Learning How to Count to 350: Seattle, Copenhagen, and Beyond

Published on


Remembering People Power in Seattle in 1999 and Berlin in 1989


A decade ago, and a decade before that, popular power turned the tide of history. November 30, 1999, was the day that activists shut down a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle and started to chart another course for the planet than the one that corporations and their servant nation-states had presumed they'd execute without impediment. Since then, events have strayed increasingly far from the WTO's road map for global domination and the financial scenarios that captains of industry once liked to entertain.




There was a lot of triumphalism in the West thereafter.  From the White House to business magazines and newspapers came a drumbeat of pronouncements that communism had failed and capitalism had triumphed.  As it happened, those weren't the binaries at stake in the astonishing uprisings that season in Eastern Europe, or in the failed uprising in Tiananmen Square in the Chinese capital Beijing that spring. People certainly wanted freedom, but it wasn't the freedom to trade mysterious debt instruments and buy Double Whoppers, exactly. Nor was it capitalism, but civil society, very nearly its antithesis, that had risen up and brought down the Wall. The real binary then was: civil society versus top-down authoritarianism -- and framed that way, our situation didn't look quite as good as Washington and the media then made out. 

Nevertheless, for a decade afterward, it wasn't that easy to argue with the logic of capitalism's triumph, since even China was making a beeline for a market economy and, in the process, doing an especially good job of proving that capitalism and democracy were separate phenomena. It was also the decade of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the first of a series of broad international treaties meant to secure the terms of corporate power for a long time to come.  Its implementation on January 1, 1994, prompted the Zapatistas, the indigenous peasants of southern Mexico's jungle, to rise up against the treaty, which promised -- and has now delivered -- a grim new chapter in the deprivation and dispossession of Mexico's majority. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Zapatistas came as a great shock.

The Sucking Sound and the Turning Tide

Few remember how dissent against NAFTA was dismissed and even mocked in the era when the treaty was debated, signed, and ratified. In his debate with Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush during the 1992 presidential campaign, Ross Perot was ignored when he said, "We have got to stop sending jobs overseas."  He was ridiculed for describing the "giant sucking sound" of those jobs heading south. Which, of course, they did -- and then on to China in a financial "race to the bottom," while cheap corn raised by Midwestern agribusiness also went south where it bankrupted Mexico's small farmers.

Cheap food, cheap labor, cheap products turned out to be very, very expensive for the majority of us. It's a sign of how much things have changed that Hillary Clinton felt compelled to lie in last year's presidential campaign, claiming she had long been against NAFTA. In that, she was just a weathervane for changing times.  After all, in the decade since Seattle, most of South America liberated itself not just from a legacy of American-supported dictators and death squads, but from the economic programs those instruments existed to enforce.


That tide had just begun to turn 10 years ago, when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred to the people in the streets of Seattle as "a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960's fix."  He charged, "What's crazy is that the protesters want the W.T.O. to become precisely what they accuse it of already being -- a global government. They want it to set more rules -- their rules, which would impose our labor and environmental standards on everyone else."

Nice though our labor and environmental standards might have been elsewhere too, most of us didn't want the WTO to do anything or to have any power. As the Direct Action Network organizing leaflet from August 1999 put it, the WTO's "overall goal is to eliminate ‘trade barriers,' frequently including labor laws, public health regulations, and environmental protection measures."

solnitparadise.gifThat day in Seattle a crane dangled a pair of gigantic banners shaped like arrows: the first, inscribed "Democracy," pointed one way; the second, labeled "WTO," pointed the other. The leaflet and banners were pieces of a carefully organized resistance, and it's important to remember that events like the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia 20 years ago or the shutdown of the WTO weren't just spontaneous uprisings; they were the fruit of long toil.  While the right and too many American media outlets like to remember a fictitious Seattle that was nothing but a cauldron of activist violence (while ignoring serious police violence), too many on the left wanted to think of it as a miraculous convergence rather than the result of careful coalition-building, strategizing, outreach, and all the usual labors.

Straying Far from the Blueprint for Our Era




In fact, for the corporations nothing much has turned out as planned. Capitalism itself failed a little more than a year ago. Or rather the bizarrely rigged corporate-run market economies that determine at least some portion of nearly everyone's life on Earth imploded in a frenzy of deregulated fecklessness and weirdly disassociative procedures. Then, they were propped up by governments in a way that made the phrase "socialism for the rich" truer than ever. For a while, the same business newspapers that had celebrated capitalism's triumph in 1999 were proclaiming "the end of American capitalism as we knew it" and the "collapse of finance."

It was as though the world economy had been a car driven by a drunk.  Even if we have now let that drunk back behind the wheel, at least his credibility and the logic of what he claimed to be doing have been irreparably harmed. On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Time Magazine's cover story was: "Why Main Street Hates Wall Street" and it told readers in its opening passage that they should be furious.  The fall of Wall Street, you could call it, if you want to hear the echo from Berlin.






Futures that Work

There are endless questions and conundrums about the largely unforeseen situation in which we now find ourselves, all six billion of us. One of them is: if capitalism and communism both failed, what's the alternative? The big tent of subversions and traditions called the left hasn't, in recent times, done a very good job of providing pictures of the possibilities available to us. Still, perhaps the answer to what the political and social alternatives might be will prove very close to what a sustainable world in the face of climate change might look like:  small, local, smart, flexible economies and technologies, democracy as direct as possible, an elimination of excess wealth as part of a leveling that might also eliminate dire poverty.


To survive the coming era, we need to re-imagine what constitutes wealth and well-being and what constitutes poverty. This doesn't mean telling the destitute not to hope for decent housing, adequate food, and some chance at education, as well as some pleasures and power. It means paring back on the mad consumption machine that has been the engine of the global economy, even though what it produces is often enough entirely distinct from what's actually needed. American life as it is now lived is poor in security, confidence, connectedness, agency, contemplation, calm, leisure, and other things that you aren't going to buy at Wal-Mart, or at Neiman Marcus for that matter. If we can see what's poor about the way we are, we can see what would be enriching rather than impoverishing about change.  

Anniversaries of a whole host of revolutions seem to fall in years ending in nine -- from 1789 in France to 1959 in Cuba and 1979 in Nicaragua. And then, in our calendar of nines, there was the fall of the Wall and the Battle of Seattle.  The "revolution" that got us into this era of climate change, however, can't be dated that way.  It was the industrial revolution, a gradual shift to an era of mechanization made possible by, and paralleled by, the rise of fossil-fuel consumption. We can't, and shouldn't, undo this revolution, but we need to reject some of its premises and recognize some of its costs, including alienation, degradation, and commodification. 


There needs to be another revolution in addition to these, one that finishes decolonizing the world so that Europe and the United States are no longer using the lion's share of resources and emitting the lion's share of carbon per capita. The WTO, the IMF, and other instruments of neoliberalism existed to keep that world-as-it-was going; the revolt in Seattle was against their ideology as well as their impact, and the decade-old graffiti that said, "We are winning," had a point.

The "we" that could win and needs to win in the climate change wars isn't the United States itself.  As Bill McKibben recently wrote of President Obama, "The announcement yesterday from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month's Copenhagen climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session makes it clear that he has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate. The world won't be able to get started on solving our climate problem, and the obstacle is -- as it has been for the last two decades -- the United States."  The citizens of the U.S. need to revolt, again, against their nation's failure of vision and responsibility, in solidarity with the rest of the people of the world, and the animals, and the plants, and the coral reefs, and the coastlines, and the rivers, the glaciers, the ice caps, and the weather as we now know it, or once knew it.  That's why November 30th is going to be a global day of action.  



Rebecca Solnit


Share This Article

More in: