan of
(17:56):
people to Seattle. They also and I think we'll talk
about this a little bit.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
And they also.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Organized a lot of the precursor or inspired a lot
of the precursor protests, but we'll talk about that in
proper zapatista form. When they came together and put together
a caravan of people going to Seattle, it came from
the east coast and it stopped in twenty cities to
talk to people about how corporate globalization had impacted them.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
And the reason it's in proper zapatista.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Form is those appetistas are constantly going on these like
listening and talking tours where they travel around place to
place and just interact with people directly, which is cool.
So all of these internationals on this caravan are like,
we're down to go get arrested in a foreign country
to stop this shit, which is a serious decision to make,
but this was a serious issue for them. Then there's
(18:45):
the main group of people who organized the direct action
to shut down the World Trade Organization, and they're sort
of the main characters in this week's tale, or maybe
that's because of a bias in my sources, but you
know who's a reoccurring side character, and not just this
week's tale, but the entirety of cool people who did
cool stuff. That's right. It is products and services the
(19:07):
only real through line on this show, the only thing
that makes you feel connected with the history. Nay, the
legacy of cool people who did cool stuff.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
The sponsors of this show the people we don't pick
and we're back, okay. The main group that organized the
direct action shut down the WTO it's called DAN.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
Daniell's not the editor anymore. That would have been funny anyway.
DAN stands for Direct Action Network, or more formally, the
Direct Action Network against Corporate Globalization. They decided that dan
AGG wasn't as good of a name.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
They were right.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
This organization is about as grassroots and scrappy of an
organization as they come. It was built from to author
Chris Dixon quote, a loose conglomeration of peace activists, anarchists, environmentalists,
international solidarity groups, and unaffiliated radicals, all interested in street
(20:12):
theater and or direct action during the WTO end quote.
What DAN offered was a clear and achievable vision for
what the protests could and in their view, should look like.
They should be art focused, and they should be non violent,
and they should be direct action. They were like, this
(20:33):
is not going to be boring.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
And it's not going to be symbolic. It's going to be.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Colorful and artsy and also direct as hell, and our
goal is to shut this shit down. And they followed
through on that promise. It was dan best as I
can tell, that innovated the whole. All radical protests should
be filled with just absolutely gigantic and dramatic puppets vibe
that defined so much of the Alter Globalization era, especially
(20:59):
in the US, I think, but I could be more
certain about things. I think that in Europe and Mexico,
the altglobalization protests were a bit more focused on direct
confrontation with the police and less focused on art. But
I might be misreading things, and maybe on change my
mind as I continue this series. The alto globalization movement
is something that I know a lot about, sort of
instinctively because I was involved in it. But it's been
(21:22):
interesting to actually sit down and really read all of
the information on it instead of just talking to people
in the streets or reading the discourse of people arguing
about this, that or the other. It's been interesting to
try and read it as history. Interesting is a strange word.
It's so strange to read about a movement you're involved
(21:42):
in his history. I was not involved in the WTO
protests and Seattle.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
I was too young. I barely knew about them.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Dan came together when so it started with a San
Francisco group of art anarchists called Art and Revolution. This
was part of a West Coast network of groups with
that name who did artsy direct action in the late nineties.
And Art and Revolution I think there were the people who,
in like February, were like, hey, what if we just
did this thing? And it took a while for people
to be like, yeah, totally, let's do the thing. By
(22:11):
June they started having conference calls with folks from around
the West Coast talking about direct action in street theater.
They were heavily inspired by the Reclaim the Streets protests
that had been happening, especially the Carnival against Capital that
had taken place in England the year before, and the
Carnival against Capital is this big artsy mass direct action.
(22:33):
The vibe that people were.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Moving to in protests at that point was.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Basically they were like, we want a global street party.
We want to reclaim our cities and streets as common
property and they called this movement Reclaimed the Streets. And
this movement was set up by and you probably guessed
it because I hinted at this people's global action and
therefore sprung up from the organizing.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Done by the Zapatistas.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Some of the initial folks on the DAN conference calls
where Canadian organizers who'd just done some shit the year
before in Vancouver too, and they have these conference calls
and then they take the proposal to a group called
Global Exchange, which is like a fair trade organization, and
they all agree, all right, yes, there should be decentralized
artsy direct action, but it needed to be focused around
(23:24):
a specific plan with specific dates and times and locations.
In order to be effective. You can't just say hey,
everyone show up and stop this. You need to be like,
here's how we're going to stop it. Here is a
decentralized framework for people to plug into. And I think
the idea of building a framework is the core idea
(23:46):
of decentralized organizing. And sometimes people who advocate for centralized
organizing think that decentralized organizing is just a like, ah,
everyone do what they want. And sometimes, unfortunately people believe
in decentralized organizing also think that, but it's actually about
building of framework collectively that other people can plug into
and hang their actions on. So Dan put out a call,
(24:09):
I'm going to quote it quote come to Seattle. It
is time to raise the social and political cost to
those who aim to increase the destruction and misery caused
by corporate globalization. As movements in other parts of the
world have, there is an incredible opportunity to use street theater, art, dance, music,
(24:29):
giant puppets, graffiti, art and theater, and nonviolent direct action
to simplify and dramatize the issues of corporate globalization and
to develop and spread new and creative forms of resistance.
This will help catalyze desperately needed mass movements in the
US and Canada capable of challenging global capital and making
(24:51):
radical change in social revolution. And that's a lofty goal, right.
We're going to use this moment to catalyze entirely new
mass movements with new energy in order to radically change society.
And they succeeded at a lot of this. They succeeded
(25:14):
at creating mass movements that were desperately needed that challenge
global capital and make radical change in social revolution. We
did not make a social revolution. That's a big one.
We didn't succeed at and so people can get kind
of hung up on that one. But on the other hand,
fascism is always trying to create a like global fascist state,
and they always fail at that too. Right, there's just
(25:35):
a give and take, and as long as we fight,
the other side doesn't win. I still dream of winning,
but winning isn't a static win condition anyway. Whatever, I'm offscript.
So Dan is calling for this thing, and they're like,
we should talk to the other people who are doing
this thing too, So they start talking to, for example,
the American Federation of Labor I think was probably the AFLCIO,
but actually I don't remember when the AFL became the AFLCIO.
(25:57):
I've had it on episodes before, but I just don't remember.
And I'm completely offscript. Dan started coordinating with labor, and
some folks that they talked to were like, yeah, that
sounds great, do your thing, and others were like, man,
you're gonna fuck our shit up. You should just stay
the fuck out of this. But Dan moved forward with
coalition building to greater or lesser success with these other
big groups I was talking about. They worked very well
(26:19):
with PGA, who they came out of. They also coordinated
loosely with people involved in public citizen who mostly wanted
to stay out of the whole thing. Meanwhile, by summer
DAN was expanding, bringing on some direct action activist groups
that are more like nonprofit right, like the Ruckus Society
and Rainforest Action Network. These are people who do like
(26:40):
banner hangs to draw attention to issues, imagine like green peace,
tight ideas. If you're in one of those groups that
you get really mad being compared to Greenpeace, I'm sorry.
They are distinguishable from that. They're a little bit more radical.
But they all got together at meetings to discuss the plan,
and they all consensed on we are going to call
(27:02):
for a specific date and time and location. And since
DAN was a meeting of equals, not a top down organization,
they had to work together as equals horizontally. The anarchists
who set the whole thing up did this a little
bit on purpose as a way to radicalize the more
traditional nonprofit activist groups and not like radicalize like get
them in trouble or make them do more direct action.
(27:24):
But actually the thing that's really radical. Well, I like
direct action, but the thing that's really radical is getting
people to confront the way that they make decisions internally
and getting people to look for structures that don't recreate
the systemic power abuses that we fight against. They were
(27:45):
reasonably effective, I think, at injecting more radical ideas within
some traditional nonprofit activist groups. All along there was internal
conflict within DAN about whether or not property destruction like
breaking bank windows or Starbucks windows or doing graffiti would
be accepted within the context of the action.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
And this is.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Talked about in a lot of different ways because people
who were involved seem to kind of be wreck conning
in what happened and being.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Like, no, we were always in favor of just this
or whatever.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Right, It's worth knowing that there are anarchists and other
radicals on both sides of this debate as best as
I can tell. And you'll notice, like property destruction includes graffiti, right,
and in their initial call they talk about graffiti art,
and so they're not coming at it morally opposed to
property destruction.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Well, some people are morally opposed to it.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
What they agreed upon was that property destruction was outside
the framework of the direct action they were calling for.
I maybe being a little bit generous there. I think
that a lot of people might have been specifically calling
on like, no one better come and do this shit,
fuck them if they do. I suspect that there was
a diversity of opinions about that, and I don't know
a ton about how people felt about it, partly because
(29:00):
like I've literally read the same author refer to it
two very different ways in like two thousand and two
thousand and six. You know, when they're talking about it later,
and I'm not going to name that person because everyone's
opinions and understandings of the past change and stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
I'm not truma call this person out.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
So it was Dan who put together the basic framework
of how direct action was going to work, which was
to be clear, when I say direct action shut this down,
they're going to be doing blockades. They're going to be
going and locking themselves to things and making themselves hard
to move so that delegates and stuff can't get into
the building. So Dan put together that framework, and it
(29:39):
was there organizing that shut down the World Trade Organization,
although also it was internal conflict within the World Trade
Organization also helped it shut it down. Because whatever anyway,
DAN put together the Direct Action with both help and
hindrance from other coalitions. People for Fair Trade never did
add DAN actions to the their own calendar of events,
(30:01):
and the labor marches were sometimes scheduled in ways to
draw people away from DAN. And then of course the
Black block, who will talk about they're the fifth group.
They just ignored the no property destruction guidelines that DAN
had agreed upon. But some other groups worked to bridge
the gaps between DAN and others. Jobs with Justice, a
labor advocacy group from Portland, advertised both the more radical
(30:24):
and less radical events. And now after November thirtieth, which
spoiler alert is the day that they successfully shut down
the wto opening ceremonies and stuff, suddenly everyone loves Direct
Action Network because they'd organize this big things successfully. Like
after the fact, everyone's like, oh, yeah, we were totally
with you or whatever. I've read a lot of people
(30:45):
who are salty. I just want to be really clear,
my sources are all so salty. In order to do
this organizing that they did, they started doing action camps
well ahead of time. Action camps are basically multi day
train where you can show up and learn direct action
skills and they are an amazing time and people still
put them on and you can go to them. They
(31:07):
also started doing road shows talking about the protest, going
place to place and talking about the issues in person,
which is an effective strategy that people do still use.
But sometimes people get sloppy and rely on social media
alone for outreach.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
These days, you.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Can reach more people with social media, but combining it
with an in person outreach model is a great combo.
That's all I'm saying. Also, it's really funny to be
like and the way they organize this was super in
person and stuff. They didn't perceive themselves as doing that.
They were very like this is the first Internet protest,
because they were also doing an awful lot of internet
(31:42):
organizing and in a way that I'm sure we'll talk
about it sometime. They like basically developed indie media, which
kind of became social media, and the nightmare world we
live in now everything can be recuperated by capitalism. So
these are the four are coalitions involved. Then there's the
(32:03):
wild Card, which is also a coalition to and just
sort of people forget that it's actually an organized thing.
The Famed and dreaded Eugene Anarchists the Black Block, which
most of them weren't from Eugene, Oregon, but that's what
the press picked up on. DAN organizers get pretty frustrated
when media called the Black Block the anarchists, because DAN
(32:26):
itself was heavily anarchists and pretty explicitly at least organized
along anarchistic lines. But the Eugene Anarchists were.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Part of the Black Block.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Eugene, Oregon is a kind of hippie college town in Oregon,
and in the nineties it was the center of this
fairly vibrant scene of militant tree sitters and forest defenders.
We've talked about the scene some in our Earth Liberation
Front episodes. There was a group called CFD Cascadia Forest
Defense that would maintain militant road blockades and tree sitty
(33:00):
and things like that to protect old growth forests and
endangered watersheds. An awful lot of those people were anarchists
and specifically part of this fairly new scene, the Green anarchists.
While anarchism comes out of the socialist movement and has
historically focused on issues of class and labor, green anarchists
apply the basic principles of solidarity direct action and egalitarianism
(33:23):
to the fight for wilderness and ecology rather than focusing
on class issues. Some but not all, green anarchists are
also anarcho primitivists. We specifically say that the root of
modern suffering isn't just the state or capitalism, but the
concept of civilization itself. The main theoretician of anarcho primitivism
(33:43):
at the time was a man named John Zerzan, who
was a local professor in Eugene who had cut his
teeth as an anarchist in the nineteen sixties. To quote
a write up from its Going down dot Org quote,
Zerzan concluded that the formation of class society, marked by
the shift from hunter gatherer bands to sedentary life through
agriculture and domestication, led to the creation of the state, patriarchy,
(34:07):
and industrialism, and has since sent humanity on course toward
our current industrial climate catastrophe. Moreover, he argued that by
giving up such a form of life, human beings were
leaving behind in existence largely of freedom and autonomy.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
End quote.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
I don't agree with everything Zerizen has to say, and
I believe that some of his conclusions are based on
outmoded anthropology, but he has done an awful lot of
work exploring the roots of oppression, and yeah, Eugene was
a hotbed of some of the most radical activists in
the country in the nineties. They ran a cable access
show called Cascadia Alive and through shows and had riots
(34:45):
when people were arrested for forest defense, and they planted
community gardens, and they defended trees in the city and
secretly at night, a lot of them were participants in
the Earth Liberation Front, more directly destroying the machinery that
was destroying the natural world. And in the end, about
one hundred to two hundred people, some of them from Eugene,
(35:06):
most of them not, went to Seattle to participate in
a black Block protest that existed outside the framework suggested
by the other coalitions. It seems likely that the majority
of the Black Block protesters were actually local to Seattle,
but it's impossible to conjecture exactly who was there and
who wasn't, because when you show up to things to
be anonymous, you don't tend to tell everyone that. As
(35:28):
best as I understand, the block actually did coordinate on
some level with Dan. There was a lot of tension
between these two groups, but the block basically agreed like,
all right, as long as the protests are peaceful, we're
going to not run around and smash shit. But if
the cops start attacking peaceful protesters, we're going to run
(35:50):
around smash shit. And it seems like they actually did
this away from the lockdowns, and that's a pretty good strategy.
It draws police attention elsewhere, away from unprotected people. But
I mean, honestly, this is probably like the most controversial
black block that I've ever read about in terms of
mixed feelings from the crowd. Although once again you have
(36:13):
this thing where the organizers don't want to lose control
of a situation, which makes sense, that's kind of their job.
Even the anarchist organizers that Dan don't want to lose
control of the situation. The sort of rank and file,
the people who are there doing things, I actually have
read accounts where they're much more in favor of, like hoay, the.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Black block is here.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
So those are the five groups that I can point to.
Mainstream NGOs who had very little impact as best as
I can tell, Labor which brought the numbers but was
presented as the good protesters by the president, PGA consisting
of largely people from the Global South, which had a
small presence from an organizing and on the ground point
of view, but pretty much inspired the entire movement in
(36:55):
the first place. You have the Direct Action Network, who
are the above ground bad activists who organize the actual
successful direct action and then you have the Black Bloc,
which made even the Direct Action Network look like saints
in comparison to the media. Though none of these groups
were actually appreciably violent, the violence was done almost exclusively
by the police. Anyhow, Notably missing from this list, you
(37:20):
might realize, are the sorts of groups that are doing
more organizing these days, traditional leftist and communist parties. Dan
organizer David Soulnett put it bluntly in an interview quote,
there was absolutely no Marxist, Leninist or Old Left or
old New Left involvement. Those groups were completely not present.
(37:42):
It was almost exclusively radical and radical anti authoritarian groups.
And the structure in the form of organization that I
think is an incredibly positive departure from left traditions, some
of which we can learn from, some of which we
can leave in the dust bin, and not to push
back against the super I am certain that there were
Marxists and Leninists and Old Left and New Left people
(38:04):
involved in some of these coalitions, but in terms of structure,
you just don't have groups like the PSL or the
Answer Coalition or these traditional authoritarian communist groups. But the
first action that happened against the WTO in November nineteen
ninety nine actually happened in Ocean Away in Geneva, Switzerland,
(38:25):
where the WTO has its headquarters. On November sixteenth, nineteen
ninety nine, twenty seven people went to the headquarters and
were like, hello, we are students, we would like a tour,
And then they were like, just kidding, we're ninety style activists.
So they pulled out chains and chained themselves across the
door and then dropped a banner from the roof, which
(38:45):
is pretty cool. As for how all these pieces came
together to shut down the WTO, we'll talk about that
on Wednesday. It's your cliffhanger. What's going to happen? Well,
you know on some things are going to happen. You
know the police are going to attack them, but you
know that the testers are going to win and six
hundred people get arrested. But we'll talk about it on Wednesday.
(39:06):
But you know what we should talk about. First, support
the protests that are happening. They're probably happening whenever you
listen to this, I mean probably there's some protests you
don't want to support, but a lot of them you
probably do. And remember that everyone is going to protest
in their own ways, and that we are strongest when
we build movements that accept that pluralism, tactical and ideological
(39:30):
pluralism is our strength and not our weakness. When we
tried to hold on so firmly to control, then the
fact that we are politically pluralistic and diverse works against us.
When instead we build frameworks and we invite people in,
as the Zapatista say, look to find compromises with each other.
(39:54):
That's the glue that holds us together. That's when we're strong.
And I guess I should also plug some other stuff.
I have a substack. It's Margaret Kildroyd at substack dot com.
I reflect a lot on the things that I talk
about on the show, as well as things happening in
the regular world. Almost everything is free, but when I
talk about more personal stuff, it's for paid subscribers only.
(40:14):
I have a new book that's out. I kind of
have two new books that are out. One of them
I've spent so long talking about on the show a
couple months ago. It finally is out. It's called The
Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, and it is out from
a publisher that I work with that's an anarchist collective
publisher called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. I also helped
(40:34):
co write another role playing game book, and this one's
called Defenders of the Wild, which is also a board
game that I had a little bit less to do with.
I did some world building for the board game, but
I had much more to do with the world building
for the Almanac compendium. That is a tabletop roleplaying game.
So you should look for Defenders of the Wild and
go out and get it. It's full of beautiful art.
(40:56):
I worked with amazing co authors on it. I am
not the primary creator, but I did an awful lot
of the writing and battle scenes and had a.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Lot of fun with it.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
Yeah, those are some things to plug anyway, I'll talk
to you on Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website goolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
Speaker 3 (00:07):
It's a podcast that looks at radical history to help
all of us figure out how to live in a
radical present and build a radical future.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and for the.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Past month or two, I've been investigating the fairly successful
fight against neoliberalism that activists from across the world waged.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
At the turn of the twenty first century.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
But before I even tell you about that, I need
to tell you that we have a producer named Sophie
who isn't on the call today, and we don't have
a guest today because this is one of those Margaret's
talking to a microphone in a podcast closet by herself episodes.
We also have an audio engineer named Eva hi Eva,
and our theme music was written for us by unwoman.
(00:49):
You don't actually have to go back and listen to
all of the parts that we've done about neoliberalism if
you just want to learn about the topic of today,
the Battle of Seattle. But there's a lot more context
if you go back and listen to those episodes. And
I love context, kind of like I don't know, jo
all grew up with Oscar the Grouch singing, I love trash.
(01:11):
It's like that, only I like context. I also kind
of like trash, but that's unrelated. We started off by
talking about what neoliberalism is, and in short, neoliberalism is
a system by which the rich people in developed nations
strip resources from underdeveloped nations and workers within their own countries.
(01:32):
Then we talked for a while about the Zapatistas, the
indigenous rebels of Chiapas, Mexico, who use a diversity of
tactics and ideologies to build autonomy in Southeast Mexico. I
promised you that they helped bring together an international assembly
of grassroots organizations to help fight against neoliberalism, and this
week we're going to talk about some of the fruits
(01:53):
of that organizing. Then last week we talked about the
Black Bloc, a tactic developed by a timeonomists and anarchists
in Western Germany. Essentially squatters and anti authoritarian activists trying
to build a better egalitarian society found themselves under attack
by the state and capitalism.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Rather than rely on what they had.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Seen as the possibilities presented to them in Europe at
the time, which was on one hand, you had mass
mobilizations that use rigid principles of nonviolence, and on the
other hand, the other option that had been presented to
them as available was underground, clandestine direct action, like what
many urban guerrillas were doing.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
During that time.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Instead, these activists forged a third path in which they
made themselves hard to arrest and hard to prosecute, and
then went ahead and did their direct action in the
light of day for all the world to see by
wearing all black and disguising their identities. That tactic, among others,
was used extensively throughout the alter globalization movement that we've
(02:55):
been focusing on, and so this week I want to
talk about the opening salvo of the alter globalization movement,
the successful shut down of the World Trade Organization's summit
in Seattle, which took place on November thirtieth, nineteen ninety nine.
While it was the Black Cloud anarchists who captured media headlines,
the protest was organized by tens of thousands of people
(03:17):
from across a wide range of movements and ideologies, including
plenty of not Black Cloud anarchists. The shortest version of
the story that I can think of is this, When
the World Trade Organization met in Seattle, a new movement
of movements stepped onto the world stage. Tens of thousands
of people from all sorts of social movements like the
(03:39):
anti war movement, environmentalist movement, global justice, and labor showed
up and blockaded the site of the conference. They held
back multiple police departments and held strong. Six hundred people
were arrested. A state of emergency was declared, and the
people won, and the World Trade Organization meeting was shut down,
(04:01):
and the World Trade Organization was no longer the rising
star of geopolitics, and its influence weighed dramatically, while most
of the subsequent protests that happened in the altglobalization movement
were less tactically successful. In many ways, we'd already won
the war, so let's talk about how people did it.
(04:27):
We've been talking for a while about some of the
early altra globalization protests, mostly throughout Europe, at which tens
of thousands of people demonstrated against letting unelected decision making
bodies determine how the world's resources should be managed. In
nineteen ninety five, the World Trade Organization was formed. It
was built originally after World War Two. There was this
(04:49):
agreement among a lot of countries called the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade, which sought to foster a tariff
free trade around the world, and in nineteen nine, the
World Trade Organization was founded out of that with much
more like actual attempts at systemic power and things like that.
(05:11):
I've mentioned this in previous episodes, but it's worth repeating.
Global trade and economic policy are both really complicated things,
and essentially it's possible for right wing forces to do
bad shit with all sorts of positions.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
The reason I bring this.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Up like, right now, what we're looking at the world's
most influential economy, The US is suddenly throwing up trade
barriers and tariffs, and this is greatly disrupting world trade
and it is causing all kinds of havoc that is
affecting poor people. My guess is less that Trump and
all those people are doing this to try and build
up a strong local economy and more that they're just
(05:47):
thieves who've broken into the building and are stripping the
wire out of the walls of the country. That's my guess,
but I don't know. But either way, being pro tariff
is currently the right way position. Twenty years ago, being
pro free trade was. It wasn't just the right wing position.
It was the consensus between the neoliberal Democratic Party and
(06:09):
the neo conservative Republican Party. All people who were capitalists
were in favor of free trade, and both political parties
were very adamantly capitalist when all of this stuff went on. Essentially,
you can use free trade the lack of tariffs to
remove the economic protections that smaller economies might want to
(06:30):
put up to help keep international companies from basically strip
mining them, both literally and figuratively. One of the main
ways that neoliberalism destroys developing economies is by using predatory
lending to trap countries into debt and then force those
countries to accept something called structural adjustment programs to rewrite
(06:50):
their own laws, to remove environmental and labor protections, to
basically streamline their economies to funnel money back to the
lenders stuff. I think it's really important to understand this
right now, because right now free trade looks like guid
right when the fascists are attempting to do trade protectionism
(07:12):
in the US, and it's just it really matters in
what context people are developing trade policies. Anyway, The World
Trade Organization was formed the idea that it would meet
every two years. It's headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, but it
would meet somewhere new For each summit. Leaders from countries
(07:33):
around the world would get together and discuss how to
reduce trade barriers and in the process enrich the richest
people in the world. Obviously, that's not what everyone went
there to do. People from poorer countries weren't like, yes,
please destroy us, but were forced into compromising positions. Let's
say the people running the wto the World Trade Organization,
(07:57):
they probably don't see themselves as cartoon villains, but instead
as people who foster global.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Cooperation and togetherness or whatever.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
If they actually meant that, if they actually meant an
interconnected and internationalist world, they would focus on allowing the
free movement of people across borders instead of the free
movement of capital across borders. The difference between those two
things is very, very important. One of the primary slogans
of the alter globalization movement is people over profit. For decades,
(08:29):
activists have been calling for what is called fair trade
in contrast to free trade. Basically, the argument is that
trade shouldn't cause countries to lose environmental and labor protections,
but instead develop those protections, people have been working to
develop supply chains and pay fair prices to producers and
emphasize working with producers and distributors that treat their workers fairly.
(08:52):
So if you like buy coffee, you know that the
person who grew the coffee isn't living in a horrible life,
and maybe you have to pay a little bit more
for them, and that seems fine to me. Ideally, you're
talking about trying to buy from people who are cooperatives
like so that the workers actually own the means of production.
(09:14):
And I suppose we'll probably return to this point fair
trade sometime during this series, or at least I certainly
hope we do. But these ideas around fair trade have
been around it since at least the nineteen sixties, if
not the nineteen forties and the nineteen fifties. And do
you know, wells who treats their workers fairly some places?
I don't know whether it's the ads or not, because
(09:34):
we don't vet that, because we can't because we actually
don't get to pick our ads. But here they are anyway,
and we're back in January nineteen ninety nine, Seattle was
picked for the every two years meeting of the WTO,
and this is the first time a major neoliberal summit
was happening on US soil. This was also the Millennium Talks,
(09:58):
and it was meant to be Millennial Round of Talks.
You'd think I would have put that in my script,
but I didn't. But it basically was like these are
going to be a big deal. And there's also a
lot of like, hey, we're going to finally start listening
to the smaller countries, and a lot of promises were
being made by the WTO that people were skeptical of.
By February, activists were starting to say things like, I
(10:20):
wonder if we can just shut the WTO down. By
spring they figured out a rough idea of how they
would do it, and by summer this was more developed.
They were like, we're going to build an incredibly wide
series of coalitions, unheardedly wide coalitions across diverse social movements,
and then coordinate mass direct action to shut the meetings down.
(10:43):
And when I say coalitions, I mean that there wasn't
one group, not even one group of groups, coordinating this
whole thing. There were actually a lot of different forces
working together and against each other in complicated ways, and
that means we're going to talk about them because I
like talking about that kind of stuff. I feel like
it's like worth understanding how people organize things. I think
(11:05):
that when we learned from history, we can't just be like,
they did a cool thing. It's like really worth getting
into the recipes, right, It's worth getting into how they
did things. I'm not saying we should do things like
these folks did things. We're in a very different situation,
very different context. But I think there's a lot of
really specific lessons that can be learned and applied. There
(11:27):
were maybe five different groups or five coalitions or what
have you that started organizing on this, both separately and
in tandem with each other, and usually people only talk
about two of them, but I'm a taoo five of them.
One of the ones that had very little impact in
the end was Okay, this is guy Ralph Nader. He
(11:48):
was famous at the time as a consumer protection advocate
and a Green Party presidential candidate, and he ran an
organization called Public Citizen, and in that group put together
a group called People for Fair Trade SLASH, the network
opposed to the WTO, which is too long of a name.
If you have a slash in your name, there's probably
(12:09):
some slashes that are earned. This one wasn't. You should
have picked one or the other if you ask me,
And everywhere people just call it people for Fair Trade.
This coalition, which involved more mainstream nonprofits NGOs non governmental organizations,
has been less focused on in everything I've read, and
they intentionally tried to keep some distance, mostly not antagonistically
(12:32):
from the more direct action focused part of the organizing.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
So that's them.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Then there was the biggest one by the numbers, There
was the labor movement, and they mobilized between twenty and
forty thousand people. Those numbers are very different from each other,
but I've read both. While all sorts of mainstream and
radical unions did show up, there was actually also a
split within the labor movement around this. The mainstream labor
position was basically, we want a seat at the table.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
In these negotiations, and.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
If you don't give it to us, then will shut
you down, although realistically they were like, if you don't
give it to us, then we'll have a big protest
march that is symbolic. The more radical labor unions were like,
actually we hate this corporate greed shit. But they were
still part of this labor organizing. Overall, labor organized independently
and they planned mass marches and not direct action. And
(13:25):
the Clinton administration the president at the time of the
earlier Clinton Bill Clinton, they referred to the labor march
as the legitimate protests compared to the criminal descent of
the direct actionists that we're going to talk about shortly.
So these are presented as the good protesters. But people
oversimplify this stuff all the time. I think that a
(13:47):
lot of narratives around the WTO downplay the importance of
labor and the struggle. The march in Seattle was largely symbolic,
at least it was intended to be largely symbolic, although
actually we'll get to it. There's the rank and file
of labor was a lot more radical than the organizers
by and large. But probably the most economically impactful part
(14:09):
of protests against the WTO was what the Longshoreman Union did.
They shut down every port on the West Coast from
Los Angeles to Alaska, and also the local taxi drivers
in Seattle went on strike, and the firefighters union basically
police were like, hey can you turn the hoses on
the protesters, and the firefighters union was like, we're not
(14:31):
going to do that. That's not going to happen. My
argument here is that labor is cool. Then there's a
coalition that sort of spawned the next coalition. So it's
like a two and one. When I said there's five,
it's blurry. There's a group called People's Global Action PGA,
which got its start in nineteen ninety eight at one
(14:54):
of the Zapatista and Quentros, the encounters, which were global
meetings of grassroots move These have been happening for a
couple of years at that point. I believe this was
the third one. You'd think, I know, it's in my notes,
but not in my script. And the nineteen ninety eight
in Quentro was in Geneva, Switzerland, which is actually the
same place as the WTO is headquartered. And I don't
(15:16):
know whether that was on purpose or not. It probably was,
but no one I read said that specifically. At this meeting,
four hundred representatives from seventy one countries launched a global organization,
People's Global Action. And this was largely people from where
you would say the developing nations or the global South.
(15:38):
The terminology around this is shifting. We it's all bad,
it's all whatever. Anyway Pga chose. I've seen it referred
to as an anarchist inspired organizational structure. I suspect that
was part of it, but I would actually suspect it
as like primarily as Apatista inspired horizontal organizational structure, which
(15:58):
would make it anarchistic, but actually developed from indigenous practices
in Southeast Mexico, although at some point, actually I think
we covered it in the magone episodes. Actually a lot
of anarchist practices in Europe did actually come from indigenous
practices in Mexico, from a Greek doctor who went there
early in the movement. But that's besides the point. I
(16:19):
get really nerdy about the roots of different practices in
social movements. So they chose this horizontal organizational structure in
which no one group or person could control the actions
of the entire group. And this is interesting to me
because this seems quite natural and logical. When you have
(16:41):
a group of peers who come together to interact, it's horizontal,
like you don't assume among your friend group that one
person is in charge, maybe like they're in charge for
the night.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
They're the one who planned it or whatever, right, but.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
They're not the boss. You don't have bosses among your friends.
And the same is true on a larger scale, By
and large, when countries interact with other countries, they assumed
that the other is sovereign and equal. Countries can't tell
one another what to do, except when they use force,
like military or economic force. Like theoretically you're talking to
(17:15):
your peer now, not in a super egalitarian way. Obviously,
countries are constantly at war with each other and like
doing weird diplomatic stuff and all of that, but it's
still like there's this assumption that this person sort of
should be get to be your equal. So a movement
built out of movements naturally abides by a horizontal structure
(17:36):
in which every movement has a right to be heard.
And that's how People's Global Action worked. So they formed
in nineteen ninety eight, and they met again in Bangalore,
India in August nineteen ninety nine, and they were like, yeah,
we endorse actions all over the world in solidarity with
the Seattle protests. And they also sent a caravan of
(17:56):
people to Seattle. They also and I think we'll talk
about this a little bit.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
And they also.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Organized a lot of the precursor or inspired a lot
of the precursor protests, but we'll talk about that in
proper zapatista form. When they came together and put together
a caravan of people going to Seattle, it came from
the east coast and it stopped in twenty cities to
talk to people about how corporate globalization had impacted them.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
And the reason it's in proper zapatista.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Form is those appetistas are constantly going on these like
listening and talking tours where they travel around place to
place and just interact with people directly, which is cool.
So all of these internationals on this caravan are like,
we're down to go get arrested in a foreign country
to stop this shit, which is a serious decision to make,
but this was a serious issue for them. Then there's
(18:45):
the main group of people who organized the direct action
to shut down the World Trade Organization, and they're sort
of the main characters in this week's tale, or maybe
that's because of a bias in my sources, but you
know who's a reoccurring side character, and not just this
week's tale, but the entirety of cool people who did
cool stuff. That's right. It is products and services the
(19:07):
only real through line on this show, the only thing
that makes you feel connected with the history. Nay, the
legacy of cool people who did cool stuff.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
The sponsors of this show the people we don't pick
and we're back, okay. The main group that organized the
direct action shut down the WTO it's called DAN.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
Daniell's not the editor anymore. That would have been funny anyway.
DAN stands for Direct Action Network, or more formally, the
Direct Action Network against Corporate Globalization. They decided that dan
AGG wasn't as good of a name.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
They were right.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
This organization is about as grassroots and scrappy of an
organization as they come. It was built from to author
Chris Dixon quote, a loose conglomeration of peace activists, anarchists, environmentalists,
international solidarity groups, and unaffiliated radicals, all interested in street
(20:12):
theater and or direct action during the WTO end quote.
What DAN offered was a clear and achievable vision for
what the protests could and in their view, should look like.
They should be art focused, and they should be non violent,
and they should be direct action. They were like, this
(20:33):
is not going to be boring.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
And it's not going to be symbolic. It's going to be.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Colorful and artsy and also direct as hell, and our
goal is to shut this shit down. And they followed
through on that promise. It was dan best as I
can tell, that innovated the whole. All radical protests should
be filled with just absolutely gigantic and dramatic puppets vibe
that defined so much of the Alter Globalization era, especially
(20:59):
in the US, I think, but I could be more
certain about things. I think that in Europe and Mexico,
the altglobalization protests were a bit more focused on direct
confrontation with the police and less focused on art. But
I might be misreading things, and maybe on change my
mind as I continue this series. The alto globalization movement
is something that I know a lot about, sort of
instinctively because I was involved in it. But it's been
(21:22):
interesting to actually sit down and really read all of
the information on it instead of just talking to people
in the streets or reading the discourse of people arguing
about this, that or the other. It's been interesting to
try and read it as history. Interesting is a strange word.
It's so strange to read about a movement you're involved
(21:42):
in his history. I was not involved in the WTO
protests and Seattle.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
I was too young. I barely knew about them.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Dan came together when so it started with a San
Francisco group of art anarchists called Art and Revolution. This
was part of a West Coast network of groups with
that name who did artsy direct action in the late nineties.
And Art and Revolution I think there were the people who,
in like February, were like, hey, what if we just
did this thing? And it took a while for people
to be like, yeah, totally, let's do the thing. By
(22:11):
June they started having conference calls with folks from around
the West Coast talking about direct action in street theater.
They were heavily inspired by the Reclaim the Streets protests
that had been happening, especially the Carnival against Capital that
had taken place in England the year before, and the
Carnival against Capital is this big artsy mass direct action.
(22:33):
The vibe that people were.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Moving to in protests at that point was.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Basically they were like, we want a global street party.
We want to reclaim our cities and streets as common
property and they called this movement Reclaimed the Streets. And
this movement was set up by and you probably guessed
it because I hinted at this people's global action and
therefore sprung up from the organizing.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Done by the Zapatistas.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Some of the initial folks on the DAN conference calls
where Canadian organizers who'd just done some shit the year
before in Vancouver too, and they have these conference calls
and then they take the proposal to a group called
Global Exchange, which is like a fair trade organization, and
they all agree, all right, yes, there should be decentralized
artsy direct action, but it needed to be focused around
(23:24):
a specific plan with specific dates and times and locations.
In order to be effective. You can't just say hey,
everyone show up and stop this. You need to be like,
here's how we're going to stop it. Here is a
decentralized framework for people to plug into. And I think
the idea of building a framework is the core idea
(23:46):
of decentralized organizing. And sometimes people who advocate for centralized
organizing think that decentralized organizing is just a like, ah,
everyone do what they want. And sometimes, unfortunately people believe
in decentralized organizing also think that, but it's actually about
building of framework collectively that other people can plug into
and hang their actions on. So Dan put out a call,
(24:09):
I'm going to quote it quote come to Seattle. It
is time to raise the social and political cost to
those who aim to increase the destruction and misery caused
by corporate globalization. As movements in other parts of the
world have, there is an incredible opportunity to use street theater, art, dance, music,
(24:29):
giant puppets, graffiti, art and theater, and nonviolent direct action
to simplify and dramatize the issues of corporate globalization and
to develop and spread new and creative forms of resistance.
This will help catalyze desperately needed mass movements in the
US and Canada capable of challenging global capital and making
(24:51):
radical change in social revolution. And that's a lofty goal, right.
We're going to use this moment to catalyze entirely new
mass movements with new energy in order to radically change society.
And they succeeded at a lot of this. They succeeded
(25:14):
at creating mass movements that were desperately needed that challenge
global capital and make radical change in social revolution. We
did not make a social revolution. That's a big one.
We didn't succeed at and so people can get kind
of hung up on that one. But on the other hand,
fascism is always trying to create a like global fascist state,
and they always fail at that too. Right, there's just
(25:35):
a give and take, and as long as we fight,
the other side doesn't win. I still dream of winning,
but winning isn't a static win condition anyway. Whatever, I'm offscript.
So Dan is calling for this thing, and they're like,
we should talk to the other people who are doing
this thing too, So they start talking to, for example,
the American Federation of Labor I think was probably the AFLCIO,
but actually I don't remember when the AFL became the AFLCIO.
(25:57):
I've had it on episodes before, but I just don't remember.
And I'm completely offscript. Dan started coordinating with labor, and
some folks that they talked to were like, yeah, that
sounds great, do your thing, and others were like, man,
you're gonna fuck our shit up. You should just stay
the fuck out of this. But Dan moved forward with
coalition building to greater or lesser success with these other
big groups I was talking about. They worked very well
(26:19):
with PGA, who they came out of. They also coordinated
loosely with people involved in public citizen who mostly wanted
to stay out of the whole thing. Meanwhile, by summer
DAN was expanding, bringing on some direct action activist groups
that are more like nonprofit right, like the Ruckus Society
and Rainforest Action Network. These are people who do like
(26:40):
banner hangs to draw attention to issues, imagine like green peace,
tight ideas. If you're in one of those groups that
you get really mad being compared to Greenpeace, I'm sorry.
They are distinguishable from that. They're a little bit more radical.
But they all got together at meetings to discuss the plan,
and they all consensed on we are going to call
(27:02):
for a specific date and time and location. And since
DAN was a meeting of equals, not a top down organization,
they had to work together as equals horizontally. The anarchists
who set the whole thing up did this a little
bit on purpose as a way to radicalize the more
traditional nonprofit activist groups and not like radicalize like get
them in trouble or make them do more direct action.
(27:24):
But actually the thing that's really radical. Well, I like
direct action, but the thing that's really radical is getting
people to confront the way that they make decisions internally
and getting people to look for structures that don't recreate
the systemic power abuses that we fight against. They were
(27:45):
reasonably effective, I think, at injecting more radical ideas within
some traditional nonprofit activist groups. All along there was internal
conflict within DAN about whether or not property destruction like
breaking bank windows or Starbucks windows or doing graffiti would
be accepted within the context of the action.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
And this is.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Talked about in a lot of different ways because people
who were involved seem to kind of be wreck conning
in what happened and being.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Like, no, we were always in favor of just this
or whatever.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Right, It's worth knowing that there are anarchists and other
radicals on both sides of this debate as best as
I can tell. And you'll notice, like property destruction includes graffiti, right,
and in their initial call they talk about graffiti art,
and so they're not coming at it morally opposed to
property destruction.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Well, some people are morally opposed to it.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
What they agreed upon was that property destruction was outside
the framework of the direct action they were calling for.
I maybe being a little bit generous there. I think
that a lot of people might have been specifically calling
on like, no one better come and do this shit,
fuck them if they do. I suspect that there was
a diversity of opinions about that, and I don't know
a ton about how people felt about it, partly because
(29:00):
like I've literally read the same author refer to it
two very different ways in like two thousand and two
thousand and six. You know, when they're talking about it later,
and I'm not going to name that person because everyone's
opinions and understandings of the past change and stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
I'm not truma call this person out.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
So it was Dan who put together the basic framework
of how direct action was going to work, which was
to be clear, when I say direct action shut this down,
they're going to be doing blockades. They're going to be
going and locking themselves to things and making themselves hard
to move so that delegates and stuff can't get into
the building. So Dan put together that framework, and it
(29:39):
was there organizing that shut down the World Trade Organization,
although also it was internal conflict within the World Trade
Organization also helped it shut it down. Because whatever anyway,
DAN put together the Direct Action with both help and
hindrance from other coalitions. People for Fair Trade never did
add DAN actions to the their own calendar of events,
(30:01):
and the labor marches were sometimes scheduled in ways to
draw people away from DAN. And then of course the
Black block, who will talk about they're the fifth group.
They just ignored the no property destruction guidelines that DAN
had agreed upon. But some other groups worked to bridge
the gaps between DAN and others. Jobs with Justice, a
labor advocacy group from Portland, advertised both the more radical
(30:24):
and less radical events. And now after November thirtieth, which
spoiler alert is the day that they successfully shut down
the wto opening ceremonies and stuff, suddenly everyone loves Direct
Action Network because they'd organize this big things successfully. Like
after the fact, everyone's like, oh, yeah, we were totally
with you or whatever. I've read a lot of people
(30:45):
who are salty. I just want to be really clear,
my sources are all so salty. In order to do
this organizing that they did, they started doing action camps
well ahead of time. Action camps are basically multi day
train where you can show up and learn direct action
skills and they are an amazing time and people still
put them on and you can go to them. They
(31:07):
also started doing road shows talking about the protest, going
place to place and talking about the issues in person,
which is an effective strategy that people do still use.
But sometimes people get sloppy and rely on social media
alone for outreach.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
These days, you.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Can reach more people with social media, but combining it
with an in person outreach model is a great combo.
That's all I'm saying. Also, it's really funny to be
like and the way they organize this was super in
person and stuff. They didn't perceive themselves as doing that.
They were very like this is the first Internet protest,
because they were also doing an awful lot of internet
(31:42):
organizing and in a way that I'm sure we'll talk
about it sometime. They like basically developed indie media, which
kind of became social media, and the nightmare world we
live in now everything can be recuperated by capitalism. So
these are the four are coalitions involved. Then there's the
(32:03):
wild Card, which is also a coalition to and just
sort of people forget that it's actually an organized thing.
The Famed and dreaded Eugene Anarchists the Black Block, which
most of them weren't from Eugene, Oregon, but that's what
the press picked up on. DAN organizers get pretty frustrated
when media called the Black Block the anarchists, because DAN
(32:26):
itself was heavily anarchists and pretty explicitly at least organized
along anarchistic lines. But the Eugene Anarchists were.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Part of the Black Block.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Eugene, Oregon is a kind of hippie college town in Oregon,
and in the nineties it was the center of this
fairly vibrant scene of militant tree sitters and forest defenders.
We've talked about the scene some in our Earth Liberation
Front episodes. There was a group called CFD Cascadia Forest
Defense that would maintain militant road blockades and tree sitty
(33:00):
and things like that to protect old growth forests and
endangered watersheds. An awful lot of those people were anarchists
and specifically part of this fairly new scene, the Green anarchists.
While anarchism comes out of the socialist movement and has
historically focused on issues of class and labor, green anarchists
apply the basic principles of solidarity direct action and egalitarianism
(33:23):
to the fight for wilderness and ecology rather than focusing
on class issues. Some but not all, green anarchists are
also anarcho primitivists. We specifically say that the root of
modern suffering isn't just the state or capitalism, but the
concept of civilization itself. The main theoretician of anarcho primitivism
(33:43):
at the time was a man named John Zerzan, who
was a local professor in Eugene who had cut his
teeth as an anarchist in the nineteen sixties. To quote
a write up from its Going down dot Org quote,
Zerzan concluded that the formation of class society, marked by
the shift from hunter gatherer bands to sedentary life through
agriculture and domestication, led to the creation of the state, patriarchy,
(34:07):
and industrialism, and has since sent humanity on course toward
our current industrial climate catastrophe. Moreover, he argued that by
giving up such a form of life, human beings were
leaving behind in existence largely of freedom and autonomy.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
End quote.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
I don't agree with everything Zerizen has to say, and
I believe that some of his conclusions are based on
outmoded anthropology, but he has done an awful lot of
work exploring the roots of oppression, and yeah, Eugene was
a hotbed of some of the most radical activists in
the country in the nineties. They ran a cable access
show called Cascadia Alive and through shows and had riots
(34:45):
when people were arrested for forest defense, and they planted
community gardens, and they defended trees in the city and
secretly at night, a lot of them were participants in
the Earth Liberation Front, more directly destroying the machinery that
was destroying the natural world. And in the end, about
one hundred to two hundred people, some of them from Eugene,
(35:06):
most of them not, went to Seattle to participate in
a black Block protest that existed outside the framework suggested
by the other coalitions. It seems likely that the majority
of the Black Block protesters were actually local to Seattle,
but it's impossible to conjecture exactly who was there and
who wasn't, because when you show up to things to
be anonymous, you don't tend to tell everyone that. As
(35:28):
best as I understand, the block actually did coordinate on
some level with Dan. There was a lot of tension
between these two groups, but the block basically agreed like,
all right, as long as the protests are peaceful, we're
going to not run around and smash shit. But if
the cops start attacking peaceful protesters, we're going to run
(35:50):
around smash shit. And it seems like they actually did
this away from the lockdowns, and that's a pretty good strategy.
It draws police attention elsewhere, away from unprotected people. But
I mean, honestly, this is probably like the most controversial
black block that I've ever read about in terms of
mixed feelings from the crowd. Although once again you have
(36:13):
this thing where the organizers don't want to lose control
of a situation, which makes sense, that's kind of their job.
Even the anarchist organizers that Dan don't want to lose
control of the situation. The sort of rank and file,
the people who are there doing things, I actually have
read accounts where they're much more in favor of, like hoay, the.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Black block is here.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
So those are the five groups that I can point to.
Mainstream NGOs who had very little impact as best as
I can tell, Labor which brought the numbers but was
presented as the good protesters by the president, PGA consisting
of largely people from the Global South, which had a
small presence from an organizing and on the ground point
of view, but pretty much inspired the entire movement in
(36:55):
the first place. You have the Direct Action Network, who
are the above ground bad activists who organize the actual
successful direct action and then you have the Black Bloc,
which made even the Direct Action Network look like saints
in comparison to the media. Though none of these groups
were actually appreciably violent, the violence was done almost exclusively
by the police. Anyhow, Notably missing from this list, you
(37:20):
might realize, are the sorts of groups that are doing
more organizing these days, traditional leftist and communist parties. Dan
organizer David Soulnett put it bluntly in an interview quote,
there was absolutely no Marxist, Leninist or Old Left or
old New Left involvement. Those groups were completely not present.
(37:42):
It was almost exclusively radical and radical anti authoritarian groups.
And the structure in the form of organization that I
think is an incredibly positive departure from left traditions, some
of which we can learn from, some of which we
can leave in the dust bin, and not to push
back against the super I am certain that there were
Marxists and Leninists and Old Left and New Left people
(38:04):
involved in some of these coalitions, but in terms of structure,
you just don't have groups like the PSL or the
Answer Coalition or these traditional authoritarian communist groups. But the
first action that happened against the WTO in November nineteen
ninety nine actually happened in Ocean Away in Geneva, Switzerland,
(38:25):
where the WTO has its headquarters. On November sixteenth, nineteen
ninety nine, twenty seven people went to the headquarters and
were like, hello, we are students, we would like a tour,
And then they were like, just kidding, we're ninety style activists.
So they pulled out chains and chained themselves across the
door and then dropped a banner from the roof, which
(38:45):
is pretty cool. As for how all these pieces came
together to shut down the WTO, we'll talk about that
on Wednesday. It's your cliffhanger. What's going to happen? Well,
you know on some things are going to happen. You
know the police are going to attack them, but you
know that the testers are going to win and six
hundred people get arrested. But we'll talk about it on Wednesday.
(39:06):
But you know what we should talk about. First, support
the protests that are happening. They're probably happening whenever you
listen to this, I mean probably there's some protests you
don't want to support, but a lot of them you
probably do. And remember that everyone is going to protest
in their own ways, and that we are strongest when
we build movements that accept that pluralism, tactical and ideological
(39:30):
pluralism is our strength and not our weakness. When we
tried to hold on so firmly to control, then the
fact that we are politically pluralistic and diverse works against us.
When instead we build frameworks and we invite people in,
as the Zapatista say, look to find compromises with each other.
(39:54):
That's the glue that holds us together. That's when we're strong.
And I guess I should also plug some other stuff.
I have a substack. It's Margaret Kildroyd at substack dot com.
I reflect a lot on the things that I talk
about on the show, as well as things happening in
the regular world. Almost everything is free, but when I
talk about more personal stuff, it's for paid subscribers only.
(40:14):
I have a new book that's out. I kind of
have two new books that are out. One of them
I've spent so long talking about on the show a
couple months ago. It finally is out. It's called The
Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, and it is out from
a publisher that I work with that's an anarchist collective
publisher called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. I also helped
(40:34):
co write another role playing game book, and this one's
called Defenders of the Wild, which is also a board
game that I had a little bit less to do with.
I did some world building for the board game, but
I had much more to do with the world building
for the Almanac compendium. That is a tabletop roleplaying game.
So you should look for Defenders of the Wild and
go out and get it. It's full of beautiful art.
(40:56):
I worked with amazing co authors on it. I am
not the primary creator, but I did an awful lot
of the writing and battle scenes and had a.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Lot of fun with it.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
Yeah, those are some things to plug anyway, I'll talk
to you on Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website goolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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