The Battle of Seattle at 20

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Ralph Radford/AP Photo

Protesters hold police at bay near the convention center during the World Trade Organization trade talks in Seattle, November 1999.

“My bone marrow was purring—this is gonna be fuckin’ big.”

That was how Ron Judd felt in the pre-dawn darkness of November 30, 1999, 20 years ago this month, as he paced inside Seattle’s King County Labor Temple, which he directed at the time. In just a few hours, delegates to the World Trade Organization would begin arriving at the opening session of their Millennial Round Ministerial, where they planned to author new rules on global trade.

Ron knew it wasn’t going to happen. “The delegates had no idea what awaited them,” he said. For about six months, Ron had been helping to mobilize tens of thousands of trade unionists from across the country to descend on Seattle to protest the WTO. He thought—correctly—that the changes to global trade rules the WTO hoped to make would come at the expense of wages, unionization rates, and high labor standards for American workers, precipitating a race to the bottom with workers in the global South.

But the WTO had other concerns on its radar too. At the time, the international trade arbiter was the closest thing the world had ever known to a global governing institution. Yet its members weren’t elected, and it was inclined to meddle in the quotidian affairs of ordinary citizens—what kind of food they were allowed to import, how much they could pay workers, what access they would have to natural resources, what constituted an unfair violation of trade rights—across the globe. Virtually anything, it seemed, could be deemed an illegal barrier to free trade, and then created as a binding constraint, without the input of democratically elected national legislatures. That magisterial arrogance mobilized a lot of opponents.

Across the city that morning, thousands of mostly young protesters strategically moved into position, surrounding the convention center where the WTO was supposed to meet. David Solnit, one of the founders of the Direct Action Network, the organization most identified with the street protest strategy, led one flank of the march from Elliott Bay to downtown. I was somewhere behind him.

Our groups approached downtown and ended up blockading a number of predetermined “pie pieces” of the city, an action that served to keep delegates out. By 7:30 a.m., activists had occupied the entire downtown area, blocking WTO delegates from accessing their meetings, and in some cases from even leaving their hotels. We were chained together, a wall of bodies, a physical manifestation of solidarity at the end of the millennium.

As the labor march that Ron organized snaked along its permitted route a safe distance from downtown, droves of restless unionists broke through the lines that had been established by the official marshals, joining what was beginning to resemble a police riot against nonviolent protesters. Lisa Fithian, a veteran of every major American protest in the last three decades, helped to organize what she calls “flying squads” of new arrivals to support those on the barricades, a tactic borrowed from the 1930s sit-down strikes of the United Auto Workers.

By noon, the WTO’s opening ceremonies had been officially canceled, and the global justice movement was celebrating its coming-out party in the global North. Police were soon overwhelmed, and resorted to teargas, rubber bullets, and concussion grenades to clear the streets. Mayor Paul Schell declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew for all Seattle residents, and designated a 50-block no-protest zone around the WTO meeting site.

Opposition to neoliberalism earned us the moniker “anti-globalization movement,” despite activists’ insistent refrain that we actually wanted a different kind of globalization, one that promoted high labor standards, global environmental protections, debt relief, food justice, and authentic democracy. As is common in protest coalitions, it was hardly a coherent movement—more like a movement of movements—but in its organizing style and in its stated goals, there was an abiding commitment to bottom-up democracy across the globe.

Though the WTO meetings did take place, activists challenged the no-protest zone in the subsequent days with nonviolent direct action, which landed hundreds in jail. On the last day of the meetings, African delegates refused to acquiesce to proposed trade norms, citing the street activists as inspiration. As the WTO left town without a mandate, a simple message went viral: Another world is possible.

Seattle set in motion a new kind of movement. For the next few years, activists reliably gathered to protest these global-elite summits. There were successes along the way. In 2003, the Kenyan, South Korean, and Indian delegations all walked out of the WTO meetings in Cancún, once again citing the dramatic protests as evidence that global civil society was more powerful than unelected institutions. In 2005, some African countries won much-needed and long-awaited debt relief, which had long been a demand of the global movement. But nothing quite captured the world’s imagination like—or had the impact of—those eventful five days in Seattle.

For one thing, in the wake of Seattle the conditions for protest changed. Within a few years, the WTO was displaced as the centerpiece of global trade. While not a direct outcome of the protests, gridlock at the WTO and a tarnished public profile encouraged the U.S. to pursue a multilateral trade agenda with countries or groups of countries. The IMF and World Bank were transformed too, displaced by competing lenders, like China, or forced to reorient some of their strategy in the global South. As the Washington Consensus no longer existed as a force that unified a global left, the forces of opposition splintered into narrower, issue-based struggles. Labor in particular, with a few exceptions, sought out a strategy to deal with global trade far from the streets of the protest movement.

These events help us to contextualize the Seattle movement’s seeming quick disappearance. The common explanation, one I myself even helped to promote at the time, was that the September 11 attacks shifted activists’ focus away from anti-capitalism and toward anti-war. Of course, the spirit of revolt against economic domination never truly died, from Occupy Wall Street and grassroots uprisings all over the world. But there was something different about Seattle.

From afar, it was easy to view the explosive power of Seattle as a spontaneous eruption. But the magic of Seattle wasn’t magical at all. It had a lot to do with relationships built by organizers, patiently, over the year before the protest. Somewhere in the teargas on November 30, a marcher carried a sign that read “Teamsters and Turtles Together at Last,” a slogan that came to illuminate the real scope of the movement. History tells us that labor and environmentalists rarely just stumble into a coalition. The blue-green alliance that brought some of the largest unions in the AFL-CIO into a partnership with Earth First! was built carefully. And it bore fruit. Union longshoreman shut down every West Coast port on November 30, 1999, in solidarity with protesters. Steelworkers led a dramatic confrontation with police alongside a masked anarchist marching band. Labor had been a crucial part of an inside/outside strategy that, for the most part, has not been replicated.

Labor’s turn away from the movement was a big problem, especially as large unions like the Teamsters and the Building Trades warmed to the fossil fuel industry. “They thought they had a seat at the table,” said John Sellers, co-founder of the Ruckus Society, which has trained tens of thousands of activists in the art of nonviolent direct action. “But they were really in the veal pen.”

Today, as the movement for climate justice becomes more widespread and militant, indeed as it takes up the language of labor—a climate strike—it must find common cause once again with unions, still the only force capable of organizing an actual strike. Seattle laid some groundwork for this, and we can look to places like the Labor Network for Sustainability, which is carrying it forward. The body of environmentalists and labor activists has a proposal for unions to help build the Green New Deal, and to encourage local collaborations between green groups and unions wherever possible. Moreover, as striking union members increasingly bargain for “common good” demands as part of their contract settlements—like public housing, child care, immigration reform—there’s an open window to include demands for ecological justice as well. If Seattle is any guide, those alliances will be tricky, but they’re also essential for real change.

Judd gets choked up even today when he thinks back to seeing the banner that kicked off the Seattle protest. Activists had climbed a huge crane and, dangling from ropes hundreds of feet off the ground, unfurled a massive banner with two arrows. The first, which said “Democracy,” pointed one direction; the second, inscribed “WTO,” pointed the other. “That was the reason we were there,” he says.

John Sellers was one of the climbers on the end of the banner’s rope. For him, democracy is about more than representative government. It’s an ethos for how a movement must organize itself to be effective and inclusive. Given its momentous impact, he’s often surprised to speak to many young activists who’ve never heard of the Battle of Seattle. “Our history’s been stolen from us,” he says, and then pauses for a while. “We need to make new history.”