From: Jill Murray
Attn: Christopher Keene
______________________________________________
Peter Rachleff writes about the WTO meeting in Seattle.
I was asked by the Twin Cities weekly newspaper, CITY PAGES, to participate in an end of the millenium discussion that will appear in their December 29 issue. They asked a number of people to respond to the prompt: "If I was able to change one thing about life in the Twin Cities, I would change the following..." I hope that the participants in the ILO discussion will find my brief remarks interesting.
I did not go to Seattle myself, but 27 of my students went (from Macalester College) and nearly 300 trade unionists and activists from various movements went from Minnesota. There have been some excellent report back meetings and great coverage in the St. Paul UNION ADVOCATE.
In Solidarity,
Peter Rachleff
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Friday, December 10, 1999, 12:47 PM -0600r
From: rachleff@macalester.edur
Subject: city pagesr
If I Could Change One Thing ...
If we could peer through the fog of tear gas — and mass media misrepresentation — our vision would find in the recent anti-World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle the kernel of a social movement that could profoundly change our lives here in the Twin Cities. It could not only change fundamental power relationships and address inequities across society, but it could bring community and purpose to our daily lives.
The Seattle demonstrations linked together a new generation of activists (such as the 27 Macalester students who took part), veterans of the anti-war and civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, trade unionists, farmers, environmentalists, and activists from the peace and justice, anti-racism, feminist, and sustainable agriculture movements. One widely appreciated sign, obviously hand-made on the spot, read "Teamsters and Turtles, Together At Last!" US activists met their counterparts from other countries, as the virtual relationships of internet organizing were replaced by face-to-face discussions, from workshops to street corner sit-ins. These new possibilities were expressed in one slogan among the many chanted by demonstrators: "This is what democracy looks like." Solidarity and community, words long bandied about by progressive activists of all sorts, leapt from the pages of books and the texts of speeches into the streets of Seattle, where they were given material existence by the actions of tens of thousands of protestors.
This movement is as strong on theory as it is on practice. The protestors were well-prepared, not just strategically (e.g., in how to block the streets or how to behave after arrest) but also intellectually. They had read books and articles about economic globalization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the WTO. They had debated ideas over cups of coffee in their neighborhood as well as over the electronic channels of the internet. At Macalester, students had organized a conference on issues of world trade a month before the Seattle events, eager to better educate themselves. In Seattle itself, activists organized round-the-clock workshops, lectures, films, and discussions. One Twin Cities participant reported that the teach-ins were so filled that there were people scalping tickets to get in. The outcome of much of the intellectual preparation prefigured and informed the protestors' experiences in the streets — that issues of economics and politics, race, class, and gender, and labor and the environment are structurally connected within the world economy.
The movement in Seattle was successful on many fronts. It stopped the WTO from achieving any of the goals it had come there to pursue. It raised the visibility of global economic issues, putting the WTO on the front page and the evening news rather than behind the closed doors that its participants have long prefered. And it brought protestors together from previously disparate movements and from distant corners of the world. Twin Cities participants reported, for instance, about the impressive exchanges of ideas between rank-and-file steelworkers from the Iron Range and women's advocates from Malaysia. The frequent swapping of email addresses suggests that these relationships will deepen in the years ahead.
What would it mean to have a movement like this as a regular presence in the Twin Cities? The potentialities, it seems to me, are endless. When an employer, as the Holiday Inn Express recently did, has the Immigration & Naturalization Services harass its workers rather than bargain with them like human beings, six thousand protestors could fill the streets of Minneapolis rather than the six hundred that did a month ago. Rallies to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal could fill the Target Center instead of the Cedar Riverside Peoples' Center. Nonviolent civil disobedience against Alliant Technology's production of weapons of mass destruction could involve so many women and men that the day's production could be halted. Protests against the relocation of Highway 55 would bring so many people into the streets that the MDOT, the Minneapolis police, and other authorities would be unable to carry them away... and the four oaks would be left standing for us and future generations to appreciate.
The presence of such a movement wouldn't just mean numbers or coalitions. It would also generate a movement culture that would bring muralists, hip hop poets, labor troubadors, actors and directors, singers, and dancers together, provide them with diverse and engaged audiences, and encourage them to create rich, challenging, inspiring expressions of our dreams and visions. Together, as the surrealists have said, we could reach for the marvelous!
Among ourselves, within the heart and soul of this movement, life itself would be poetry. Time, work, responsibility, and love would take on new meanings, along with community, solidarity, and democracy. Who knows what we might find ourselves aspiring? How might our very dreams change?
It is not so far-fetched to imagine such possibilities here in the Twin Cities. There have been other times in our history when movements both deep and broad have coursed in our streets. The trolley strike of 1887, the Great Northern Railroad strike of 1894, the street car strike of 1917-1918, the Teamsters strikes of 1934, the Hormel strike of 1985-86 all saw thousands and thousands of people in the streets, not only from the labor movement, but from neighborhood and community organizations, students as well as workers, activists from diverse movements as well as the unions. In the wake of one of these struggles, Meridel LeSueur was moved to write: "I felt my legs straighten. I felt my feet join in that strange shuffle of thousands of bodies moving with direction, of thousands of feet, and my own breath with the gigantic breath. As if an electric charge had passed through me, my hair stood on end. I was marching."
Indeed, we could all be marching.
Peter Rachleff
December 10, 1999
Peter Rachleff teaches history at Macalester College and is an activist in the labor movement and other movements for social justice.