If the rest of the world was surprised at the turnout and the vehemence in Seattle, it was only because the seismologists have been asleep. Close attention to subterranean rumbles would have discerned the gathering of a worldwide web of activists–unions that fear dumping and a race to the bottom, environmentalists who fear despoliation and species death, farmers and small businessmen who fear competition and the world’s poorest, who fear being crushed by kleptocratic rulers and greedy multinational corporations. In the face of legitimate fears, the conventional wisdom recommends gratitude for the benefits of trade and investment–easy to recommend from a comfortable perch. Cynics ask, “Don’t ’those people’ know what’s good for them?” Well, sometimes people have different ideas about what’s good for them. Then what?
The WTO, deciding to meet in Seattle, gave this fledgling movement a great gift–a focus. It plunked down its diplomatic gathering in a place that is not only a heartland of environmentalism but a union-friendly zone; Boeing machinists felt so strongly about marching that management gave them a day off. To those old enough, the images on TV–marauding street types, brutal cops, surreal chaos in clouds of gas–were reminiscent of footage from Chicago and Paris in 1968. As in Chicago, the demonstrators were ideologically and tactically all over the lot. But the resemblances, while real, are also misleading. One big difference is that Chicago’s central issue was unambiguous and unifying–get out of Vietnam–while Seattle brought together all manner of radicals and reformers. Another big difference is that Seattle’s protest cut across class lines. In 1968 organized labor identified with Chicago’s police. The AFL-CIO was run by George Meany, proud of never having walked a picket line, supporter of the Vietnam War and squelcher of antiwar sentiment in the unions. The unions, which still represented 23 percent of the work force, were junior partners in the establishment. In 1998 embattled labor represents only 13.9 percent of the work force, and Meany’s successor, John Sweeney, cultivateed alliances with students, intellectuals, tree-huggers.
The U.S. labor movement, in fact, is at a make-or-break point, and has to cut loose from business as usual. Hence the unions’ centrality in this protest, which swelled into a general protest against corporate high-handedness of all kinds. Hence Bill Clinton’s at least partial recognition of the Sweeney-Greenie alliance: this pair is indispensable to Democratic victories in next year’s elections.
And the anarchists with their masked faces? There were 100 to 200 wreaking havoc in Seattle, as there were no more than a few hundred of their equivalents in Chicago. The masked ones are the outriders of social movements. They can’t organize large demonstrations themselves–there aren’t enough of them. They wait for groundswells, when the nonviolent people have done the months of patient work a big demonstration requires–make the coalitions, work out the logistics, negotiate with police. When the crowds are assembled, the anarchists roar into town, defiant, exultant, spoiling for a fight. To their great joy, their tactics predictably drive the police and the media wild, whereupon the 99 percent of the demonstrators who are nonviolent lose control of the event. No wonder they chanted “Shame!” at masked marauders in Seattle.
It’s a huge mistake to confuse these machos with the left. They despise the left. An anarchist-action collective from Eugene, Ore., signaled its intentions beforehand with a manifesto declaring: “We want no partnership at all with… discredited institutions–unions, government, the left…. They are part of the glue holding a rotting order together, an order that must be totally dismantled.”
But again, they’re only the outriders. The main action now returns to the hinterlands where millions of disgruntled people who identify with unions, greens and unincorporated farmers take deep breaths, come down from their adrenaline rush and debate what to do and what exactly they want after this remarkable rallying moment–a week that surely did not turn out the way they expected but just as surely put them on the political map. They will be straining to manage their new recruits–no easy task. And soon enough they will also have to figure out how far to go for Democratic candidates, while the Democrats, who batten on the proceeds of free trade, try to figure out how far they’re willing to go for them.
