A Changed Sense of the Possible

The Left’s greatest moments occur when it taps into a deep longing for change and alters our sense of what’s possible. Think of the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie 2016, the George Floyd uprising. The Battle of Seattle was one of those moments. It seemed to come out of nowhere at the end of a politically placid decade. It was the first mass protest in which organizers wielded the Internet and cell phones to their advantage. It sparked a wave of colorful and confrontational mass protests over the next twenty-one months wherever global and corporate leaders met.

And then, in the blink of an eye, the movement vanished.

While the specific issues that animated the WTO protests — the race to the bottom in environmental and labor standards, the upending of consumer protection laws, and the expansion of corporate patent rights, to name a few — were important, the showdown in Seattle ultimately revolved around a larger question: Could our already deeply flawed democracy still serve the common good? Or was it going to be fully captured by corporate interests?

For the forces of neoliberal greed, the Battle of Seattle was a humiliating, though hardly definitive, defeat. For progressive social movements, it was a spectacular victory. While each faction in the anti-WTO coalition tended to center itself in the post-protest narrative, in the end, the sum of all the main groups in Seattle was greater than the individual parts.

NGOs like the International Forum on Globalization and Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen provided the intellectual clarity and sound arguments for why the protests were necessary. The unions were plodding and cautious, as unions usually are. But they brought the most people, and they gave the raucous protests a working-class face that Middle America could relate to. The anarchist Direct Action Network (DAN) organized and trained thousands of people — including this author — to participate in the human blockades that paralyzed Downtown Seattle.

DAN emerged from Arts & Revolution, a network of radical collectives on the West Coast that sought to make your average protest march more festive and visually compelling. The giant paper-mache puppets were one of their signature props. DAN came out of a tradition of decentralized mass nonviolent direct action that can be traced back to the waning days of the anti–Vietnam War movement and on through the anti–nuclear power, Central America solidarity, and other radical movements from the 1970s and ’80s.

The basic units in this kind of protest are affinity groups (small groups of five to twenty people who know and trust each other) who coordinate through a spokes council (composed of representatives from affinity groups). Various working groups — food, medical care, communications — formed to assist with the protest also worked on the affinity group model. Decision-making at all levels was done by consensus process. This approach, when it works well, allows everyone’s concerns to be addressed before a group moves forward with a decision, creating deeper commitment and a sense of solidarity among participants.

In addition to DAN, there was the black bloc, a renegade group of about fifty black-clad anarchists, many of whom were from Eugene, Oregon, and had been active in tree sits and other direct-action campaigns to preserve old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. They operated independently of DAN and disregarded its action guidelines against property destruction. Instead, they used the larger protest as a shield from which to hide behind as they shattered the storefront windows of Starbucks, Old Navy, Nordstrom, and numerous other iconic corporate brands.

This angered many protesters, who were concerned that the black bloc’s actions would tarnish how the broader public perceived the WTO protests. Given that most protesters believed in the necessity of winning over that broader public rather than needlessly alienating them, such heedless actions posed a problem for the broader movement. The black bloc was a small sideshow in a much larger event, but it would garner a disproportionate amount of attention from a sensation-seeking corporate media.

The Seattle Model Goes Global, Then Disappears

Two days after we shut down the WTO’s opening meeting, I joined several thousand people who marched through downtown Seattle and blockaded the entrance to the county jail, locking arms and risking arrest to demand that movement lawyers be allowed inside to visit our jailed comrades. The standoff would last for several hours before the authorities relented to our demands.

The mood in the air was electric. For the first time in days, I had a chance to catch my breath and reflect. In that instant, I knew that what had exploded in Seattle would not stop there. Thousands of people who had been transformed by their experience would go back home and inspire and organize others to join this movement against corporate domination. Many others who watched from afar would be moved to act as well.

Over the next twenty-one months, similar mass protests and attempted Seattle-style shutdowns would be organized wherever global elites gathered — the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank first in Washington, DC, and then Prague, the Organization of American States in Windsor, Ontario, the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Quebec City, the G8 in Genoa, Italy, as well as the Republican (Philadelphia) and Democratic (Los Angeles) national conventions in 2000.

The corporate media tagged the movement as “anti-globalization,” but we were anything but narrow-minded nationalists. In reality, it was a contest between two visions of globalization: one from above dedicated to strengthening corporate power and eroding the already meager living standards of the international working class, the other from below rooted in grassroots democracy and international solidarity.

This surging “movement of movements” was accompanied by the rise of Indymedia, a network of radical media collectives in more than two hundred cities around the world. Indymedia pioneered citizen journalism. Before there were blogs or social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there was Indymedia’s open publishing newswire which made it easy for “citizen journalists” to publish their reporting — be it in print, video, audio, or photos — without having to go through corporate media gatekeepers. At a time when publishing on the Internet had previously required knowledge of computer code, this was a historic breakthrough, though the quality and reliability of this kind of journalism varied greatly.

Originally envisioned as a one-week project for the WTO protests, Indymedia’s coverage proved so popular that media activists around the world quickly began setting up their own locally themed Indymedia websites. These sites had the same basic format as the original: open publishing newswire on the right, a curated center column where the site’s editors featured the most important stories from the newswire, and a left column with a hyperlinked scroll of cities where Indymedia collectives were active. If radical protests were happening in another city or country, Indymedia was often the first place you went for the news.

The G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001 drew as many as 300,000 protesters and saw the first fatal police shooting of a protester. In the United States, organizers were gearing up for the semiannual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF in Washington, DC. The World Bank was notorious for steering developing nations into unsustainable forms of development. And the IMF had a terrible reputation for imposing onerous structural adjustment programs on those countries in return for emergency loans when their economies inevitably faltered.

Crowds of 100,000 or more were expected, and for the first time leaders of the AFL-CIO were going to join in civil disobedience actions. The “Teamsters & Turtles” alliance of labor and environmentalists that first appeared in Seattle was still going strong.

Then September 11 happened.

It was the story for weeks. In the aftermath of 9/11, political and media elites stoked the public’s grief and fear with calls for war. President George W. Bush vowed to exact revenge from the “evildoers” who masterminded the attack. His public approval ratings climbed to a stratospheric 92 percent. Instantly, protests from the Left became deeply suspect.

For the US wing of the global justice movement, 9/11 was a nuclear winter level event. Labor unions and major NGOs pulled out of IMF/World Bank protests. The demonstration went forward, but the turnout was small and easily contained. Other attempts were made to rekindle the “spirit of Seattle” in the following years but didn’t get very far. The largest and most vibrant protest movement in the United States since the end of the Vietnam War disappeared from public view almost overnight.

Shutting It Down Isn’t Enough

Even before 9/11, though, the movement was facing headwinds.

Post-Seattle, protest organizers continued to call on their fellow activists to “shut it down.” But law enforcement agencies were now fully prepared and would not be caught off guard, unlike the Seattle Police Department, which vastly underestimated the protests. Also, local media outlets in the next soon-to-be impacted city would replay footage of the black bloc’s window smashing and warn that this menace was about to descend upon their fair city. What had been an extraordinary act of mass nonviolent civil disobedience in Seattle was now being repackaged as the nihilistic rampage of disgruntled malcontents.

This hobbled organizers, who found it harder to assemble the kind of broad coalition seen in Seattle. While the prospect of rioting might draw a small handful of activists like moths to a flame, most people will head the other way. Further complicating things, world leaders started holding their meetings in more remote locales. The WTO’s 2001 summit meeting was held in Qatar, an absolute monarchy where all forms of public protest are illegal.

The movement had confused a single tactic — shutting down a meeting — with a strategy. It failed to evolve, and facing radically different circumstances after 9/11, it collapsed.

Another one of the movement’s flaws was its penchant for what the political philosopher Theodor Adorno called “actionism,” protest for its own sake without any clear goal or direction. As long as affinity groups took over the streets, and there was a high enough arrest count to make the action seem consequential, and it was extensively covered on Indymedia, there was a sense of achievement. We were doing . . . something.

Concurrent with this emphasis on action for its own sake was an inability to agree on what we were protesting for or how we might achieve it. For unions, gaining a “seat at the table” when trade deals were being hammered out was important. NGOs tended to emphasize goals like “fair trade” and empowering “civil society.” The more radical wing of the movement identified itself as both “anti-capitalist” and “antiauthoritarian.”

One word that was rarely heard was “socialism.” Barely a decade removed from the collapse of the Soviet Union, socialism had no currency. Depending on your vantage point from within the global justice movement, socialism 1) was old, musty, and irrelevant, 2) sounded great but was so grandiose as to be unrealizable, or 3) was an oppressive statist project that had crushed individual freedom and was as bad as capitalism itself.

Some activists took the third point to its logical conclusion that the very idea of organization itself was inherently suspect, and any signs of hierarchy should be resisted even if it crippled a group’s ability to act. “We will be free when we are all equally disempowered” might as well have been the motto of this strain of anarchism.

After Seattle, I threw myself into Indymedia, reporting from the streets in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Quebec City. When I met organizers from the nascent New York City Indymedia who spoke of creating an Indymedia Center that wasn’t just a one-week pop-up site but committed to providing ongoing grassroots coverage of the issues that most directly affected people’s lives, I was all-in. We were fortunate in New York to have an Indymedia supporter who gave us a two-thousand-square-foot loft space in the middle of Manhattan that came with meeting spaces, a high-speed Internet connection (almost unheard of back then), a kitchenette, and a shower. Both living and working in that space, I became immersed in the contradictions of Indymedia and the larger movement.

Our most ambitious project was a monthly print newspaper, the Indypendent. Launched in September 2000, the Indy quickly grew from four to sixteen to twenty-four pages and took on additional relevance after 9/11, when it became the only newspaper in our battered city with a clear antiwar and anti-imperialist voice.

This success came with growing pains. While using consensus process, our collective had anguished discussions about whether it was okay to correct faulty grammar and risk diluting a writer’s “authentic voice.” More heated debates unfolded about taking certain kinds of advertising, about whether to have a skills-based editorial hierarchy or to run the paper like an Indymedia newswire, and about creating small stipends so a couple of our volunteers could dedicate more time to being organizers.

At each juncture, we ultimately made the decision that grew the paper and made it more impactful and sustainable. But my goodness, it was exhausting to get there.

The Battle of Seattle had supercharged support for ultraliberal ideals and practices — none more so than consensus process. I gradually realized that our belief in consensus blinded us to its defects. It was often time-consuming, which privileged a certain kind of activist who didn’t have other life commitments. By giving as few as one or two individuals the power to block, it crippled collective decision-making. More generally, consensus process tends to break down when members of an organization have different goals and priorities.

It’s one thing for a small group of people who know and trust one another to devise the best way to take over an intersection at a mass protest. It’s a whole other matter when there are fundamental disagreements about what an organization’s direction should be or how it should be run.

Consensus process also elides the fact that conflict is inherent to politics. Our first reflex was to believe that we were failing consensus process, not that it was failing us. In reality, we were using a decision-making process that was ill-suited for our situation. Many activist projects in that era —including a number of Indymedia Centers — didn’t figure this out and were ravaged by their encounters with consensus.

Revival

Having clarified our direction at the Indypendent, we settled into a routine, publishing every three weeks for many years before later going monthly. The edgy Seattle-era protests gave way to large but carefully choreographed antiwar marches. Wall Street crashed the global economy in 2008 as George W. Bush’s hard-nosed conservatism gave way to Barack Obama’s tepid liberalism. Almost three years after the Wall Street crash and the mass unemployment and millions of home foreclosures it provoked, the only protest movement that had emerged in response was the right-wing Tea Party.

As time passed, I occasionally found myself wondering: Had Seattle been a flash in the pan of no enduring consequence? Everything seemed so politically dead, just as it had in the late 1990s.

Then, on September 17, 2011, a couple thousand people gathered at the tip of Lower Manhattan and marched up Broadway to Zuccotti Park. A smaller contingent pitched camp and stayed overnight. It was the beginning of Occupy Wall Street.

The anarchists who launched Occupy were inspired by the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt and subsequent anti-austerity protest encampments that took over public squares in Greece and Spain. Their goal wasn’t to contest power but to create a prefigurative space that would show how people could feed and care for each other outside of capitalism. With its battle cry of “We are the 99 percent” and some high-profile missteps by the New York City Police Department, Occupy quickly attracted broader interest from other leftist groups, labor unions, and members of the general public. A new generation of activists was parting the waters that were supposed to drown its idealism.

The Occupy movement spread rapidly to dozens and then hundreds of cities and towns in the United States and beyond as people set up their own protest encampments in parks and public squares. There were several advantages to establishing a permanent protest encampment. It provided a staging ground for spin-off protest marches. It was a media magnet and a gathering spot for all kinds of people and movements. Because it functioned as a utopian community, it gave people a fleeting glimpse of what a world beyond capitalism might look and feel like.

The Indymedia network had peaked around 2004 and was almost entirely defunct by 2011. This time, activists spread the news over Facebook and Twitter and via livestream channels instead of in a shared communal space. Many younger Occupy activists, I suspected, had never heard of Indymedia.

With its denunciations of a rigged economic and political system, its decentralized organization, and its bold, confrontational tactics, Occupy was the heir to the Battle of Seattle. Occupy carried that legacy forward in ways good and bad. The people’s microphone that had first been improvised outside the King County Jail in 1999 became a mainstay of Occupy. The ballooning of Occupy meant hundreds of people were suddenly participating in the nightly general assemblies in Zuccotti Park that continued using consensus process. Occupy’s de facto leaders became so frustrated by the general assemblies, they began meeting and making decisions on their own. It was totally foreseeable, but because so little movement history and knowledge is passed on, the Occupiers had to learn from their own mistakes.

A New Politics of the Left

With its 99 percent vs 1 percent formulation, Occupy brought class back into US politics for the first time in a half century or more. It inspired the campaign for a $15 minimum wage. And it set the stage for Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns, which blasted out Occupy’s core message of a rigged economic and political system.

Bernie 2016 demonstrated that millions of Americans will support a left agenda — Medicare for All, Green New Deal, student debt abolition, higher minimum wage — that directly speaks to their needs. It also showed that the right candidate can raise enough money online from ordinary working people to be competitive with an opponent who relies on funding from the 1 percent. His success winning twenty-two state primaries and caucuses against the Clinton machine shook long-held assumptions on the Left about the futility of engaging in electoral politics, especially anything involving the Democratic Party.

Two key figures in building the national infrastructure that put the wind at Bernie’s sails were Occupy Wall Street veterans Winnie Wong and Charles Lenchner. At the outset of Bernie’s campaign, they created two hundred different pro-Bernie Facebook pages and handed off the passwords to grassroots organizers who took it from there without any guidance from the official campaign. When the 2016 primary season ended, the call went out from the Sanders campaign to its supporters to bring home the “political revolution” by running for local offices.

Two years later, the first four members of the Squad — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley — were elected to Congress. Scores of Berniecrats and outright socialists won state legislative and city council elections. For the first time in decades, the Left was winning a foothold in the corridors of power.

The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — the largest socialist organization in the United States since at least the 1940s — has been an especially noteworthy event. Some of DSA’s core practices stand in stark contrast to a lot of the organizing in the post-Seattle moment. Instead of consensus process and the tyranny of structureless, it has created a strong internal democracy where leaders at all levels of the organization are voted into their positions and can be held accountable.

There is a relentless focus on public-facing electoral and issue campaigns. The very act of engaging in door-to-door canvassing to try to win majority support for a socialist candidate requires a measure of humility. For the Left, the willingness to listen to people, understand their point of view, and try to find points of common interest has long been in short supply. Another key difference is the willingness to enter the corridors of power and to try and wrest change from a hostile political system.

Amid ever-worsening inequality, labor unions have grown in popularity over the past decade, especially with younger workers. DSA has helped stoke that trend with many hundreds of its members becoming active in rank-and-file caucuses in established unions and through its support of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which has helped thousands of unorganized workers start their own unions. The brawny industrial worker who was still the predominant union archetype in Seattle has been joined by the gender-fluid, twentysomething Starbucks barista who may have been inspired to organize by Black Lives Matter or the Bernie campaigns. And it’s a beautiful thing.

Here in New York, DSA has elected a bloc of nine democratic socialist state legislators who have played a key role in winning rent law reforms, $2.5 billion in pandemic relief for undocumented immigrants, and Green New Deal legislation that has put New York State on a path to greatly expand its supply of publicly controlled renewable energy.

From the vantage point of twenty-five or even ten years ago, the achievements of the post-2016 left would have been inconceivable. At the same time, it’s not nearly enough. Authoritarian right-wing movements have had far more success at winning elections in the United States than their counterparts on the egalitarian left. And now we find ourselves looking into the abyss of a second Trump administration.

Our political system is designed to crush idealistic movements, as Tom Hayden noted outside that Seattle jail. If we’re going to once again “slow the rate of destruction” and “speed up the rate of creation,” here’s a few suggestions drawn from lessons I’ve learned over the past twenty-five years.

Build broad coalitions. If your coalition doesn’t make you uncomfortable, you’re probably doing it wrong. The point isn’t to only ever work with people who 100 percent agree with us, but to be flexible enough, when the moments present themselves, to seize opportunities and win victories that otherwise would not be possible. The progressive NGO/labor/anarchist alliance in Seattle is a powerful example of what can happen when we play well together.

A growing movement is a winning movement. If your movement is shrinking and becoming more insular and isolated, you’re failing. Treat every protest not just as a place to blow off steam but as an opportunity to engage in public outreach and education that can grow your movement. Frame your actions and messaging accordingly.

Embrace the contradictions. Building effective movements that can win change under capitalism will always be difficult. Fundraising is hard. Dealing with the corporate media is frustrating. Explaining your cause to a general public that can be skeptical, apathetic, and misinformed is wearying. Face that adversity and do your best.

It’s more useful and, from my experience, more satisfying than either retreating into activist safe spaces or falling for ultraleft narratives about how we should follow one vanguard grouplet or another whose theory of change is unmoored from reality and will be dismissed out of hand by most working-class people.

There is always hope, even in the bleakest of times. Both Seattle and Occupy seemed to come out of nowhere. It’s likely to happen again, as Donald Trump and his wrecking crew inevitably overreach.

While acting strategically is crucial, don’t become so practical that you miss future movement moments when something wild and unexpected captures the public imagination. The organizers who will be “drawing outside the lines” will likely be young and from the margins of what’s considered respectable activism.

Cherish the comrades you meet along the way. If organizing on the Left isn’t easy, it does afford the chance to work alongside many extraordinary people who are willing to act from a place of solidarity, whether they are fighting for their own communities, their fellow workers, or someone they don’t even know.

From Anarchism to Bernie

So how did I get from a place where I enthusiastically believed in the anarchist ideals and practices of the early 2000s global justice movement to my current views, which are more aligned with the Bernie-inspired socialist current that has emerged in the past decade? The Battle of Seattle made two enduring impressions on me that would shape how I think about political activism.

The first, the power of a deeply egalitarian movement to unleash the participatory energies of everyone who joins in its work, was embodied by the mass nonviolent shutdown of the WTO that the Direct Action Network instigated.

The second, that the power of the Left is so much greater when there is broad unity, was on full display in Seattle with the alliance of progressive NGOs, labor, and anarchists each doing their part.

For the radical wing of the global justice movement, the triumph in Seattle fueled a confidence in some of our practices, like consensus process, that was often unwarranted. Because of this, the movement gradually became more subcultural and politically isolated.

In my work with the Indypendent, I carried the idea, inspired by the breadth of the Seattle coalition, that we should speak to a broad spectrum of progressive and radical groups, not just a small subset of anarchists. My thinking along these lines was also informed by the years before the Battle of Seattle in which I lived a nomadic existence, laboring as a migrant farmworker, hitchhiking 75,000 miles in seventeen countries, learning new languages, and encountering various cultures, above all my own.

From that experience, I came to understand that how the minority of those who are highly politicized talk to the majority who are not makes all the difference. We can’t assume people see things the way we do and just preach at them. If we want our ideas to land, we have to do the hard work of meeting people where they are at and communicating in ways they can readily understand.

Ultimately, many of us in the post-Seattle milieu confronted the contradictions between the movement’s self-marginalizing subcultural tendencies and the desire to have a broader impact and relevance. At the Indypendent, we chose the latter. This meant shedding anarchist dogmas around the value of building organization and obtaining the resources to keep it functioning. Each time we printed a newspaper and covered our monthly expenses, we were participating in the larger market economy. At the same time, we were reaching tens of thousands of New Yorkers with information, analysis, and a worldview they wouldn’t encounter anywhere else. We were willing to make the trade-off.

In the process, the Indypendent’s coverage has evolved over the past twenty-four years in tandem with the movements and the campaigns we cover. The Bernie 2016 campaign, for example, forced us to rethink our assumptions about electoral politics and how movements can engage with the Democratic Party.

Still, we never completely abandoned our freewheeling anarchist roots. The paper is available for free across New York City thanks to the financial support of our readers and the assistance of a network of neighborhood box stewards. Our reporting is done from a bottom-up vantage point that provides a monthly snapshot of a “movement of movements” all struggling for justice, as Naomi Klein once said about us. We are still largely volunteer-based and able to tap into the desire for authentic participation that egalitarian movements and organizations can attract. And there are few if any publications where aspiring journalists get as much attention and mentoring from editors. We long ago resolved to have high editorial standards, but we also believe in giving people the tools and the support they need to succeed.

Life is about creatively reconciling opposites and accepting that the tensions never go away. In our personal lives, most of us want to be financially secure, but we don’t want our lives to solely be about money. We want to be safe, but we don’t want to be so cautious that our lives become boring and monotonous. We want to care for and nurture others, but we also have to make space for tending to our own well-being.

In political organizing, I believe we should be as horizontal as we can be and vertical as we need to be. What that looks like in practice, we each have to figure out in the doing.