Seattle '99: One Week to Change the World

Reliving the WTO protests with author DW Gibson.

I interviewed DW Gibson about his latest book, One Week to Change the World: an Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests. Here are some excerpts, lightly edited for clarity.

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Richard:

I wanted to read this book partly because. as an activist as well as a journalist, I think it's important to learn from the lessons—successes, failures and otherwise—of the past.  I found it fascinating.

That’s why I read it. Why did you write it?

DW:

I agree. I think there are a lot of lessons there to be learned.

Twenty-five years ago—it's not a long time, but in some ways this protest has really been forgotten. Much more so than, say, Occupy, or than some other movements that really grew out of Seattle. It was an interesting time. 1999 is the beginning of the Internet as an organizing tool; a very early Internet, rudimentary, just email list and listservs, but a tool nonetheless.

You have the beginning of militarization of police departments in the police response to the protesters in Seattle. You have call and response, the use of the “people's microphone,” which is often traced back to Occupy but actually goes to Seattle. And you have the beginning of this pushback on globalization.

And I think most importantly, you have protesters who articulated a goal. They wanted to shut down the World Trade Organization meetings and prevent them from reaching an agreement. They set that goal, and they met that goal by blocking all of the intersections through non-violent civil disobedience. They prevented meetings from happening on the first day and thwarted efforts to reach an agreement that week.

How often can you say that about protest movements of this scale: that they set a goal and met it? I think you have to go back to the civil rights era, right? We haven't seen many examples of that on this kind of scale in the last fifty years.

Richard:

To do what they did, first of all, the organizers had to build a coalition of very disparate forces around what was then a fairly obscure issue. You had the so-called Black Bloc, for example, working with the Teamsters and other union leaders.

I think at one point someone in your book says (and I got a kick out of it) that sometimes it was union leaders who wanted to do some really crazy stuff and the anarchists wanting to be more measured. It seems that they had had to build a coalition out of these groups. They had to educate their fellow activists to organize the protest. Then they had to use the protest to educate the public about globalization and the WTO. That's no small task.

DW:

No, not at all. And that's why it took so many months of organizing and work. And the “Before” section of the book is one of the more interesting ones, I think, about all the work that went into educating people.

And indeed, they had the internet, but they realized it was just as a tool, right? It wasn't everything. It wasn't a panacea. It was just one tool. They still needed to interact with each other and  the real world. So, there were road shows, people went on the road with puppets and educational performances to tell people about the WTO. There were old school teach-ins and town hall-type meetings where people debated the virtues of globalization and about this really esoteric thing at the center of the protest: the World Trade Organization, a new entity that a lot of people don't know about or recognize.

Then there was the fundamental issue that you alluded to, the tension between democracy and globalization.  Because what was at the heart of the WTO? They were trying to reach an agreement that would allow them to set and enforce the rules of global trade–even if it overrode rules that other countries had set up for themselves.

So if you say, "Oh, we don't want child labor to make these products in our country.” You can't do that. That's a trade barrier. Or you say, "Oh, we don't want these products in our country because it harms the environment." You can't do that. That's a trade barrier. Right?

So people understood fundamentally once they engaged these teach-ins, once they saw a roadshow and had some of these interactions, they understood that it was about democracy.

It was about being anti-globalization, yes, but more to the point, it was about being pro-democracy, about defending the rules that you might want to set up in your city, your county, your state, or your country in terms of how you want to be governed and how you want your economy to work.

Richard:

A slight aside, DW, but I think it's worth just noting that when we talk about globalization in this context, we take the word for granted. I do, too, but it's a funny use of that word. Because what we're really talking about, whether it’s pro or anti forces using the word, what we're really talking about is global capitalism, right? We're not talking about globalization when it comes to worker solidarity and what US workers can do if Foxconn workers in China are mistreated.

“Globalization” today strictly means global capital flow and capital control over government processes. If you agree with that, then I just think it's important to set the stage that what's being objected here to is an ever increasingly powerful global regime of financial control.

DW:

100 percent. And I don't think we can say that point too many times because it points out two things. One, it points out the reality and the specificity of what we're talking about, the flow of capital, but also shows a dearth of imagination, a dearth of our ability to talk about globalization in more expansive ways.

We could talk about it culturally, right? Exchange of cultural ideas and inspirations, linguistic globalization, right? Exchange of language and so many different ways you could talk about globalization, but you're spot on when we're talking about it. Definitely in this context, we're always talking about the globalized flow of capital. Absolutely.

And of course that's neoliberalism.

Richard:

You quote Vandana Shiva about the fact that farmers affected by this are 60% of the population in India but only 2% of the United States.

Lori Wallach, who has been on this program many times, calls the US the mothership of neoliberalism or words to that effect. She points out that if the WTO was holding a meeting that year in Korea or India you would have expected huge protests. But it really hadn't happened in the US yet, certainly not over an issue like this.

DW:

 No, no. And that's a really important point because the WTO was just a few years old at that point, but there had already been some pushback on them ... There had been major movements in other countries, but the American organizers that put a lot of this together said again and again in my interviews: Look, we were taking our cues from the Global South. We were taking our cues from the Zapatistas in Mexico, who had already organized a protest against NAFTA and the WTO.

So this was a seminal moment in the US context, because America had never sort of awakened to these issues. And it's important to note that not only were the streets of Seattle flooded with union workers and environmentalists and debt relief activists from all around the country, but from all around the world.

You referenced Vandana Shiva from India, but there was also Jose Bouvier, a French farmer who famously took his tractor to a construction site where they were trying to build a McDonald's near his village in France. He came into the US, snuck 500 kilos of Roquefort cheese into the US because it was one of these items that was going to be controlled by the WTO, and handed it out for free in front of a McDonald's on the streets of New York.

So it captured some of the radical farm movement, which is global but also US. There’s a lot of history of US farmers being politically active, and you saw a resurgence of that here in Seattle.

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The interview goes on to discuss the protesters’ “inside-outside” strategy of street action accompanied by inside negotiations; the importance of nonviolent civil disobedience, media distortions of the movement, the future of mass action, and the role of media in activism.