Author: Chris

My anarchist mentor Ruth Sheridan died on January 11, 2020, in Anchorage. The friendship and comradeship that she and I sustained over three decades, based in shared politics and deep love, profoundly shaped my life. Whenever I talk about sticking around in struggle, I invoke Ruth. I’m including here a short contribution I wrote for the celebration of her life at the Unitarian Church in Anchorage on what would have been her 102nd birthday, January 25, 2020.

I first encountered Ruth Sheridan in 1991, when I was thirteen years old. One of my teachers at Steller Secondary School had invited her to come speak about her experiences of labor organizing and social justice activism. I was immediately captivated by her description of the Industrial Workers of the World, and this contributed to me seeking to learn more about the history of radical social movements.

In the following years, I came to know Ruth better through her involvement with Alaskans Concerned About Latin America (ACALA). I encountered her at public events and was moved by how welcoming she was. When I contributed an article to the ACALA newsletter (the first time I had ever published anything), her positive feedback motivated me to do more.

Based on these experiences, I formally asked Ruth to serve as my mentor, in 1994, in helping me to prepare to teach a course to fellow students at Steller on anarchism. Her advice was invaluable. But what was more significant was the friendship we developed. Ruth brought so much respect and interest toward my ideas and questions, and I came to see her as an incredible resource of knowledge and experience.

I moved away from Anchorage in 1995 and I have only lived in Alaska for three yearlong stints since then. However, this never prevented Ruth and me from maintaining a lively friendship. While I completed a PhD on social movement history in California, she provided consistent encouragement. She and I also re-united at activist events in the Lower 48, and I made a point of spending time with her during all of my annual visits to Alaska. She always eagerly asked for my reports on activist efforts outside of Alaska, and I always looked forward to hearing her updates about politics in Alaska. We never ran out of topics to discuss.

Ruth Sheridan is my model for aging and sticking around in struggle for social transformation. She had boundless energy, an insatiable interest in ideas and history, a deep commitment to social justice and mutual aid, and profound care and respect for people without concern for status or power. She taught me how, as the Spanish anarchists used to say, to carry a new world in my heart.

A few weeks before the 1999 Seattle WTO shutdown actions, Punk Planet Magazine circulated a call for someone to cover the protests for their next issue. I eagerly volunteered and was delighted when they asked me to do it. In the following weeks, I filled a waterproof notebook with notes on everything in which I was involved and everything I heard from people around me. At the end of each day, I tore out the pages I had filled in case I were to be arrested the next day. And once the protests ended, I spent a week in front of my computer piecing my notes together into a day-by-day account. I was still recovering from tear gas inhalation, my ears were still ringing from concussion grenades, and I was anxiously waiting for some friends to get out of jail. Punk Planet published that piece in early 2000 and, a decade later, a revised version was included in The Battle of the Story of the “Battle of Seattle”. In 2019, anticipating the 20th anniversary of the Seattle protests, I spent several months building it out further by going over narratives from other organizers, reviewing oral history transcripts, and incorporating crucial pre-Seattle movement history. While I recognize that there’s still a lot missing from this account, my hope is that it at least conveys the scale, sequence, and significance of what happened – not as nostalgia, but as a contribution to ongoing transformative movements. I wrote this piece for the Shutdown WTO Organizers’ History Project and I am so honored that it is also featured on the website of Upping the Anti – a journal born from the cycle of struggle associated with the Seattle protests.

On Tuesday, November 30, 1999, I was standing in downtown Seattle on 6th Avenue between Pike and Union – an unremarkable place amidst remarkable circumstances. Directly in front of me stood a reinforced line of police officers in full body armor, carrying truncheons, rubber bullet guns, and grenade launchers. All around me, hundreds of protesters packed into a human wall taking up half a block. And directly behind us in the middle of an intersection, at least another hundred people protectively surrounded a large wooden platform underpinned by metal pipes. Locked inside each pipe was the arm of an activist. Resolute and defiant, we were all there to shut down the World Trade Organization Ministerial meetings that were scheduled to begin that day.

“This is the Seattle Police,” an authoritative voice crackled through a loudspeaker. The rest was drowned out by the loud discharge from a grenade launcher and the disarming hiss of tear gas, punctuated by the shots of rubber bullets. Suddenly, we were scrambling, coughing, gasping, and crying. The police advanced, flanked by an armored personnel carrier. Yet, just as quickly as we dispersed, we returned – this time with bandannas on our faces and water for our eyes. We weren’t going to be moved so easily. And again, the face-off began. Such was the rhythm of the day. 

Alone, this scene was inspiring. But what was truly remarkable was that we at that particular intersection were not alone. For blocks around us – stretching out of view and snaking around buildings – were thousands more people. There were blockades at every single intersection in the twenty blocks surrounding the Washington State Trade and Convention Center. In addition, many local students and workers were on strike that day, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union had shut down the ports along the entire West Coast.

Who could have guessed that this was going to happen? Even those of us who had spent months planning to “shut it down” were stunned when our rhetoric became reality. On that Tuesday, the first day of WTO Ministerial meetings ever to take place in the U.S., most sessions were canceled because our blockades were so effective. The Seattle Times quoted one of the last WTO delegates to leave that afternoon: “That’s one for the bad guys.” We were the bad guys, and we clearly won.

In the years since, “Seattle 1999” has become a shorthand. People have produced articles, books, graphic art, music, documentaries, at least one oral history project, and even a Hollywood film about the protests. Police agencies and security analysts have closely studied “the battle of Seattle” in order to thwart similar efforts. Left intellectuals have used the Seattle protest experience to advance all sorts of theories about radical politics. The so-called “Seattle riots” have become an historical reference point for journalists covering U.S. protests. Not surprisingly, much is missing in these accounts.

With the twentieth anniversary of the Seattle protests, now is a good time to revisit the history from the perspective of those who were deeply involved in organizing the mass direct action. I was one among them – at that time, a 22-year-old activist living in Olympia, Washington. Along with dozens of others, I co-founded the Direct Action Network in the summer of 1999 and spent months organizing for the WTO shutdown. In what follows, I draw on accounts from other organizers and my own experiences to discuss the lead-up to Seattle, what actually happened, and what we can learn from it, all with an eye toward our current circumstances of struggle in North America.

Not the Beginning

Before the tear gas had even cleared in Seattle, the mainstream media had pronounced the birth of the so-called “anti-globalization movement.” However, as experienced activists emphasized right away, Seattle was not the beginning. A worldwide revolt against neoliberalism had been growing for nearly two decades, and U.S. activists from a variety of social movements had targeted international financial institutions and trade agreements since the early 1990s. The road to Seattle was paved with years of organizing, confrontational struggle, and cross-border movement-building.

This started in the mid-1980s in the Global South, especially Africa and Latin America, with increasingly widespread struggles against austerity measures mandated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Building on legacies of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements, these mobilizations particularly fought IMF-imposed price hikes and cuts to social spending. And by the early 1990s, meetings of neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank and the WTO faced massive protests from Bangalore to Berlin.

Meanwhile, a convergence of movements was developing in the U.S. The labor movement, longstanding international solidarity efforts, Indigenous groups, the environmental movement, consumer advocacy and human rights organizations, and others took increasing aim at so-called “free trade” agreements. They argued that these agreements strengthened corporate power, undermined Indigenous sovereignty, slashed protections for workers and the environment, and degraded standards of living. During the early 1990s, many activists found common cause in the fight against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Although ultimately unsuccessful, that struggle forged important cross-movement and cross-border relationships.

On January 1, 1994, the day that NAFTA went into effect, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation emerged on the world stage by seizing seven cities in Chiapas, Mexico. “Ya Basta!” (“Enough!”), they said in opposition to the Mexican government and neoliberalism. Bringing together aspects of left radicalism and Indigenous Mayan traditions, the Zapatistas offered an autonomous anti-capitalist politics that inspired movements across the globe. The Zapatistas also actively facilitated transnational links among movements. Starting in 1996, they sponsored face-to-face global Encuentros (Encounters) that served as key meeting points for what later became known as the global justice or alter-globalization movement.

The initial Encuentros led to the formation of the Peoples’ Global Action (PGA) network in 1998. The PGA brought together massive movements in the Global South, such as the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil and the Karnataka State Farmer’s Movement in India, along with generally smaller organizations in the North, to develop horizontal links in the struggle against neoliberalism. This network was a key node through which an emerging anti-capitalist current in the global justice movement was able to engage in discussion and planning. The PGA Hallmarks, developed through early conferences, came to define this anti-capitalism. They included a rejection of “all forms and systems of domination and discrimination,” “a confrontational attitude,” “a call to direct action,” and “an organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy.”

By the late 1990s, actions and campaigns against what was increasingly called “corporate globalization” were kicking off all over the U.S. Activists targeted the IMF and World Bank, and engaged in a sustained fight against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. Anti-sweatshop campaigns blossomed on university campuses, activists identified and challenged government policies that facilitated corporate power, and environmental and labor groups built coalitions to take on companies responsible for ecological destruction and worker exploitation. And increasingly, this ferment bubbled into confrontational collective action. A direct antecedent for Seattle was the wave of protests in Vancouver in 1997 that confronted the summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), a regional trade agreement among a number of Pacific Rim economies.

While activists from a range of political orientations participated in these activities, anarchism animated the dynamic anti-capitalist current. This was an anarchism that combined a far-reaching critique of domination with a commitment to direct action and direct democracy. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, anarchists had participated in and learned from the experiences of a succession of direct-action movements, especially the radical wing of the anti-nuclear movement, direct action AIDS organizing, and radical environmentalism. Building on these experiences, they synthesized a set of protest tactics and organizing practices that became widely influential in the global justice movement. Movement journalist L.A. Kauffman aptly describes this as a multi-decade process of “radical renewal.” And as she emphasizes, it was queer women activists, “both white and of color, who most often formed the bridge between one movement and the next, transmitting skills, insight, and expertise.”

Anarchist-influenced activists were deeply inspired by the Zapatistas and had been some of the first to work with the PGA. Following the example of their European counterparts, many began organizing around the PGA’s calls for “global days of action” involving coordinated international protests against institutions of neoliberalism. At its second annual conference in Banglore, India, in August of 1999, PGA endorsed global actions in solidarity with the protests in Seattle on November 30.

Many Organizing Efforts

In early 1999, Seattle was announced as the choice for the WTO’s “Millennium Round.” Within a month, word was rapidly spreading through West Coast activist circles. Many pointed to it as an unprecedented opportunity for protest since the Seattle Ministerial would be the first international trade meeting of its kind to be held in the U.S. Some of us had been at the Vancouver anti-APEC actions in 1997 and, with Seattle, we saw the possibility of the APEC protests multiplied by one hundred.

Effective protests are rarely planned overnight. Rather, they come out of patient, dedicated, and frequently frustrating organizing efforts. Seattle was no different. Every effort faced an exhausting array of concerns, debates, and planning sessions. How can we build strong coalitions? How can we get the word out? How can we effectively protest the WTO? How can we make sure that our phones get answered? These and many more pressing questions were on the agendas of countless meetings.

The organizing efforts for Seattle developed along several different lines and were never fully unified. In fact, there were some significantly divergent initiatives. One was the People for Fair Trade/Network Opposed to the WTO (PFFT), initiated in the spring of 1999. Launched with the assistance of the national organization Public Citizen, PFFT drew together a broad umbrella of consumer advocacy groups, environmentalists, human rights activists, and others. PFFT set the stage for much of what went down in the faith communities, on the college campuses, in the educational forums, and on the evening news in Seattle.

Filipino anti-imperialist networks also played a key role. Radical groups in the Philippines with strong international ties organized mass protests against the 1996 APEC summit in Manila. Associated organizations in Vancouver, particularly the Philippine Women’s Center, carried this momentum into a counter-conference and protests against the 1997 APEC summit. In early 1999, with support from experienced Vancouver activists, Sentenaryo ng Bayan, a Filipino community organization in Seattle, began organizing the NO to WTO/Seattle International People’s Assembly. This two-day assembly brought together delegates from twelve countries and culminated in a major march on November 30. The People’s Assembly effort, perhaps more than any other, mobilized racialized communities in Seattle alongside movements in the Global South.

The labor movement generated a lot of energy as well. Starting in the summer of 1999 and building through the fall, the AFL-CIO devoted substantial resources to Seattle efforts, widely circulating educational materials and mobilizing intensively through labor councils and union locals. There were clear tensions within the labor movement, however, as national union leaders proclaimed their demand “to have a place at the table” while more radical unions, independent labor formations, and some rank-and-file members took more critical stances. Ultimately, the labor movement mobilized the largest numbers, bringing some 30,000 people to the streets on November 30.

There were also some unlikely alliances that laid the groundwork for Seattle. At the grassroots level, one of the most pivotal was between unionized steelworkers and Earth First! The steelworkers, who worked at five plants in three states, were involved in a protracted fight with their employer, Kaiser Aluminum, which had locked them out in early 1999. Kaiser, as it turned out, was owned by Maxxam and headed by infamous CEO Charles Hurwitz, who also owned Pacific Lumber, the company clear-cutting old growth redwood forests in northern California. Earth First! had been involved in direct-action efforts to protect those forests since the 1980s. Identifying their common enemy, the locked-out steelworkers and the forest defenders began collaborating on protests and spending time together on picket lines and in tree-sits, especially on the West Coast. These relationships, which eventually formalized in Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment, were crucial in the direct-action organizing for Seattle and in the streets during the protests.

Planning and Training

The vision for mass direct action in Seattle developed through an informal network of West Coast radicals. Many were connected to Art and Revolution collectives and associated groups, which were known for injecting graphics, theater, and songs into activism. Beginning in June of 1999, this network started holding conference calls and email discussions with groups from Los Angeles to Vancouver. Some of those involved initiated a face-to-face meeting in Seattle in mid-July with people from several northwestern cities. In August, these overlapping efforts merged, and we decided to call ourselves the Direct Action Network (Against Corporate Globalization).

DAN started out as a loose conglomeration of primarily anti-war activists, anarchists, direct-action environmentalists, anti-prison activists, international solidarity groups, and unaffiliated radicals. We eventually evolved into a more structured coalition, bringing together organizations such as the National Lawyers Guild, Rainforest Action Network, Industrial Workers of the World, Mexico Solidarity Network, War Resisters League, and Seattle Earth First!. We were predominantly white and mostly young.

Over the course of months of meetings, DAN developed a plan for mass direct action on November 30. This would be an action, as we wrote, “involving hundreds of people risking arrest and reflecting the diversity of groups and communities affected by the World Trade Organization and corporate globalization.” Our aim was “to physically and creatively shut down the WTO.” We weren’t interested in routine and largely symbolic arrests; as much as possible, we wanted to prevent the Ministerial meetings from happening.

Organizers with significant experience from the direct action anti-nuclear movement played leading roles in shaping DAN’s approach. As a result, the core features of our action plan were adopted from that movement. One – which was controversial in planning discussions and became even more so later – was a set of “action guidelines” to which all participants were asked to agree: no violence, no weapons, no use of alcohol or illegal drugs, and no destruction of property.

Another feature was affinity groups: DAN asked participants to form self-reliant groups of five to fifteen people each who would determine their own creative plans for physically blockading intersections around the WTO meeting. Each affinity group designated a spokesperson who coordinated with others in “spokescouncil” meetings and then reported back to their fellow members. Many affinity groups also agreed to work with each other in “clusters” which took responsibility for particular intersections. Some clusters shouldered particularly ambitious projects. For instance, the cluster known as the “Flaming Dildos” volunteered to shut down the area next to the interstate highway running underneath the Convention Center.

The other core feature was jail solidarity: DAN encouraged participants to be prepared, if jailed, to act collectively to protect each other and carry on direct action. This strategy was based on the assumption that large numbers of activists would be arrested on November 30. With this expectation, DAN recommended that arrestees use noncooperation tactics to get equal treatment and charges lowered or dropped for everyone. Chief among these tactics was arrestees refusing to give names when being processed. If need be, hundreds of jailed activists could also refuse to move or comply with other orders, clogging the legal system with their efforts. As part of this, DAN arranged to have substantial legal support – including a staffed office and lawyers – available for arrested activists.

To spread the word about our plan, DAN developed and distributed more than 50,000 copies of a broadsheet with information about the WTO and details about participating in the direct action. DAN also organized a roadshow that toured along the West Coast, offering performances and action trainings. DAN members regularly facilitated popular education workshops and spoke at events throughout the region. And just before the WTO meetings began, DAN ran a nine-day “Direct Action and Street Theater Convergence” in Seattle, where we offered regular orientation, trainings, meals, and space for protest preparation. The convergence also provided a time and a space for people to develop artwork of all kinds – from giant puppets to block-printed banners to dance and theater performances – for the streets.

Training was central to DAN’s action plan. We prioritized preparation and skills-building in all of what we did in the lead up to the protests. We regularly offered trainings in nonviolent direct action, jail solidarity, first aid, blockade tactics, meeting facilitation, street theater, and more. Most trainings lasted hours and included in-depth role-plays. Emphasizing the importance of these trainings, Seattle DAN organizer Jennifer Whitney would later recount:

Thousands of people went into the action on November 30^th having already practiced how they would set up their blockade, what they would do when police came, how they would respond to tear gas or pepper spray, how they would behave during arrest, transport, booking, etc. It really demystified the process for people who had never been arrested before; for them, it was a revelation not only to have the entire scenario spelled out step-by-step, but actually to be ‘arrested’ by activists in cop costumes, and to act out the entire process, including interrogation scenes where the ‘cops’ used different lies and manipulations to try to extract information. Trainings built confidence as well, not only in ourselves but in our community. The knowledge that hundreds of people would be on the street to give you first aid if you were hurt, and to observe and document any police action against you, and to track you through the jail and court system, inspired people to push their limits, to test their endurance, to imagine what was possible and then go one step further.

Not everyone who protested in Seattle came through DAN. But we trained thousands of people and reached tens of thousands more with our plans. Our efforts created an infrastructure for what unfolded in the streets.

What Actually Happened?

By October 1999, there was a palpable buzz about the upcoming protests. People across North America were making travel arrangements to get to Seattle, and we heard about more and more union locals, student organizations, and community groups organizing buses. Those of us involved in planning the DAN convergence put out a call for pre-registration and we were startled to receive responses from people coming from far outside the U.S. In Olympia, a hub city for DAN, our planning meetings that initially involved 15-20 people were regularly bringing out more than 100. The same was happening in many other cities.

On November 20, we opened the DAN convergence center – a spacious former dance club with an industrial-sized kitchen – at 420 East Denny Way near downtown Seattle. Almost immediately, out-of-town activists began streaming in, more and more every day. Convergence space organizers hustled to orient and care for this influx of people, maintain and update an increasingly packed schedule of meetings and trainings, mediate conflicts as stress grew, and deal with corporate journalists.

The convergence also provided a space for funneling out-of-town activists into local resistance to the WTO, which was building in intensity. Starting on November 21 with a festive neighborhood procession, Seattle saw almost daily protests and other visible actions. For example, the following day, corporate watchdog Global Exchange brought a few hundred protesters to the heart of downtown to demonstrate against the use of sweatshop labor by the Gap. As marchers reached Gap subsidiary Old Navy, two climbers rappelled off of the roof, unfurling a banner which read, “SWEATSHOPS: ‘FREE TRADE’ OR CORPORATE SLAVERY?”

On November 24, the PGA caravan arrived. The busload of activists from across the world had departed from the U.S. East Coast in late October. Along the way to Seattle, they stopped in over twenty cities, “trying to communicate the impacts of globalization on our communities,” in the words of Indian participant Sanjay Mangala Gopal. They brought tremendous enthusiasm for the coming protests and tangibly demonstrated the PGA’s support.

By November 27, two days before the Ministerial, the tally of actions was mounting. In the middle of the night, activists had placed a fake front page on 25,000 issues of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, satirizing its coverage of the WTO. A rally on the University of Washington campus had marched the full length of a main avenue, occupying key intersections with guerrilla theater. A large, multi-gender squad of “radical cheerleaders” dressed in red mini-skirts had crashed the annual Bon Marche parade through downtown Seattle. A critical mass bike ride of 400 people had ridden down main streets and eventually opened the doors of the Convention Center, riding straight through. Two activists had scaled a retaining wall next to Interstate-5 with a “SHUT DOWN THE WTO” banner while one of their mothers shouted words of encouragement.

November 28 was the first day of the International People’s Assembly at the Filipino Community Center. With significant representation from the Global South, more than 200 delegates participated in this two-day series of presentations and discussions critically analyzing the WTO as an instrument of imperialism. In its concluding session, the People’s Assembly produced a unity statement, which, in part, declared their collective commitment “to confront the imperialist monster that has taken away our lands, jobs and livelihood and has further displaced, commodified and turned women into modern-day slaves.”

At the same time, over 1,000 people paraded through Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood in the largest procession yet. The steelworkers who led the march carried colorful, hand-painted pictures of snakes overlaid by the words “DON’T TRADE ON ME.” Later in the day, several hundred of us went downtown for an impromptu protest at the Gap. Led by a white van blasting techno music and frequent interludes about the wages of Gap sweatshop workers, we managed to occupy a major shopping area.

November 28 also saw the opening of the Independent Media Center (IMC) at 1415 Third Avenue in downtown Seattle. Formed by a small crew of activists and housed in a space donated temporarily by a local nonprofit, the IMC functioned as a hub for movement media-making during the protests. The IMC issued 450 of their own press passes, distributed 100 camcorders to street-based videographers, printed and distributed a small daily newspaper, and provided a physical space with phone lines and reliable high-speed internet for hundreds of activist journalists. Perhaps most significantly, the IMC also set up a website that enabled people to upload audio, video, photos, and text in real time to a newswire; in the era before social media, this opened up unprecedented space for participatory activist journalism. As the protests unfolded, the IMC quickly became the most reliable source of information.

N29: A Beginning

Monday, November 29 was the unofficial beginning to the WTO Ministerial, although no actual meetings occurred. Starting on this day, the number of resistance activities throughout the city began to ramp up exponentially – with multiple protests, direct actions, and educational events happening simultaneously for the next several days.

On that morning, we learned that dozens of squatters had occupied an abandoned building near the downtown police station. They were able to hold the building until the end of the WTO meetings. Meanwhile, Seattle commuters started their work week in sight of five members of the Rainforest Action Network dangling from a 170-foot crane with an enormous banner which read “Democracy” and “WTO” with arrows pointing in opposite directions.

In the streets, more than 200 animal rights activists and environmentalists costumed themselves as sea turtles (protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, which the WTO was threatening). Originally part of a Sierra Club march, they and some 2,000 others roamed downtown, eventually stopping to join French farmer José Bové in a protest at McDonalds. At the time, Bové was something of a movement celebrity, famous for bulldozing a McDonalds under construction in France.

The day ended with a “human chain to end Third World debt.” Led by an interfaith coalition, nearly 5,000 people marched to encircle the site of the WTO’s opening gala seven times over. They called for the powerful member nations of the WTO to cancel the debt of the world’s poorest countries. In the pouring rain, they chanted, “We’re all wet, cancel the debt!”

N30: “Shut It Down!”

Tuesday, November 30 – known internationally as “N30” – was the day we had been building toward for months. As I walked to downtown before dawn with my affinity group, actions were already underway. Workers were calling in sick, students were skipping school, cab drivers were engaged in a work stoppage, and longshore workers had shut down all of the West Coast ports.

Police cars were present on every block and the cops were vigilantly watching us. I saw two people pushing a shopping cart with a puppet and U-locks who were suddenly surrounded by police officers. When asked, the police declared that the pair would not identify themselves or admit that the shopping cart was theirs. After enough of a crowd grew to observe, they were released – minus the shopping cart. On the other side of downtown, two activists carrying pieces of a tripod, a large teepee-like structure for blocking roads, were detained by police and eventually arrested. Separately, both were interrogated, one pepper-sprayed and the other strapped to a chair and threatened with rape. Later, they were released with no charges.

DAN had announced two public meeting locations on opposite sides of downtown. Protesters gathering at both sites grew from the hundreds to the thousands by 7:30am when they began lively processions toward downtown. It was an astonishing sight. Looking around, there was a group of activist Santa Clauses, many returning sea turtles, a sprinkling of stilt-walkers, a jubilant squad of radical cheerleaders, a vast number of giant puppets, an anarchist marching band with matching pink gas masks, and thousands of ordinary people who looked very determined.

As the processions neared police lines around the Convention Center, some affinity groups deployed blockades; others were already in progress. By the time marchers had circled the nearly twenty-block circumference, protesters had blocked every single intersection, alleyway, and hotel entrance. Some simply sat across roads with arms linked. Others locked their arms inside pipes known as “lockboxes,” creating human walls. Still others used a combination of U-locks and bike cables to chain their necks together. One affinity group successfully set up a tripod with a protester sitting at the top and others locked to the base.

Confronted with these human blockades and thousands of their supporters, the police were visibly tense. Interestingly, President Bill Clinton had canceled his welcome address a few days before – perhaps anticipating its failure. The official opening of the WTO Ministerial was still scheduled for delegates. Yet, as mid-morning approached, they were unable to make it into the Convention Center. While some stopped to speak with protesters, others simply tried to push their way through.

By 10am, the police were preparing to create a corridor for “safe entry.” They choose an intersection with a less fortified blockade, gave a quick warning, lobbed in tear gas canisters, and shot a volley of rubber bullets. The few protesters who remained were arrested, many of them pepper-sprayed in the process. At a few other intersections, police beat activists with two-foot long batons to try to force them to move.

Despite police efforts, the WTO meetings were effectively shut down. Indeed, as Assistant Police Chief Ed Joiner would later flatly admit, “The police strategy failed.” Word quickly made its way through the crowds that the morning session had been canceled and that the only people inside the Convention Center were the press. The Seattle Times would later report that, throughout Tuesday morning, “US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky were holed up in the Westin Hotel. Federal law-enforcement officials said the streets of Seattle were too dangerous for them to travel the few blocks to the opening ceremonies.”

Meanwhile, the People’s Assembly march was heading toward downtown, growing to some 2,000 people along the way. Ace Saturay, who coordinated the march, later explained, “We made the strategic decision to start the [march] in the International District, a low-income community of color, with a large population of immigrants…that is experiencing the domestic impacts of institutions like the WTO policy thrusts.” They did this in open defiance of the City of Seattle; of the numerous groups to apply for march permits, only the People’s Assembly was denied.

By late morning, crowds of protesters around the Conference Center downtown swelled with the arrival of the People’s Assembly and student walkout marches from nearby colleges and high schools. Some 10,000 people surrounded the Convention Center.

Although police continued to shoot tear gas and rubber bullets, most locked-down activists began to relax. Some people, such as Portland DAN organizer Nancy Haque, unlocked from their blockades to look at was happening in other areas around the Convention Center. When I ran into her, she summarized the scene with a smile, saying: “We own the streets of Seattle.” This was no exaggeration. In every direction around us, the streets were full of jubilant protestors and the prevailing mood was festive. Some were dancing, others were engaged in enthusiastic conversations, and many were simply looking around with complete awe. A few people were decorating buildings with graffiti, and others pushed dumpsters and newspaper boxes into intersections to reinforce existing blockades.

While we were holding intersections, some 30,000 union members were gathering for a labor rally and march at Memorial Stadium, adjacent to downtown. In the early afternoon, they headed down Pine Street, in sight of many of the blockades. Faced with the mass direct action, labor’s unity dissolved. While AFL-CIO marshals directed many marchers away from the blockades, some trade unionists rushed through the marshals to join the thousands of protestors already occupying the streets.

As the day drew on, confrontation between police and protesters intensified once again. Those of us near major blockades became more accustomed to tear gas, and some protesters began throwing canisters back. Some activists set the contents of an overturned dumpster on fire. Meanwhile, office workers and shoppers scrambled to get past the looming clouds of tear gas, many of them pausing to have their eyes flushed by DAN medics. Throughout, crowds frequently chanted “Nonviolence!” or displayed the two-fingered peace symbol.

By this point, it was becoming plainly evident that some of the DAN action agreements – specifically, against property destruction – had begun to unravel. Even when we had first developed the agreements, there had been debate about whether we should or could ask people to abide by them. Clearly, some people in the streets had not agreed to them.

Since mid-morning, a well-organized contingent of a few hundred black-clad and masked people had been shattering windows at corporate targets, including Nike, the Gap, and Bank of America, and slashing tires of limousines and police cars. Using a black bloc formation – at that point, very novel in the U.S. – they stuck together, protected one another, and avoided confrontations with police. One black bloc collective later circulated a communiqué explaining why they targeted specific corporations for property destruction. “When we smash a window,” they wrote, “we aim to destroy the thin veneer of legitimacy that surrounds private property rights. At the same time, we exorcise that set of violent and destructive social relationships which has been imbued in almost everything around us.”

Many media reports at the time (and since) described Seattle as completely devastated by the black bloc. In reality, mainly corporate stores in the heart of downtown were damaged. Still, these actions sparked intense controversy in the following days. Labor leaders and other prominent organizers denounced the black bloc, as did some protestors. Others warned of the dangers of equating minor damage to buildings with the pervasive police violence. Still other activists questioned the property destruction not so much on philosophical grounds but tactically. There was no consensus and, if anything, the debate grew more intense with summit protests in subsequent years.

Back on the streets, the police were clearly agitated. As the afternoon turned into evening, rumor spread that Seattle Mayor Paul Schell had declared martial law. In fact, he had declared a “civil emergency” and set a curfew for 7pm to 7:30am in the downtown area. Many activists who were still locked down began to discuss leaving as they realized that they could come back for another day of blockades on Wednesday.

Just as the largest blockade was preparing to leave, the police opened fire with tear gas and rubber bullets. They added a new weapon too: concussion grenades, small projectiles that hit the ground with a bright, booming explosion. In the face of this attack and pursuit by the police, protesters splintered, many hastily heading out of downtown. The police hounded the remaining crowds of protesters into the nearby Capitol Hill neighborhood. There, residents and activists alike were tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed by police through several hours of repeated standoffs and assaults.

By the end of Tuesday, 68 people were in jail and many others had suffered from police violence. The DAN convergence center was turned into an emergency clinic for protesters with severe pepper spray burns and dangerous cases of tear gas inhalation.

D1: Crackdown

The morning of Wednesday, December 1, saw protesters marching downtown once again. This time, police quickly intercepted them. While some held their ground and were arrested, others continued to march, outflanking police for over an hour as their numbers grew into the hundreds. When the march stopped at Westlake Park, police surrounded them and separated people into those who wanted to be arrested and those who didn’t. Then, all of them – “arrestables” and “non-arrestables” alike, including members of the DAN legal team – were arrested and dragged onto buses. A crowd of hundreds loudly supported them from behind police lines.

Under Seattle Mayor Paul Schell’s orders, the police had cordoned off a massive section of downtown with the Convention Center in the middle. They were assisted by some 200 National Guard troops. Entering that area without a “legitimate reason” (i.e., being a WTO delegate, cop, resident, or office worker) became punishable by fines and jail time. Schell was attempting to create a “protest-free zone.”

The full weight of Schell’s declarations wasn’t fully apparent until later in the afternoon. As police turned countless protesters away from downtown, some 2,000 gathered outside of the protest-free zone for a short march and rally with the steelworkers. Most of us assumed that as long as we stayed with the unions, we wouldn’t be attacked by the police. We still held onto that hope as we joined more militant trade unionists in a march from the rally site toward downtown.

As we approached the no protest zone, police suddenly assaulted us with tear gas and concussion grenades. The march scattered into several large groups and many people sustained injuries. One person went into shock; another person passed out, landing on her face and fracturing her jaw, after a canister exploded at her feet; and one older person was hit in the face with a rubber bullet and temporarily blinded in one eye. The lines between protesters and downtown shoppers blurred as everyone tried to escape. Relentlessly, police chased the scattered groups of protesters. At Pike Place Market, some activists sat down to try to de-escalate the situation. Police reacted by pepper-spraying medics, shoppers, and marchers alike.

As some people sought medical attention, others simply fled. In the distance, more riot police amassed. A couple of hours later, these would be the police who chased a remaining splinter of nearly 300 protesters away from the protest-free zone, assuring them that they could continue their march if they went North – only to be corralled by armored police vehicles. The police proceeded to throw in tear gas and command everyone to “get on the ground” or else face more gas. Then, over two-thirds were arrested – the remainder spared because the police ran out of buses to transport arrestees.

On the other side of town, at Sand Point Naval Base, seven busloads of arrested protesters refused to get off to be processed. Going for over thirteen hours without food, water, or bathroom facilities, they demanded to see DAN lawyers. By the middle of the night, they had all been dragged off, some pepper-sprayed. Activist Jamie Taylor would later tell how most remained undaunted, singing as they had learned in legal trainings: “I am going to remain silent/uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh/I want to see a lawyer/oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.” Once in processing, the majority of them refused to give their names, so they were issued wristbands with either “Jane WTO” or “John WTO” followed by a number.

Over the following days, police and guards ruthlessly terrorized jailed activists who tried to maintain solidarity. A significant number of arrestees were strip-searched, pepper-sprayed, or otherwise brutalized, and most had inadequate access to food and clothing. Still, solidarity sometimes prevailed. At one point in jail, guards came to Nancy Haque’s cell to separate her from others. She later recalled, “when I didn’t immediately comply I was threatened with solitary confinement. My cell mates responded by locking their arms around me, singing ‘Si, se puede’ (‘Yes, we can’). The jail officials let me stay.”

Outside, for the second night in a row, police pursued protesters into Capitol Hill. Helicopters with searchlights circled overhead while sirens screamed late into the night, punctuated by the regular sound of tear gas shots. This time, residents were even more furious at the military-like invasion, shouting at police to leave their neighborhood.

By the close of the day, the score was clear: if we had won on Tuesday, the police had won on Wednesday. However, they were losing in the eyes of Seattle residents. As I walked out of downtown that evening, people were gathered in bars and cafes watching live footage of police firing tear gas and rubber bullets into protesters. I overheard downtown office workers speaking angrily about Schell’s declarations. Meanwhile, many shopkeepers had put up supportive signs in their windows, such as “WTO, GO HOME” or “We support peaceful protesters.”

D2: “This Is What Democracy Looks Like!”

On the morning of Thursday, December 2, hundreds of activists amassed on Capitol Hill and marched toward downtown. It was, by far, the most colorful procession since Tuesday morning. Marchers carried signs, flags, banners, towering skeleton puppets, and a giant papier-mâché human head flanked by two large hands connected with painted banner-sleeves. Like many of the protesters, the head was gagged in order to visually communicate the effects of Mayor Schell’s declarations. Offering further comment, one marcher’s sign read: “THIS IS A FREE PROTEST ZONE.”

As I caught up with the march, a song wafted through the crowd: “We have come too far/We won’t turn around/We’ll flood the streets with justice/We are freedom bound.” In counterpoint, others chanted, “This is what democracy looks like!” Together, the song and chant reinforced our collective sense of power. More and more people joined our procession.

Following a brief downtown rally, marchers amicably split into two processions – one heading to protest multinational agribusiness company Cargill and the other toward major WTO sponsor and timber corporation Weyerhaeuser. The vast majority – upwards of 2,000 – followed the latter, briefly stopping at Weyerhaeuser’s Seattle headquarters to hang banners and then moving to the county jail, where many of the nearly 500 arrested protesters were being held.

As we arrived, police blocked off the nearby freeway entrance, clearly fearing that we would occupy the interstate. Our focus, however, was on the people inside. A protestor held a hand-written cardboard sign: “FREE THE SEATTLE 500, JAIL THE FORTUNE 500.” Marching around, we could see prisoners pressed up against cell windows and raising fists. Activist Hank Tallman, in jail at the time, later told how, on his one phone call, the DAN legal team had mentioned the 2,000 outside. “I turned to the rest of the prisoners in the cell block and yelled,” he said. “They were all cheering.”

Outside, we held hands to encircle the building. Others gathered near the front and we soon heard that an affinity group had physically blockaded the main entrance. Tension was mounting, with many of us preparing for tear gas, but the police maintained only a light presence. Within an hour, the blockading affinity group announced their demands: unconditional freedom for all nonviolent protesters and a public apology from the city of Seattle. Those of us who were willing to risk arrest began joining the others at the entrance, overflowing into the sidewalk and onto the street. Still, the police stuck to the periphery. We appeared to be in a protracted standoff, and patiently we waited.

As the sun set, a representative from the DAN legal team announced that they had been negotiating with city officials who had granted a concession: if we ended the blockade, officials would allow pairs of DAN legal support workers to consult with groups of jailed protesters. Many present grumbled, saying that the city was only allowing prisoners the rights already owed to them. The affinity group that had sparked the action, however, urged us to exit the blockade with them. Slowly, we began to march home.

D3: Success

By Friday, December 3, most of us were dragging. After a week of running from riot police, inhaling tear gas, and enduring constant sleep deprivation, many were looking for a sense of closure as well as more news about the 500 still in jail.

As a final mass action for the week, the County Labor Council organized a rally and march from the local labor temple. Altogether, several thousand people wound their way through downtown with shouts of encouragement from construction workers, motorists, and other passersby. At the conclusion of the march, a large group of protesters –including many previously uninvolved Seattle residents who were outraged about Mayor Schell’s declarations – turned back toward downtown. As our spontaneous march approached police lines, protesters argued about whether we should focus on the WTO or those who were in jail. In the end, the march broke in half: one group went to the jail and another remained in sight of the Convention Center.

Once at the jail, several hundred gathered to sort out what we could do for those inside. To chants of “let them go!” the DAN legal team reported that many arrestees were being brutalized and isolated, and some weren’t getting necessary food and medical treatment.

The rest of the day was an astonishing exercise in direct democracy. With skillful facilitation from a volunteer in the crowd, the hundreds present deliberated about how to proceed. Twenty-three people presented proposals for how best we could force the city to negotiate with our legal team, and then we split into impromptu affinity groups to discuss the proposals. Each group reached a consensus on what it favored and then sent a spokesperson to hammer it out with some 20 other spokespeople. Within two hours, we had a detailed action plan to occupy the entrance of the jail until all the protesters were released. We then began making preparations for a long stay.

While we were making our decisions at the jail, the other half of our march had chosen to blockade the Westin Hotel, where many WTO delegates were staying. An affinity group of eight people U-locked themselves to the main entrances while hundreds of others occupied the road and sidewalk in front.

As both groups hunkered down, news leaked from the Convention Center that the WTO Ministerial had ended with no agreement on a new round of meetings. Earlier that morning, the African delegation had booed the U.S. Trade Representative as she walked into a plenary session. And as the day came to a close, a coalition of delegates from over 70 countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia had stubbornly refused to sign onto an agenda in which they saw they had little voice. The WTO wasn’t dead, but it was severely stalled. The next day, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s bold headline read, “Summit ends in failure.” Our efforts had contributed, some delegates would later admit, by costing the Ministerial nearly two full days of meeting time.

With the word of success, occupations at the jail and the Westin turned into street parties with dancing, drumming, and singing late into the night. The commitment of protesters was only buoyed by the news. At least one hundred stayed in each location overnight. Those at the Westin finally decided to unlock the next morning. The occupation of the jail would continue for days, until most of the arrested protesters were released on Sunday, December 5. We would later learn that, alongside our solidarity tactics in and outside the jail, some trade union leaders put intense pressure on the City of Seattle to release those arrested.

Legacies and Lessons

Toward the end of that week, we began chanting, “WTO, you’ve gotta go!/The people came and stole the show!” This was apt. As many commentators would later point out, thousands of us went up against one of the most powerful organizations in the world – and we won.

Our victory is an enduring legacy of the Seattle protests. Through direct action and direct democracy, thousands of ordinary people – students, workers, parents, community organizers, activists, and many others – made history. Those of us who organized for the shutdown were consciously audacious in our politics and our strategy, and this created space for an astonishing upsurge with effects we could not have anticipated. Ultimately, we contributed to fundamentally shifting public discussions about globalization and inequality.

Just as important was our internationalism, what we called “globalization from below.” We saw ourselves as participating in a struggle that was global, and we paid careful attention to movements in other parts of the world, particularly the Global South, that had been fighting mightily against neoliberalism. Many of us were involved in international solidarity efforts, and we understood that we had particular responsibilities as people organizing in the U.S. Through our victory in Seattle, we unequivocally communicated to people across the globe that there are many in the U.S. struggling against the rule of profit and, to use a Zapatista phrase, fighting for “a world in which many worlds fit.”

Alongside these legacies, there are also valuable lessons to take from our experience in 1999. I’ll name two here. The first is that what we do is never perfect; the point is to learn from our mistakes, build on our successes, and work to do better. In the case of Seattle, our organizing had some significant flaws. As Olympia DAN organizer Stephanie Guilloud observed, “We were not building a long-term resistance movement: we were mobilizing for a protest.” And as we urgently mobilized, many of us sidestepped the political implications of the fact that we were predominantly white.

Privilege framed white organizers’ experiences in many ways. We mostly stayed within our customary activist networks and social scenes. Many of us didn’t think about the different meanings and risks of direct action tactics for communities that face police violence every day. And for the most part, we were only beginning to understand the interconnections among colonialism, capitalism, ableism, hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy, and other systems of domination. The people most affected by what we protested in Seattle were not majority white, and significant numbers of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color did participate in the protests. Those of us who were white should have worked more intentionally in solidarity with their efforts.

In the wake of the Seattle shutdown, longtime activist and writer Elizabeth Martinez brought much of this to the foreground with her article “Where Was the Color in Seattle?” Her intervention sparked valuable critical discussions about not only the racial composition of the protests, but also the relationship between mobilizing and organizing, strategy and movement-building, and contending with social hierarchies as they are reproduced in movements.

These discussions illuminated that, while mobilizing for Seattle, we didn’t sufficiently consider how to lay the foundations for a movement that could continue to grow and learn beyond our week of protests. As a result, we didn’t grapple with crucial questions: How should we be consciously connecting movement efforts to ongoing community-based struggles? And how should we, in Guilloud’s words, “challenge the dynamics of privilege and oppression while also building large, wide, and deep movements that are led by and rooted in the experiences of people who know injustice and exploitation – currently and historically”? These questions continue to be some of the most pressing for movements in North America.

The other lesson is that success almost always requires collaborative work and planning. The Seattle shutdown was neither spontaneous nor an outcome of good fortune; it was the result of months of preparation by thousands of people. We made it happen through audacity, yes, and also diligent, calculated collective effort. Seattle DAN organizer Jennifer Whitney summed this up well:

nothing came from out of the blue – we organized, and it paid off. We weren’t just freaks and artists and full-time activists on the streets; we went into high schools and churches, labor councils and neighborhood associations, workplaces and universities. Those people were on the streets with us; those people flooded city council meetings afterwards, damning the police and the city, not only for their illustrious abuses and constitutional violations, but also for having invited the WTO to meet in our city in the first place.The teach-ins, workshops, and presentations, which took place across the town for months in advance, ignited the population’s anger and propelled them into the streets, more than a single flyer or workshop ever could have.

Months of educating, mobilizing, alliance-building, training, and planning laid groundwork for mass collective action.

What’s more, we developed a strategic framework that invited participation and creativity. Thousands of people organized themselves into affinity groups, crafted their own plans, and worked with other groups to carry them out. With a shared framework and lots of communication, groups were then able to react nimbly as circumstances changed rapidly in the streets. In the words of San Francisco Bay Area DAN organizer David Solnit, “organized resistance catalyzed a broader public uprising; thousands who had no direct contact with the coordinating organizations heard about or witnessed the mass action, it made sense to them, and they joined in or supported.” How to build this kind of inviting organized resistance in a resilient, expansive way is another pressing question for movements today.

What we did in Seattle in 1999 wasn’t flawless, but it was an amazing victory, one that can and should still inspire us. Let’s celebrate it, learn from what actually happened, and keep fighting and building.

Canadian Dimension just posted this piece, my latest “writing with movements” column. I’m re-posting it here. This article is part of the Shutdown WTO Organizers’ History Project, a collection of histories and reflections from people directly involved in organizing the Seattle mass direct action in 1999.

November 30, 2019, will mark twenty years since “Seattle 1999.” This week of mass direct action, involving tens of thousands of people, successfully undermined the Seattle Ministerial of the World Trade Organization and helped to propel a critical public discussion about neoliberalism.

Over the last two decades, counterproductive myths have developed around “the battle of Seattle.” Now is a good time to dispense with them. One way to do this is to revisit the history from the perspective of those who were involved in organizing the mass direct action. I was one among them – at that time, a 22-year-old activist living in Olympia, Washington. Along with dozens of others, I helped found the Direct Action Network (DAN) and spent months organizing for the protests.

There are three myths about Seattle that are especially harmful. The first is that what we did was altogether new. In fact, our efforts were inspired by and followed in the footsteps of militant movements in the global South, which led the global revolt against neoliberalism. Building on anti-colonial legacies, this cycle of struggle started with protests against structural adjustment measures in the 1980s, especially in Africa and Latin America, and further cohered with the Zapatistas’ emergence onto the world stage in the mid-1990s.

In addition, much of our political framework in Seattle – from affinity groups to direct action – grew out of previous movement experiences. These include the labor radicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World, revolutionary pacifist efforts, grassroots direct action initiatives in the Black freedom movement, various strands of feminist organizing, the queer radicalism of ACT UP and the Lesbian Avengers, and the forest defense activism of Earth First!.

The second myth is that the Seattle actions were largely spontaneous. “This myth,” writes former DAN organizer David Solnit, “overlooks the massive amounts of grassroots organizing, mobilizing, networking, education, alliance building, media work, and the creation of a unifying strategic framework.”

The vision for mass direct action in Seattle developed through an informal West Coast activist network, primarily involving anti-war activists, anarchists, direct-action environmentalists, international solidarity groups, and anti-prison activists. We formalized as DAN in the summer of 1999. Through months of meetings, debates, and work, DAN generated an action strategy, built relationships with other organizations, and mobilized on an ambitious scale.

DAN developed and distributed more than 50,000 copies of a broadsheet with information about the WTO and detailed instructions for participating in the direct action. DAN also organized a roadshow that toured along the West Coast, offering performances and action trainings. DAN members regularly facilitated popular education workshops and spoke at events throughout the region. And just before the WTO meetings began, DAN ran a nine-day “convergence” in Seattle, where we offered orientation, trainings, meals, and space for protest preparation.

Not everyone – and probably not even a majority – of those who protested in Seattle came through DAN. But we trained thousands of people and reached tens of thousands more. Our efforts created an infrastructure for what unfolded in the streets.

The third myth is that what we did in Seattle was magical, even flawless. In reality, we made many mistakes. As former DAN organizer Stephanie Guilloud notes, “We were not building a long-term resistance movement: we were mobilizing for a protest.” As we urgently mobilized, many of us overlooked the political implications of the fact that we were predominantly white.

Privilege framed white organizers’ experiences in many ways. We mostly stayed within our limited activist networks and social scenes. Many of us didn’t think about the different meanings and risks of direct action tactics for communities that face police repression every day. And for the most part, we were only beginning to understand the interconnections among colonialism, capitalism, ableism, hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy, and other systems of domination.

The people most affected by what we protested in Seattle were not majority white, and significant numbers of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color did participate in the protests. Those of us who were white should have worked more intentionally in solidarity with their efforts.

While mobilizing, we also didn’t consider how to lay the foundations for a resilient movement. As a result, we didn’t grapple with crucial questions: How should we be consciously connecting movement efforts to ongoing community-based struggles? And how should we, in Guilloud’s words, “challenge the dynamics of privilege and oppression while also building large, wide, and deep movements that are led by and rooted in the experiences of people who know injustice and exploitation – currently and historically”? These questions continue to be some of the most pressing for movements in North America.

Seattle 1999 was a tremendous victory. Let’s celebrate it and learn from what actually happened, including the mistakes.

Organizing for the mass direct action against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 was one of the most important experiences of my life. For this reason, I have been delighted to spend the last few months working with some other co-founders of the Direct Action Network on the #ShutdownWTO20 Organizers’ History Project to commemorate and reflect on the 20th anniversary of the protests.

We compiled historical narratives from people who organized locally and regionally. We gathered articles and resources developed by people involved in the direct-action organizing. And we generated new analysis to support our collective efforts to look forward to the next 20 years. We offer this archival site as a humble contribution to remember the work of thousands and thousands of people who made it happen.

This photo is of the Direct Action Network WTO blockade map dividing downtown Seattle into 13 “pie slices” surrounding the Washington Convention & Trade Center.

The Summer 2019 issue of Canadian Dimension features this piece, my “writing with movements” column for the magazine. I’m reposting it here with links included.

I’ve recently returned to a something I wrote in my twenties. Back in 2005, I contributed a “Letter to older activists” to the book Letters from Young Activists. In that piece, I described a kind of “advice” that older leftists sometimes give to younger leftists that “sounds more like condescending lecturing than sincere sharing.” I elaborated:

Those of you who do this are often socially positioned in ways that lead you to feel deeply entitled to your expertise. And when you wield your age, experience, and achievements with self-righteous certainty, I find it hard to trust you. I’m thinking, for example, of some of you who are veterans of the often-mythologized “sixties.” There is certainly much we can all learn from the 1960s, as well as from many other historical moments. But the danger lies in romanticizing or demonizing the past, turning it into something that wholly trumps our new and creative ideas in changing circumstances. Young activists don’t need your status plays or your simplistic impositions of your past onto the present. Rather, we need you to recognize self-consciously how your past forms you, how it shapes your experience and understanding of the present in both limiting and illuminating ways.

From my now older vantage point, I can’t help but read this as cautionary guidance.

Many of us have been at an activist event when, during the question and answer session, an older leftist (frequently white, usually a man) steps up to the microphone and lambasts everyone present with a list of why whatever initiative at hand is insufficient or misguided.

Since turning forty, I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of conduct. I increasingly recognize aspects of it in myself and others I know. In recent years, I’ve witnessed radicals my age and older dismissively discuss newer movement efforts, including the Movement for Black Lives, labor organizing campaigns, anti-fascist mobilizations, climate justice activism, and feminist and queer initiatives. Even if they don’t step up to a microphone, they don’t hesitate to share their criticisms in smaller discussions and online.

For sure, critical discussion can strengthen movements, and even comradely debates can sometimes be harsh. At the same time, I’m concerned with the responsibilities that older radicals have in how we deploy our knowledge and social statuses in criticizing movement activities, particularly the efforts of younger people and people newer to activism. This is something with which I struggle myself: How should I distinguish between useful and harmful criticisms? When is it appropriate to raise reservations and how? How can I avoid taking a corrosive, self-certain approach?

I’m trying to answer these questions for myself by looking to experienced radicals who have solid track records of cross-generational collaboration. One of these people is Mariame Kaba, a longtime organizer involved in struggles against the prison industrial complex and for transformative justice. In a 2017 interview, Kaba offered some advice that has stuck with me: “if you’re a veteran organizer it is your duty, I believe, to come into spaces with an open heart and an open ear and not to go in there with your arms crossed, ready to pounce, on how these young folks are doing everything wrong all the time.”

Part of what I take from Kaba is about intentionally cultivating curiosity about other people’s activities – and nourishing those dimensions that are most promising. So often in political work, clarifying questions are more useful than sharp criticisms or aphoristic wisdom.

Another person to whom I look is Silvia Federici, a veteran feminist activist and theorist. In a 2016 interview, Federici remarked, “I’ve made it a principle not to indulge in speech that is destructive.” As I understand it, this principle calls for deep thoughtfulness about the effects of our words and actions on others engaged in struggle, even – and maybe especially – when we have disagreements.

In that same interview, Federici also emphasized learning “to be more humble.” This is key, I think. Part of being humble is being courageously and compassionately self-critical. Some of the greatest gifts I have received from older radicals in my life have been frank reflections on their uncertainties, miscalculations, and mistakes. That kind of vulnerability, especially from those who are relatively privileged, is tremendously valuable. It encourages us all to examine what we take to be certain, and to admit when we’ve got something wrong.

If we show up with open hearts and ears, intentional curiosity, thoughtfulness about our words and actions, and humbleness and vulnerability, we aging activists can offer so much more than criticism to movements today.

The work of INCITE! and Critical Resistance has crucially propelled the development of anti-racist feminist and prison abolitionist politics over the last two decades. But as most experienced activists know, these politics have much longer lineages, which are well worth exploring and learning from. Emily Thuma’s book All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence, just published by University of Illinois Press, is an enormous contribution to this process of exploration. Thuma introduces us to anticarceral feminist efforts of the 1970s and early 1980s, which challenged the mainstream feminist movement’s turn towards cops and courts as a way to deal with interpersonal violence. Carefully drawing on archives and interviews, she looks at participatory defense campaigns, organizations that supported incarcerated women, long-running collectively-produced women’s prison newsletters, and community-based coalitional efforts that attempted to tackle gender, racial, and economic violence. Thuma packs tremendous detail and insight into this short, well-written book. I recommend it!

Here’s one gem from Thuma’s book:

Across the United States, in and outside of prisons, grassroots women activists participated in collective actions that illuminated the interconnections between interpersonal violence against women and the racial and gender violence of policing and imprisonment. These mobilizations were spearheaded by radical women of color and antiracist white women, many of them lesbian-identified. They cultivated a distinctive left antiviolence politics that was defined by a critique of state violence; an understanding of race, gender, class, and sexuality as mutually constructed systems of power and meaning; and a practice of coalition-based organizing. […] Anticarceral feminist politics grew in the cracks of prison walls and at the interfaces between numerous social movements, including those for racial and economic justice, prisoners’ and psychiatric patients’ rights, and gender and sexual liberation. Through the process of building coalitions that transected these social justice struggles, the activists at the center of this study produced a broad and layered understanding of ‘violence against women’ that encompassed the structural violence of social inequalities, the violence of state institutions and agents, and interpersonal forms of violence, including rape, battering, and sexual coercion. This expansive analysis directly clashed with the ‘tough-on-crime’ ethos of the 1970s and the mainstream women’s movement’s increasing embrace of criminalization as a frontline solution to interpersonal violence.

The Winter 2019 issue of Canadian Dimension features this piece, my “writing with movements” column for the magazine. I’m reposting it here with links included.

We can learn a lot about movements by looking at how – and how much – they train people.

Many activist spaces these days spend time developing critical analysis through events, writing, and discussion. But as much as we might wish otherwise, sharp analysis doesn’t automatically translate into the skills necessary for working in groups, making collaborative plans, and taking effective action. Successful movements create intentional mechanisms for helping people to learn such organizing skills.

There are lots of examples in recent history. The U.S. civil rights movement set up intensive civil disobedience trainings as well as freedom schools. The women’s liberation movement generated consciousness raising groups, peer-to-peer education practices, and touring workshops. The labor movement created summer schools, labor colleges, and worker education programs; although much less widespread today, some of these spaces continue to exist.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the direct action anti-nuclear movement developed a culture of training inspired by the civil rights and feminist movements. In preparation for large-scale civil disobedience actions involving hundreds of people, organizers regularly held workshops on decision-making, direct action, and campaign-building, among other topics. These trainings, some of which were day-long, combined presentations, facilitated discussions, and participatory activities, often with role-playing.

As historian and activist Andrew Cornell points out, this culture of training carried on into many subsequent movements. It was definitely influential as I came into radical politics in the 1990s. This was a period when activist skill-building workshops and open, training-oriented movement gatherings were much more common than they are today.

During this time, a network of experienced Earth First! organizers offered frequent workshops and touring “roadshows” focused on popular education around specific campaigns. Copwatch groups trained interested people in other cities about how to monitor and record local police activity. Similarly, Anti-Racist Action groups trained people across the continent in methods for countering white supremacist organizing. Many activists also routinely traveled to multi-day conferences and other gatherings that offered workshops on everything from blockades to banner-making, meeting facilitation to media outreach.

Arguably, this culture of training peaked with the so-called anti-globalization movement in the late 1990s and early 2000s. What we called “convergences” – gatherings for training and planning – preceded most of the large summit protests of that era. And during those years, it was common for groups involved in the movement to hold periodic workshops on topics such as anti-oppression, consensus decision-making, and direct action, as well as more specialized trainings for legal observers, street medics, and others.

Since then, there has been a noticeable downturn in training. Although many experienced activists have mentioned this to me, anarchist sociologist Lesley Wood is the only one I know who has looked carefully at the trend. Focusing on North American anarchist gatherings, Wood has recently documented a marked decline in skill-building workshops since the 1980s. This is consistent with my experiences at movement gatherings and left spaces more generally over the last two decades: there seem to be fewer skill-based workshops and training-oriented gatherings, and the activist trainings that do happen tend to be less frequent and shorter.

What accounts for this decline? As with most everything, I’m sure there are many contributing factors. But I suspect that it has a lot to do with prevailing life circumstances amidst 21^st-century neoliberalism. The material realities of most people’s lives right now involve lots of precarious low-paid work, much harm and trauma, tremendous debt, and pressing responsibilities to care for children and older family members. So many of us feel exhausted, scattered, anxious, and sped-up. In these circumstances, creating space for training is understandably challenging and all the more crucial.

I find hope in training initiatives that are persevering – and growing – in these difficult circumstances. This is particularly the case in the U.S., where there are both longstanding organizations, such as Project South and Training for Change, and newer efforts, such as the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking and The Wildfire Project. In the Canadian context, most university-based Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) host workshops and, more ambitiously, Tools for Change organizes an annual series of trainings in Toronto. As well, some labor unions continue to hold trainings and experiment with online educational spaces for rank-and-file members. At the time of this writing, I’m also excited about the upcoming PowerShift: Young and Rising conference in Ottawa, which promises a weekend full of workshops for climate justice activists and organizers.

What can we learn about current movements based on how they’re training people? Activists are struggling mightily, but our collective capacity is lower than in some previous periods. To build the large-scale, sustained, combative movements we need, we will have to generate new and relevant mechanisms for spreading skills.

I was so honored to make another appearance on Against the Grain, one of my top favorite shows! AtG host Sasha Lilley invited me on to offer a basic introduction for U.S.-based listeners to the groundswell of struggle in the Canadian context against resource extraction and for climate justice. Anyone already familiar with that terrain of struggle won’t hear me say anything that many smarter and more experienced people haven’t already said. But if you are less familiar with that context, you may find this episode illuminating! I doubt it will surprise anyone to hear me emphasize that fighting for climate justice requires fighting against colonialism.

The Fall 2018 issue of Canadian Dimension features this piece, my “writing with movements” column for the magazine. This one is co-written with Alexis Shotwell. I’m reposting it here with links included.

Climate change is hitting hard. The heat waves and fires of this past summer – and this fall’s storms and tornados – are just the most recent manifestations.

We are living in a future many people worked to prevent, which is also a future some actively accept even though it produces ecological destruction in service to profit. The science fiction writer William Gibson is often quoted as saying, “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” Usually we think of this in terms of the distributions of good things. However, as anti-poverty activist and scholar Virginia Eubanks notes, Gibson’s quote can also help us see the uneven distribution of suffering. And, indeed, the people most directly experiencing the pain and death of climate change are not the people responsible for causing it.

But global transformation is coming even for those who have been most protected so far. Increasingly, we see reporting of the possibility that it is too late to stop the effects of global warming or that we are simply doomed.

Common responses to this unfolding transformation include denial (“we’re just having a hot summer”), despair (“there’s nothing we can do, might as well take long plane trips while we can”), and an approach we could call dystopian (“there’s nothing we can do, but we should actively know about how truly terrible things are”). This last approach calls for more attention to the catastrophe humanity faces. In this vein, the Marxist writer Richard Seymour contends that the apocalyptic tone about climate change needs to go further: “If you think something can be done, you will be serious and urgent rather than facetious. The catastrophists are the optimists here.”

While Seymour elaborates many of the ways that things are catastrophically bad, he doesn’t offer a picture of what kind of optimist it’s possible for catastrophists to be. And just focusing on scaring people has limited effects; at least in encouraging people to shift their behaviors around health, we know that fear sometimes works for one-time changes, but not for ongoing, systematic change efforts. As radical writer and broadcaster Sasha Lilley points out, we should thus be wary of catastrophism on the left: “An awareness of the scale or severity of catastrophe does not ineluctably steer one down a path of radical politics.” It’s not necessarily the case that things have to feel much worse before we work on making them much better.

Here, we think of Tank Girl, a comic book character living in a devastated world. In one frame, she pulls on her boots for the day, cigarette dangling from her mouth and a coffee cup beside her. She thinks, “I can’t let things be this way. We can be wonderful. We can be magnificent. We can turn this shit around.” What can we learn from Tank Girl?

Perhaps we can be grieving optimists. We can have what Italian communist Antonio Gramsci popularized as “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Pessimism of the intellect means refusing to shy away from how bad things are; instead, it is to examine the world realistically and seriously consider worst-case scenarios. It also means understanding that destroying places and people for profit is not human nature; it is capitalism. And in this moment, mourning comes along with understanding: the human and non-human beings, ecosystems, ways of life, and ordinary happinesses that we have lost and will lose deserve our grief.

We can also organize. Optimism of the will means that, although we perceive how bad things are, we act anyhow. Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear observes that Indigenous people have been living in a post-apocalyptic world for centuries. Those of us who are settlers could learn something about carrying on after devastation; there is grief, but there is also persistence and resurgence.

Optimism of the will isn’t about individual heroism. It’s about acting with other people to create conditions so that what currently seems impossible becomes possible. We’ve witnessed this most recently in fights against resource extraction and transport projects. The victory represented by the August Federal Court of Appeal ruling on the Trans Mountain Pipeline is one clear example. That ruling was propelled by Indigenous-led struggles that, through fierce collective action across the Canadian context, shifted the project from a done deal to an open question.

Organizing out of our grief for this planet and all of us on it rests on the certain knowledge that, for the vast majority of us who are not rich, most of the problems facing us now are at a scale beyond our individual capacity to solve. The way to be a grieving optimist is to band together with others who care about this world, and to struggle.

We can be wonderful. We can be magnificent. We can turn this shit around.

Thanks to determined grassroots Indigenous efforts, there is a growing public discussion in the Canadian context about what is known as the “60s scoop.” This was the period, starting in the late 1950s, when over 20,000 Indigenous children were removed from their families, lands, and cultures and trafficked across provinces, borders, and overseas to be raised in non-Indigenous households. Colleen Cardinal, a survivor of the 60s scoop and a fierce activist, has made a major contribution to this discussion with her book Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh (Raised somewhere else): A 60s Scoop Adoptee’s Story of Coming Home, published last year by Fernwood Publishing. Cardinal generously – and unflinchingly – shares her life with us, illuminating the everyday violence of Canadian colonialism and tracing her own journey of healing and resistance. I recommend this book!

Here’s one gem from Cardinal’s book:

In recent years, I have been able to change my perspective of myself as a victim by examining my experiences over the decades and tracing the colonial violence in my family right back to the making of Canada. I was never meant to find out what happened to my family, let alone find my parents, endure the violence, heal from the trauma and put the pieces together about how the state intended to assimilate me into the mindless tax-paying Canadian citizenry. The state has never been invested in making sure I retained my culture, land base or knowledge, nor was it concerned that my health and well-being as a First Nations ward of the Crown was protected. This would lead me to believe that everything I had learned up to this point about the state in its dealings with First Nations people was deliberate in its intent to erase us from the history of this country.