Michael Moore, theirs, not ours, said that the people who were planning to protest the WTO were a bunch of grumpy, geriatric communists (that would be me). The truth, of course, was far from that.
While activists of every age were present on the mean streets of Seattle, this was an action of, by, and for, the young. It was a baptism by pepper spray for a new generation of activists and Capitalism will rue the day it decided to throw a party in the Emerald City. Things will never be the same, and let me tell you why.
The two chants that could be heard again and again, from the heady, creative and beautiful actions of the civilly disobedient, to the massive labor march, to the spontaneous leaderless demonstrations in Portland were:
Ain't no power
like the power of the people
and the power of the people
don't stop!Whose streets? Our streets!
Whose streets? Our streets!
Well, they're not our streets (yet) except in fits and starts, but for one glorious day in Seattle it was true. My favorite example of the our streets phenomenon was Monday night, after the Steelworkers and the Jubilee 2000 people marched together and surrounded the access dinner. As we were leaving bands of marauding teenagers would pull up to an intersection, pile out of the van, pump up the volume, and occupy the intersection with an incredibly sweet energy by dancing and singing that simple lyric. Our streets! Our streets! Our streets! Emma Goldman will love their revolution. So will I.
Because the streets should belong to the dancing youth (and the workers coming home from an honest day's labor for an honest day's pay, and the lovers lingering in the sidewalk cafes, and the old women walking their dogs) and not the yuppies and the yuppie wannabes grazing in the meadows of Transnational Capital with a consumerist face.
As for the power of the people, there's just one little catch. For the power of the people to "don't stop", it has to start. People have to claim their power and exercise it. And in order to do that, they'll have to wake up from the sleep of their virtual lives, overcome their lethargy fueled by television, and decide what kind of world they want beyond the confines of their own narrow lives. What kind of world they want for their grandchildren's grandchildren. And this is where we come in.
I once saw an awful sign on twin pylons as I left a mission on the Navajo Reservation. The words painted on the first pylon said: Tradition is the enemy of progress. On the second: For without a vision the people perish. Well, the first slogan is open to a number of interpretations, depending on how you feel about progress and who gets to define it, but the second slogan is unassailably true. Without a vision, the people perish, and as a nation we have been perishing for a very long time.
Our job is to create, and embody, that vision for people. The joy of our convictions, the practice of our beliefs. And behind the screen of tear gas and pepper spray that is exactly what happened in Seattle. We were caught barehanded in the act of joyful solidarity with each other and the planet. Across race, class, age and gender lines we stood together. This was our crime, and they had no choice but to lock some of us up. Who can blame them? This is subversive stuff.
Okay, okay. I said I'd tell you why things would never be the same, why Capital would rue the day it sent its caterers into the convention center to feed the agents of the ruling class and not the people. Because for that one glorious day they were "our streets" and the power of the people didn't stop until the WTO was shut down, reduced to futility, exposed and sent home with its collective tail between its legs. The power of the people came up against a combination of arrogance and poor judgement on the part of the WTO and the City Fathers and the people won a complete and stunning victory.
So, there is a new generation of activists, mixed with several generations of older activists, who have tasted victory. Who have seen the proof of the power we always claim to have, but don't often see succeeding on such a gigantic scale. All those little victories, of course, prepared the way for the larger victory, but what really made this victory possible was something a little less glamorous than the storming of the Bastille. It was planning.
This victory did not fall from the sky. It was built on a combination of conviction, dedication, courage, hard work... and a framework for organizing the Festival of Resistance, including the civil disobedience.
Things will never be the same because activists of every stripe hit the streets together and discovered that that cliched and overused word ... solidarity, has been an underused practice. We discovered the reality of what we suspected and even said along the way, that we face a common enemy.
Some call it corporate dominance, I call it Capital. Scratch an oppression and you'll find Capital, with its winners and losers mentality and its divide and conquer tactics. Some of us, at least, really got it that we have been pitted against each other in ways that make no sense.
It is, after all, quite possible to create a world that protects labor and the environment. It's like convincing us that one of our children must die and asking us to choose. "Do you want a planet or a job." This is not a choice. On the other hand, "Do you want labor, health and environmental standards or a DVD player and a complete set of Pokemon cards?" is.
What happened in the streets of Seattle was wonderful, brilliant, exhilarating, and scary. The Police State, even when you have it off balance, is a scary thing. We have our power, and they have theirs. Ours builds a better world, creates a vision of possibility. Theirs is simply the power to brutalize and incarcerate, a very real power.
Bill Resnick pointed out that if this demonstration was in New York and the protesters were people of color, there would have been real bullets in the guns and the level of police violence would have been much worse. It's much harder to beat those white kids senseless on national TV. So, as great as our victory was, it is only a first step, or maybe a third step, in the journey of a thousand miles. But it is a step and once we're on the journey, there's nowhere left to go but forward.
Things will never be the same because we know that we can win. Things will never be the same because we will never be the same.
Jerry Atkin, December 5th, 1999