The Millennium Arrives: November 30, 1999
As the end of the twentieth century approached, many people became preoccupied with the “Y2K problem”—with the theory that computers that had not been programmed to deal with four-digit year changes would somehow disable themselves at the stroke of midnight on 12/31/99, and the systems upon which we depend would crash. It was exemplary of a certain radical mindset, morbidity made attractive by anticipated vindication. It never came to pass, of course, but it was good for water and battery sales, and another kind of systemic crash came a month earlier.
I remember walking the streets of Seattle on November 30, 1999, thinking that the millennium was already here, feeling that enormous exhilaration of consciously living in history. For all around, in intersection after intersection of the gridded, gritty old downtown, people had blockaded the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting. There were union and agricultural and human rights activists, environmentalists, anarchists, religious groups, students, and grandparents. The WTO had been founded to control international trade and, more importantly, to suppress or outlaw all other powers to limit and manage this trade. Though those who oppose it are sometimes called “globophobes” or “antiglobalization” activists, the term globalization can apply to many kinds of internationalization and border-crossing, and what we oppose is more accurately corporate globalization and its ideology, neoliberalism, or sometimes capitalism altogether. Thus, the movement is now sometimes called anticapitalism, though it is more complex, is for more things, and is less like classical Marxism or socialism than that term suggests—I like the term global justice movement for this swarm of resistances and inspirations. Another way to boil down the essential principles would focus on the privatizations and consolidations of power corporate globalization represents and see the resistance to it as, simply, a struggle to re-democratize the world, or the corner of it from which a given struggle is mounted.
After all, this form of globalization would essentially suspend local, regional, and national rights of self-determination over labor, environmental, and agricultural conditions in the name of the dubious benefits of the free market, benefits that would be enforced by unaccountable transnational authorities acting primarily to protect the rights of capital. At a recent labor forum, Dave Bevard, a laid-off US union metalworker, referred to this new world order as “government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.” Much of what free trade has brought about is what gets called “the race to the bottom,” the quest for the cheapest possible wages or agricultural production, with consequent losses on countless fronts. The argument is always that such moves make industry more profitable, but it would be more accurate to say that free trade concentrates profit away from workers and communities, for whom it is therefore far less profitable (and here the very term profit cries out for redefinition, for the stock market defines as profitable every kind of destruction and lacks terms for valuing cultures, diversities, or long-term wellbeing, let alone happiness, beauty, freedom, or justice).
The corporate agenda of NAFTA and related globalization treaties is demonstrated most famously by the case of MTBE, a gasoline additive that causes severe damage to human health and the environment. When California banned it, the Canadian corporation Methanex filed a lawsuit demanding nearly a billion dollars in compensation from the US government for profit lost because of the ban. Under NAFTA rules, corporations have an absolute right to profit with which local laws must not interfere. Poisoning the well is no longer a crime, but stopping the free flow of poison meets with punishment. Other examples of this kind of globalization include the attempts by multinational corporations to privatize water supplies and to patent genes, including the genes of wild and of traditionally cultivated plants—to lock up as commodities much of the basic stuff of life, in the name of free trade.
Young global justice advocates understand that, as is often said, globalization is war by other means. War is easy to abhor, but it takes a serious passion to unravel the tangles of financial manipulations and to understand the pain of sweatshop workers or displaced farmers. And maybe this is what heroism looks like nowadays: occasionally high-profile heroism in public but mostly just painstaking mastery of arcane policy, stubborn perseverance year after year for a cause, empathy with those who remain unseen, and outrage channeled into dedication. There had been opposition to corporate globalization before, most notably the Zapatista uprising on the day that NAFTA went into effect. But Seattle gathered the growing momentum and made it impossible to ignore.
Economic historian Charles Derber writes,
The excitement of Seattle was the subliminal sense that a new opposition, and perhaps a whole new kind of politics, was being born, both in the United States and the world at large . . . Seattle was mainly a group of white folks. Yet, and this was very important, there were people from India, Mexico, the Philippines, and Indonesia. They represented influential groups and millions of people who had protested on their own streets but couldn’t come to Seattle. So if one looks at the larger movement and the swelling of the ranks of globalization activists around the world, one would have to conclude that this is truly a crossnational movement and very possibly the first truly global movement.
French farmer and revolutionary Jose Bové, who was also there, had a similar response: “I had the feeling that a new period of protest was about to begin in America—a new beginning for politics, after the failures and inactivities of the previous generation.”
The global justice movement brought to the progressive/radical community what had long been missing: a comprehensive analysis that laid the groundwork for a broad coalition, for the common ground so absent from the movements of the 1970s and 1980s, which seemed to advance a single sector or pit one issue against another. This is, of course, in part because the globalizing corporations manage to be anti-environmental, antidemocratic, and a whole lot of other atrocities all at once. But the antiglobalization movement in its breadth, in its flexibility and its creativity seems, like the Zapatistas, a great step toward reinventing revolution. The year the Zapatistas stepped onto the world stage, the radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, “The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational as capitalism.” That resistance had appeared before Seattle, as Reclaim the Streets and the antiroads movement in Britain, as anti-GMO activism in France and India, as indigenous rights movements in Latin America, but it was in that upper left corner of the United States that it made its transnational presence impossible to ignore.
Fifty thousand people joined the union-led march, and ten thousand activists blockaded in the downtown streets, disrupting and ultimately canceling the meeting of the WTO that day. The shutdown encouraged impoverished-nation delegates and the representatives of nongovernmental organizations to stand their ground inside the WTO talks. This time victory—the shutdown—was tangible and immediate. But the action also served to galvanize the world with an unanticipated revolt on the grand scale, and it made corporate globalization a subject of debate as it had not been before.
In Seattle on those two days, there were police riots, police brutality, injuries, hospitalizations, and arrests in violation of First Amendment rights. The famous solidarity—“teamsters and turtles” for the union members and the sea turtle–costumed environmentalists—did not preclude alienation and infighting. Seattle is sometimes misremembered as an Eden. It was just a miracle, a messy one that won’t happen the same way again. Since the Seattle surprise, it’s become standard practice to erect a miniature police state of walls and weapons around any globalization summit, and these rights-free zones seem to prefigure what corporation globalization promises.
But at the end of November 1999, the media, which had dozed through the massive antinuclear, antiwar, and environmental actions of the eighties and nineties, woke up with a start to proclaim this shutdown the biggest thing since the sixties. In a way it was, in part because they made it so, in part because it was the next phase built upon the failures and successes of previous eras. In Seattle, the tactics and philosophy of nonviolent direct action had a shining moment, a moment that was the culmination of decades of discussion and experimentation. In the introduction to his anthology The Battle of Seattle, Eddie Yuen writes of the two principles behind this kind of action:
The first of these is the adoption of a strict nonviolence code that was a response to a macho fascination with revolutionary violence in the ’60s. The second is the commitment to direct democracy, as specifically the organizational forms of the affinity group, decentralized spokes-council meetings and consensus process. This commitment was a response to the preponderance of charismatic (and almost always male) leadership cults as well as the increasingly authoritarian organizational forms that became popular during the late New Left.
That is to say, the movement was pluralist; it came from many directions, including a constructive critique of the failures of the 1960s and an ethics of power. So you could say that Seattle arose not only from addressing the problem that is “them”—the corporations and governments—but from the problems that have often been “us,” the activists, the radicals, the revolution. Its success came out of addressing both of these fronts, a response many years in the making. And out of the moment.
Perhaps you’ve forgotten that in 1999 the arrogance of the boom years was still upon us; corporate chief executive officers were treated like rock stars; business journalists babbled that the market could go up forever without going down. Then the technology bubble burst; the Enron and WorldCom scandals broke, demonstrating that the corporations were morally bankrupt too; Argentina went bust thanks to its adherence to neoliberal fiscal policies, ran though several governments, defaulted on its loans and remains today a place of great economic crisis and greater anarchic social innovation. A decade after communism collapsed, capitalism was a wreck. And now, five years after Seattle, the WTO, which before that November day looked like an inexorable tank, ready to crush anything in its path, is still a tank, but one stuck in a ditch.
On that day when Seattle seemed like the center of the world, there was a sister action in Bangalore, India, focusing on Monsanto, which once brought the world the defoliant Agent Orange and, more recently, has been bringing it a cornucopia of genetically modified crops whose main features seem to be resistance to Monsanto pesticides and enhancement of Monsanto profits. The corporation that so embodied the WTO’s threats has in recent years closed its European office, been widely attacked in India, given up altogether on marketing its GMO wheat, taken its New Leaf potato out of production after the market for it collapsed, stopped trying to spread GMO canola in Australia, been unable to collect royalties on GMO soybeans grown in South America, and reported record losses in 2004. Citizens in Italy turned 13 of its 20 regions and 1,500 towns into “GMO-free zones,” as did citizens in several California counties. The huge corporation Syngenta also canceled all its research and marketing programs for GMO products in Europe because of popular outcry. European citizens have achieved significant successes in limiting the reach of GMO foods and agriculture into that continent, despite the lack of opposition (or, thanks to the WTO, inability to mount opposition) of their national governments.
To think of 1999 is to think of a bygone era in which these more complex and long-term issues had not been overshadowed by the imperial belligerence of the so-called War on Terror. But it is also to think of a great turning point, the moment a powerful movement against corporate globalization had coalesced. Four years later a group led by Mexican campesinos and Korean farmers, in coalition with the NGOs inside the September 2003 WTO ministerial in Cancun, brought the organization to the brink of collapse.
Before it began we expected that the talks would falter. The United States and the EU were pressuring the impoverished countries to surrender more autonomy without giving them any reward and without being willing to address the way agricultural subsidies in the developed world ravage farming in the less developed one. But thanks to an unanticipated solidarity among activists, nongovernmental organizations, and impoverished nations, the WTO talks didn’t just falter; they collapsed spectacularly. An activist e-mailed us from the frontlines, “A woman from Swaziland turned to a colleague of mine and told him that the African countries could not have stood firm against the WTO, the US, and the EU if it had not been for the activists in and outside of the convention hall. She said that our actions in and outside, our words, our pressure—particularly as they reached the press—gave her and her fellow African nations the strength to take this historic stand.” Another activist says that it was the presence of the farmers outside that pressured the nations inside to stand up, to remember whose lives were at stake, that kept Korea, for example, where one out of six families farms, from bargaining away more of its local agriculture. At the Cancun ministerial, the impoverished nations created a coalition called the Group of Twenty-Plus that represents nearly half the world’s people and more than two-thirds of its farmers, a group powerful enough to stand up to the rich nations and the corporations they represent. The coalition (in which India, China, and many smaller nations didn’t have to reconcile their differences) was assembled by Brazil, which under the leadership of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva is a beautiful maverick. This is one of the global impacts of South America’s long climb out of tyranny. At 3 p.m. on the last day of the meeting, the Kenyan delegate said, “This meeting is over. This is another Seattle,” and with that the Group of Twenty-Plus walked and the talks collapsed. The nongovernmental organization members present went wild with joy and the demonstrators outside began to celebrate. Guardian commentator George Monbiot wrote, “At Cancun the weak nations stood up to the most powerful negotiators on earth and were not broken. The lesson they will bring home is that if this is possible, almost anything is.”
It was a triumph for farmers, for the poor, for the power of nonviolent direct action, for the power of people over corporations and justice over greed. It was a power shift, both from the rich nations to the poor and from the towers to the streets. Seattle was led by young white radicals, though representatives of all the world were there, but Cancun was led by Mexican campesinos and Korean farmers representing huge constituencies (including seventy nations and the hundred million members of the groups in the Via Campesino coalition), which gave it a different tone and a different authority. They were able to speak for the world as we were not. And they demonstrated how broad-based the movement was, how meaningful the common ground attained by such different players. Unfolding as it did on the second anniversary of 9/11, the revolution in Cancun reclaimed some of the peaceful populist power that Osama bin Laden and Bush had paralyzed.
“We are winning,” said the graffiti in Seattle.