In the week since the dramatic World Trade Organization protests, in which a massive nonviolent blockade was overshadowed by attacks on stores like Niketown, Starbucks and the Gap, the media reporting about the activism has been as confusing as some of the protests themselves.
Most reports simply labelled the rioters “anarchists,” missing the fact that many among the peaceful blockaders consider themselves anarchists, too. And news organizations have repeatedly named anarchist writer John Zerzan as the rioters’ guru, vastly overstating his influence. By far the most important influence has been the tempestuous forest activism that has taken place in the Eugene, Ore., area over the last four years.
Attempting to clear up misconceptions about the WTO rioting, one collective involved in it felt moved to issue a statement, the “N30 Black Bloc Communique,” in order “to diffuse some of the aura of mystery that surrounds the black bloc and make some of its motivations more transparent, since our masks cannot be.”
The so-called “black bloc” is advocating “direct action at the point of consumption,” damaging corporate retail outlets and hurting their sales. Despite the storm of criticism these militants have faced, they view the Tuesday riot as a ringing success. “Ten million dollars of lost revenue, plus the 2 million they’re saying there was in property damage, is a big chunk out of their holiday cheer,” exults one member of the “Eugene Brick Throwers Union Local 666,” as a loose organization of Oregon anarchists chose to identify themselves last week.
The young Brick Thrower has only contempt for the nonviolent blockaders: “A lot of these people are going to be buying burgers at McDonald’s and shopping at the Gap next week. Everybody’s going to go home and have a really nice Christmas and forget all about this.”
The masked protesters who trashed downtown Seattle last Tuesday are mostly in their late teens or early 20s, but contrary to many people’s assumptions, they are not mostly male. Young women have been some of the most outspoken and influential figures in the loose scene that gave rise to the WTO riots, and represented a good percentage of the rioters.
The prominence of young women goes back to the movement’s origins in Earth First anti-logging activism of the 1980s. About 10 years ago Earth Firsters split between so-called “deep ecologists” and activists (of whom the late Judy Bari was the most prominent) who were looking to fuse deep ecology with the agenda of the cultural and social left. At the time of the split, people talked about “the feminization of Earth First.” Since that time, women have been in the forefront of many of the local and single-issue campaigns that form the building blocks of the broad movement on display in Seattle.
Clearly, the most important influence of all has been the tumult in the Eugene area over the last four years. When federal action threatened a forest in Oregon’s Warner Creek watershed in 1995, protesters blocked the main logging road — and maintained the blockade for an astounding 343 days. “There were these two signs on the gate, white and red striped signs like candy canes with reflectors on them,” remembers a young man named Cloud, who took part in the encampment. “So we wrote, ‘Cascadia Free State’ and claimed it as our own.”
The 11-month Cascadia Free State was an unprecedented experiment in anarchist principles of self-management, a “temporary autonomous zone” where activists enacted their dreams of the good society. The experience of creating such a world for themselves, and then seeing it destroyed by Forest Service bulldozers, fostered a rare fearlessness and audacity, which continues to define the activist climate of Eugene.
When four young women who took part in the blockade were jailed in Eugene, dozens of activists stormed the jail, causing a ruckus and smashing one window before being arrested themselves. Later, someone torched a nearby Forest Service ranger station, burning it to the ground.
Over the last two years, as police have repeatedly used pepper spray against nonviolent forest activists in the Northwest, the Eugene militant scene has become a hub for people weary of traditional nonviolence and supportive of property destruction as direct action.
In Seattle, the protesters faced a choice between two types of direct action that are well outside the political mainstream: to use the activists’ own words, between “shutting it down” and “fucking shit up.”
Even the nonviolent blockaders are comfortable with some level of interfering with property rights, disrupting traffic and preventing business as usual. It was the nonviolent blockade, after all, that forced the WTO to cancel its opening ceremonies on Nov. 30, and that prevented delegates from reaching the convention center.
For the most part, the blockaders share the rioters’ belief that destroying property is not “violent.” Their objection is a strategic one. Brooke Lehman, an activist with Reclaim the Streets/NYC who helped organize the Direct Action Network (DAN) blockade, expresses the views of many. “I personally am not against property destruction. I don’t consider it a violent action,” she says. “I consider it often a stupid action but not a violent one. It’s usually not wise in a crowd situation because it endangers the public and makes things escalate.”
But in making property destruction integral to their activism, the members of the “black bloc” are returning to the original meaning of direct action, as it was defined by the early 20th century Industrial Workers of the World. The witty and defiant Wobblies, as they are commonly known, hold a special fascination for young radicals today. In the days before the WTO protest, for example, groups of activists could be found singing “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” and other Wobbly standards.
The Wobblies’ basic approach was what they called “direct action at the point of production,” by which they meant strikes, slowdowns and workplace sabotage, rather than indirect action via traditional trade unions or the political process.
But the mask-wearing Seattle anarchists are not acolytes of Zerzan, a Eugene anarchist who has made news because of his contacts with jailed Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski. The 56-year-old writer is a leading voice on “anarcho-primitivism,” a philosophy that melds deep ecology, radical anti-capitalism and amateur anthropology to advocate the dismantling of civilization.
While primitivist ideas certainly have a following among the more bookish people in anarchist circles, their impact on activist strategies and visions has been indirect. At best, they’ve helped promote the idea that radicals must oppose the totality of contemporary human society: “Trees and animals are way more important than the human race. The human race is a greedy, destructive organism,” explains one teenage boy who identifies himself as a member of the Eugene Brick Throwers Union.
A more important intellectual influence has been “Pacifism as Pathology,” a recently reissued 1986 essay by Native American advocate Ward Churchill, and “Reflections on June 18,” a compendium of essays on last summer’s huge Reclaim the Streets action in London, which caused millions of dollars in property damage. In the week preceding the WTO protests, activists held numerous formal and informal discussions of the Churchill essay, focusing especially on its claim that pacifism is a privileged stance with little relevance to the lives of the most oppressed.
“Challenging the limitations of nonviolence is the most important thing we can do,” declared one young woman at a discussion I attended. Another — in utter seriousness — argued that kidnapping need not be viewed as a violent act.
Most nonviolent protesters are resisting the pull toward property destruction, but many confess to some attraction. “There’s a small part of me that is pretty excited to see people smashing the windows of Starbucks, to say, ‘We don’t want these things in our community anymore. We don’t want McDonald’s, we don’t want Nike, we don’t want Starbucks, and we’re taking them out,’” says Nina Narelle, a young activist who handled mobile communications for the Direct Action Network. “But I’m pushing that part of myself down.”
Tuesday’s World Trade Organization riot can be summed up by the story of Craig Webster, a friend I know from activist circles in New York. First he was shot with rubber bullets when police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Union Street, and he has nasty welts to show for it. Then later in the day, he was slugged in the jaw by a rioter, while he and some other nonviolent activists tried to prevent the Niketown store from being looted.
Craig’s bad luck encapsulated the experience of nonviolent protesters who came to Seattle to focus world attention on WTO — they got upstaged by violent anarchists and attacked by police, who did nothing until late in the day to stop the rioting. While peaceful protesters vastly outnumbered the hooligans, there were 300 to 400 hardcore anarchists intent on clashing with police, most with scarves over their faces, some carrying hammers, crowbars and spray paint in their bags.
On Wednesday, police arrested more than 300 people, most of them non-violent demonstrators, in a change of tactics designed to clear the streets for President Clinton’s visit. Wednesday night, police used tear gas again, to disperse a crowd that began to gather downtown.
But on Tuesday, police allowed the so-called revolutionaries bent on violence to gain the upper hand. Early Tuesday morning, a few blocks away from the nonviolent blockade, small roving groups of violent protesters began tossing newspaper boxes into an intersection, dragging trash bins into the street and trying — without success at that point — to smash the windows of downtown stores.
The police pretty much let them do as they pleased. One squad of about a dozen officers in riot gear briefly marched into the crowd at the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Pike Street, but retreated almost immediately, when it became clear that the protesters wouldn’t disperse. A little after 9 a.m., I saw two cops grab a demonstrator who was tipping over a trash bin on Pike Street. But they didn’t hold him for long: 20 of the rioters rushed the police and brawled with them until they got their comrade free.
But later, I watched as thousands of people blocked the western entrance to the convention center and marveled at their defiant yet peaceful demeanor. Linked arm-in-arm in a huge perimeter around the meeting site, or sitting cross-legged in key intersections, the protesters were achieving their goal of preventing the trade body’s meeting, and in a spirit of complete nonviolence. Soon, with no provocation, they were pepper-sprayed by police.
It was no secret — not to me, and certainly not to the Seattle police — that this conference would be met with violence in the streets. Rioting had broken out at a “Reclaim the Streets” protest in Eugene, Ore., in June, and in the intervening five months, anarchist militants had been circulating apocalyptic manifestos promising more fights to come. A pre-WTO article in a Eugene ‘zine called the Black-Clad Messenger warned, “Tilting at the excesses of the system never gets down to the rotten, death-culture foundations of the system … Anarchy says it is time to face reality and destroy the global (and local) machine. Phony half-measures and pseudo-critiques and submissive demos are no advance at all. SEE YOU IN SEATTLE!”
And indeed, in Seattle, at a huge public meeting of people planning to blockade the convention center, a young woman announced that 100 gas masks had been ordered in preparation for Tuesday’s protest and were available at cost. (Tuesday, Seattle Mayor Paul Schell banned possession or use of gas masks.)
But the police took no action to contain the mayhem that was obviously on the agenda. Instead, they let the rioters run wild while assaulting peaceful protesters with pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets.
I was at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Union Street when the pepper spraying began, and neither I nor three other witnesses I interviewed saw any kind of provocation from the demonstrators. I’ve been told that some in the crowd started throwing sticks at the police after the gassing started, but I didn’t see it. My eyes were burning so badly I couldn’t keep them open.
The police could have used a different method to clear the area, by simply arresting all of the blockaders. That’s what most protesters expected to happen, and they had undergone extensive training by the nonviolent Direct Action Network to prepare themselves for jail.
But mass arrests of peaceful protesters are time-consuming and expensive, and often bad for public relations. Gassing a crowd is a quick and uncomplicated way to make it disperse. Of course, it’s a controversial method, but not if the police and media make it seem like a response to rioting.
The splits on the streets in Seattle mirror divisions in direct action groups throughout the Northwest
In Seattle, some activists from Humboldt County, Calif. — mostly young, many women — engaged in what’s called a “lock-down action,” in which protesters use bicycle locks or other devices to create a human blockade. Lock-downs have been widely used by direct action movements throughout the 1990s, especially by Earth First and animal-rights groups. The devices allow protesters to hold a space — an intersection, a logging road, an opponent’s office — for much longer than they otherwise could, because it takes considerable time and effort to cut them apart.
Two years ago in Humboldt County, police developed a new way of handling lock-downs: pepper spray. In the most widely publicized incident, four Earth First activists who were blockading Rep. Frank Riggs’ office in Eureka had pepper spray applied directly to their eyes with cotton swabs.
At Tuesday’s WTO protest, 20 demonstrators from Humboldt County used lock boxes to link themselves in a circle. As supporters gathered around them, you could see thick clouds of tear gas at the next intersection down the hill, where police were dispersing a crowd. Calls went up for vinegar and rags to cover the faces of the blockaders, who calmly sat and waited.
An hour or so later, the police arrived and asked the blockaders to leave. When they refused, cops went around the circle, pepper-spraying the activists in the face. They didn’t unlock. The police sprayed again. Still the blockaders stayed firm. After two more attempts, the police finally gave up, ceding the intersection to the protesters.
Obviously it takes extraordinary endurance and dedication to take that kind of punishment, and it’s not clear that the gains exceed the costs. In Humboldt County, Earth First has been moving away from lock-downs and toward traditional Gandhi-style civil disobedience: sit-ins, human chains and the like.
But in the Eugene area, the advent of pepper spray has had a radicalizing effect. For about a year, activists have been questioning and abandoning nonviolence. I think the property-destroying tactics used on Tuesday were stupid and ineffective. It’s not just testosterone-charged yahoos who are rejecting nonviolent styles of protest, some are seasoned activists who have several years of direct-action campaigning under their belts.
Among them are two young women I’ve had contact with in the past. I met one in connection with the direct-action campaign to preserve New York’s community gardens, which I worked on for two years. I met the other at an Earth First forest encampment while doing research for a book. I didn’t see either of them on Tuesday, but I thought about a manifesto that one passed on to me last week.
It read, “Let’s not train the thousands of people who gather in Seattle to do no more than be herded by the police, hold signs and offer themselves up as sacrificial lock-down lambs. I’m not advocating a riot. The ground between violence and pacifism is wide, much larger than the ivory tower of either. Meet me there.”
When the World Trade Organization begins its meetings Tuesday, the massive and well-organized protests by the AFL-CIO and environmental groups may not be center stage. Using a wide array of direct-action tactics, hundreds, maybe thousands of activists are planning to literally shut Seattle down, blockading streets all around the convention center.
For a week now, a group called the Direct Action Network (DAN) has been training protesters in a sprawling warehouse just east of downtown. Activists are learning not only basic principles of nonviolent protest, which have been standard preparation for civil disobedience since the anti-nuclear campaigns of the mid-1970s. Many are also being trained in elaborate “lockdown” techniques pioneered by Earth First! and animal-rights groups, in which protesters use bicycle locks and other equipment to create immovable human barricades that are difficult and time-consuming to dismantle.
There will be plenty of peaceful demonstrations, ranging from the permitted labor march and rally to in-your-face — but nonviolent — road- and building blockades. And a sizable minority of self-described revolutionaries are planning to engage in property destruction. These are largely seasoned activists with experience in direct-action campaigns who now feel themselves to be part of a worldwide struggle to topple capitalism.
Expecting 50,000 delegates, journalists and activists, the city of Seattle has closed streets throughout the conference. Downtown malls have hired extra security guards and complained of slow business, despite the tens of thousands of extra people in the area. Hundreds of downtown office workers have been asked to work from home.
Though Monday’s prelude resulted in no violence or mass arrests, several small incidents and individual arrests in various parts of the city set the tone for the week to come. Several hundred WTO delegates and journalists were kept waiting approximately four hours Monday morning while police and Secret Service agents investigated a possible attempted break-in at the Washington State Convention Center downtown, the site of the first official conference event.
Meanwhile, a mile north of there, five members of the Rainforest Action Network were arrested for criminal trespass and reckless endangerment after unfurling a banner on top of a construction crane next to Interstate 5. The banner read “WTO” with an arrow in one direction and “DEMOCRACY” with an arrow in the other.
Over at the DAN warehouse, which has become so packed you can hardly move, the workshops now spill over into several other nearby spaces. But the most crucial preparation is taking place elsewhere, in decentralized “affinity group” meetings all over town, in order to preserve an element of secrecy and surprise about Tuesday’s events.
DAN has developed a sophisticated, decentralized system for covering different areas of town. Organizers have divided the area around the WTO meeting into 13 “pie slices,” which scores of small tactical groups are planning to blockade. (And they won’t just be sitting in — many will be locking themselves together as described above.) The efforts of the blockaders will also be augmented by dozens of roving teams, both of protesters and “support people” — medics, lawyers, communications squads, videographers and more.
Already the protest has an exuberant and carnival-like character, reflecting a little-known culture of direct action that has been building throughout the 1990s. Major influences include Critical Mass bicycle rides: “organized coincidences” in which large numbers of cyclists take over city streets en masse. Others are inspired by the outlaw street parties of Reclaim the Streets, a movement that began in England but has spread to the United States in recent years.
The overwhelming majority of the protesters will be nonviolent in the strictest sense of the term, having agreed to DAN action guidelines that disavow property damage and even “verbal violence,” as well as physical violence toward people. Guidelines of this sort have been integral to every major direct action campaign in the United States since the mid-1970s, adopted in reaction to the “wild in the streets” chaos of late 1960s protests, and have been fairly uncontroversial among activists.
Suddenly, though, a significant minority of protesters have tired of this ethos, decrying what they term “tactical stagnation.” These militant anarchists say they’re seeking a revolution based on “liberty, mutual aid and wildness” and bitterly criticize DAN for “nonviolent dogmatism.”
“We want no partnership at all with the discredited institutions — unions, government, the Left — now being rehabilitated due to the ‘new menace’ of globalization,” reads an article authored by the visiting Anarchist Action Collective of Eugene, Ore., in the current issue of the Seattle Weekly. “They are part of the glue holding a rotting order together, an order that must be totally dismantled.”
The militants take inspiration from two Reclaim the Streets actions this past June that turned into riots, a small-scale one in Eugene and a much larger protest in London that caused an estimated $3 million in property damage. Leaflets have been circulating here with hardcore slogans such as “Bomb the Mall,” “We’re Doomed” and “Civilization Is Collapsing … Let’s Give It a Push.”
It’s hard to know how influential this point of view is. But even some people at the nonviolence trainings I’ve attended are saying they don’t view property destruction, for instance, as “violent.” This is unprecedented: While there certainly has been debate in radical circles in recent years over whether, say, tree-spiking is a legitimate and nonviolent tactic, on balance most activists have emphatically embraced peaceful styles of protest.
The rioting will certainly be the most sensational of Tuesday’s events. But the attempts to more peacefully “shut down” Seattle are worth watching. Only once in the last 70 years has any movement sought to shut down an entire city: during the huge and almost-forgotten May Day 1971 antiwar protests in Washington D.C., in which over 13,000 people were arrested.
But where the May Day organizers detailed their targets in a widely distributed tactical manual, the DAN activists have been more prudent, with affinity groups keeping any sneaky plans to themselves.
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As might be expected in the wired Northwest, activist groups are using the Internet to organize. Locally produced sites bemoan “the WTO’s bias against the public interest” and aim for “Mobilization Against Corporate Globalization,” with schedules of events and tips for getting last-minute accommodations. The Seattle Indy Media Center’s site promises real-time coverage of protest events. The Global Trade Watch site, maintained by Public Citizen, features “A Citizen’s Guide to the WTO.”
Additional reporting was provided by Fiona Morgan.
