Lead Article
January-February 2000

Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations pose a future without capitalism

Ron Brokmeyer

Tremors from the dramatic showdown in Seattle against the World Trade Organization in November continue two months later. While commentators of every ideological stripe weigh in, anti-WTO participants, having returned to home towns here and abroad, report the incredible events. Enthusiastic audiences debate the meaning of what is reported.

Local demonstrations inveigh against the Gap's use of virtually enslaved labor in poor Asian countries. Protests around the world extend solidarity to the other America as the one Dec. 12 in Mexico City, demanding the release of protesters arrested at the WTO talks in Seattle and the release of Mumia Abu- Jamal, the U.S. Black revolutionary journalist on Death Row. And anti-capitalist activists plan to write a second chapter to the Seattle episode with meetings and protests in Chicago on May Day.

The epicenter of these tremors was the youthful crowd of tens of thousands, fighting for human rights and the environment, and 30,000 trade unionists who converged on Seattle to protest the WTO's Nov. 30 conference opening. They put globalized capitalism on trial-and the whole world was watching. The demonstrations succeeded in throwing light on a thoroughly undemocratic, secretive organization that overrules, in the name of trade agreements, environmental, trade union and human rights regulations.

THE BATTLE FOR SEATTLE

The youth actually stopped the opening WTO ceremony at the Paramount Theater. The day-long non-violent resistance of hundreds of autonomous affinity groups of the Direct Action Network were successful in dominating the area of Seattle around the conference center and, in turn, shutting down the whole conference. What was so hard for the capitalist media to grasp is how such a large mass of people with no centralized direction could exhibit such discipline and, in turn, the power of coordinated collective action.

It was just this, and not a handful who shattered a few windows in big money chain stores like Nordstrom's and Starbucks, that drove Seattle Mayor Paul Schell and Governor Gary Locke to order a "state of emergency," including a 7 p.m. curfew. (Much more looting and window smashing has been quietly forgotten in many cities after a home sports team won a championship.)

The world saw on TV that night a brutal suppression of peaceful demonstrators and many local bystanders with a massive use of tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion bombs and pepper spray by phalanxes of what looked like Darth Vader clones. Reminiscent of any totalitarian regime's police state, on the following day the forces of order declared a 50-square block "no protest zone" reinforced by the National Guard, state police, and neighboring police departments.

In spite of this on Dec. 3, after most demonstrators left town, the local King County Labor Council sponsored a march where 5,000 came out to violate the "no protest zone" and demand the release of "The Seattle 600." Along with workers there were environmentalists, lesbians and youth chanting: "This Is What Democracy Looks Like!"

In contrast to the WTO's private deliberations, affecting the conditions of life and labor for hundreds of millions around the world, dozens of open marches and forums took place in Seattle during the week leading up to the Nov. 30 confrontation. Why are laws barring the import of shrimp which are caught by methods that threaten to drive turtles to extinction shot down by the WTO as a restraint on trade? Why can't Massachusetts refuse to do business with companies who conspire with the brutal military regime in Burma to enslave Burmese laborers? Why can't we refuse to participate in a system that brings us goods made with prison labor in China or by kids and women earning a dollar a day in Laos or Cambodia?

It is not that these issues had not been talked about for years. They certainly were. However it took the WTO protests to bring them all into focus as aspects of the same globalized capitalism. Open democratic deliberation on such a total range of issues impelled participants to act, to express their solidarity with the broad range of humanity fighting this global system, beginning with an absolute certainty of the need to shut down the WTO.

WORKERS AND ENVIRONMENTALISTS

The Nov. 30 demonstrations made the WTO the most visible manifestation of the totally undemocratic essence of capitalism. It was a crucial milestone that raised many new questions about the meaning and future direction of the movement. A whole new generation experienced the power of mass revolt as well as a new broad-based coalescence with workers. As USWA (Steelworker) President George Becker put it at a Nov. 29 forum on Global Trade Unionism, "These kids want change, and they are not going to wait for us. We have to catch up."

However, the AFL-CIO leadership, seeing the power of genuine democracy in direct actions, decided to do everything they could to divert the march of labor away from their planned destination at the convention site. Thousands of workers, especially Steelworkers and Longshoremen of the ILWU, defied the AFL-CIO leaders and joined the youth braving the police assault. Many workers, who had sat in rapt attention as labor and human rights activists from poor countries described their conditions of life and labor under multi-national corporations, were not the same people at the end of the week.

In solidarity with the WTO protests, the West Coast Longshoremen shut down the coastal ports for eight hours. The ILWU has recently shown an international and social consciousness by refusing to cross picket lines in of support of dockworkers in Liverpool and striking in support Mumia Abu-Jamal. Some business journalists pondered how the Longshoremen could bring the new economy, based on just-in-time globally integrated production, to a virtual standstill in a matter of days. ILWU International President Brian McWilliams, in his speech at the Seattle WTO protest rally, declared that far from being against trade, "the interests of working people transcend national and local boundaries, and...labor solidarity truly means that when necessary we will engage in concrete action...Don't ever forget it-it is the labor of working people that produces all the wealth."

INTERNATIONALIST FORUM

The WTO meeting came on the heels of the Clinton administration's announcement that it had just completed an agreement to invite China to join the WTO. That made the testimony of Cai Chong Guo, a trade union leader in China at the time of the Tiananmen revolt, all the more important. He described the actual conditions for workers in China in graphic terms as sweated labor multiplied many fold as a result of China's trade opening to the West. Much like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York at the beginning of this century, he described how 250 young peasant women were burned to death in a locked toy factory which caught fire in Shanghai. The China of free trade is one where there is mass unemployment and untold misery for the great majority. Trade union activism is totally repressed. Nevertheless he declared there has been a proliferation of marches and demonstrations which have been met with heightened repression and selective targeting of organizers and leaders of an independent trade union movement.

Today's permanent restructuring on a global scale is an outgrowth of the internal authoritarian character of capitalist organizations in China and elsewhere. This has led to several incidents of cross border solidarity described at the Global Trade Unionism panel such as a victory for a more livable wage for the Chilean miners achieved with the help of Canadian miners. On the same panel Victor Thorpe, a trade union official from Brussels, appealed to his co-panelists to reject their desire to reform WTO by being given a place at the table. "Free trade," he said, "is an internal transfer from one part of the global system to another... Two-thirds of what is counted as trade is already in the hands of the same megacompanies dominating the whole market. The other one-third is small suppliers and vendors who service these companies."

The truth is that the global trading system is about the right of capital to move freely in order to exploit labor and the environment without restriction. Over 150 years ago, Marx saw the emergence of a global capitalism, then based on cotton and slavery, and described it in a way that is so contemporary it has many taking another look at his philosophy. In the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, Marx detailed not only the dizzying pace at which capitalism revolutionized production but also its narrow ideology: "In the place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, [the bourgeoisie] has set up that single, unconscionable freedom-Free Trade." (For a philosophic discussion of the relevance of Marx to today's globalized capitalism, see "Celebrations of the 150th anniversary of THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO," available from NEWS & LETTERS.)

ABROAD AT HOME

Today's globally integrated commodity production with its much touted U.S.-centered high-tech prosperity has as its foundation sweated labor both abroad and increasingly in this country's bottom tier economy-from chicken and fish farm processing to textiles and call centers. It is based as well on criminalizing the poor and homeless, with now over two million in prisons where there is growing use of prison labor (See pages 3 and 10). While Black participation in the Seattle protests was small, Black masses have repeatedly declared this system unviable and in need of tearing down. Like the response of many Black leaders to the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion, Clinton and his friends in the labor bureaucracy hope to confine the struggle to the electoral arena. But workers, at least the rank and file, more often take their cue from the arena of production. "Every worker," one Seattle protester explained, "has an immediate face for the undemocratic character of the WTO in the person of their boss."

The labor bureaucracy's yearning for co-partnership with capitalists, asking for a place at the WTO's bargaining table, is at odds with the notion of genuine democracy of workers taking control of their own lives and with the direct action of the youth and workers in Seattle. Clinton and now Gore, who the AFL-CIO bureaucrats have adopted as their candidate, espouse and administer the "free trade" ideology of the WTO and have done so ever since Clinton quickly forgot that he made human rights in China an issue in the 1992 election.

As Marx once said, politicians bow to capital because it is "an alienated social power which has gained an autonomous position and confronts society as a thing, and as the power that the capitalist has through this thing." On the one hand, the WTO protests questioned whether to appeal, in a capitalist system, to state "sovereignty," in other words, government-to-government relations based on regulating more or less the international flow of things, commodities and capital. The labor bureaucracy, on the other hand, wants to partner with Clinton and Gore and become a player in their arena of state-brokered agreements because, above all, they fear the workers confronting the "alienated social power" of capital through their own self-activity in the workplace. The appeal to U.S. "sovereignty" also comes from liberals like Ralph Nader. This plays right into the hands of neo-fascists like Pat Buchanan who also declared his "support" for workers who engaged in a "peaceful," that is, non-consequential protest against the WTO.

Seattle's huge protests did impact the outcome of the internal WTO negotiations. By itself the collapse of those negotiations cannot be declared a victory for the movement, as some have, because rulers had their own class reasons for turning to more nationalistic ideologies in order to help them stay in power.

Nevertheless Seattle saw new international worker-to-worker connections as well as a coalescence of human rights and environmental activists with workers. The demonstrations in Seattle were billed as the revolt of "civil society" against the globalized economy. Many youth who focused on capitalism's disregard for the environment are now reaching out to workers. The WTO events demonstrated the beginnings of global worker solidarity and social relations not between things-commodities-and material relations between persons, but workers' own direct relations with each other.