“THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!” – Part II (X.) by X.

The most striking examples of budding revolutionary democracy in action can be found in interviews of the diverse activists that participated in the three days of WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 (these interviews are available at the online WTO History Project hosted by the University of Washington). In the weeks that led up to the protests, a multitude of labor unions, issue groups, student groups, revolutionary groups, etc. cooperated in one form or another to plan for the demonstrations (amidst a host of disagreements over the purpose and the tactics of the protest). A careful reading of the activists’ interviews shows how rapidly the movement coalesced at the grassroots level in the last few days and especially during the “downtime” in between protests once the WTO ministerial conference had begun.

This so-called “downtime” was in fact the “organizing time” during which thousands of activists of every shade of the Left political spectrum resided in close proximity to one another in de facto “liberated zones” in and around Seattle. The geographic closeness and the magnitude of the logistical challenges led these activists to exchange ideas, share resources and make plans together. They became movement organizers as they began to work and decide together, as they began to practice democracy like they never had before. This process of budding revolutionary democracy is credited in many interviews for the decision by a number of “older” protesters to break away from the relatively non-confrontational, pre-approved march routes to join “younger” activists in direct actions in the “no protest” zone declared by the city police.

Richard Feldman, Director, Worker Center, King County Labor Council, AFL-CIO:

… And then there was other coalition activity, as it got closer, there was a regular meeting, kind of a coordinating meeting that I attended, that was hosted by the Citizen's Trade Campaign folks that brought together some of the prime organizers and organizations, including DAN [Direct Action Network] and a very diverse kind of group of organizations that met and just kind of more or less kept each other somewhat up to date on what people were planning.

(…)

Well, it was a coalition in terms of everyone coming together dealing with the events of the week, for example from the students' perspective, obviously having been hit the hardest, and the students that had been doing civil disobedience and not doing civil disobedience, just been sitting around and getting whacked by the cops, they brought anger and disbelief. Then us just seeing what had happened and the wrongness of how protests had been met. And it was because we were in coalition and had the energy and ability that enabled us to quickly put together a march with 5,000 people. We wanted to go into the no-protest zone on Friday to show we could have protests and that we could have our voices heard. So things happened pretty quickly.

(…)

Things came together incredibly quickly. A wide variety of things happened very quickly, just remarkable how quickly. I guess in terms of true coalition activities, people took ownership, came together and achieved, in a very short time, something that normally takes months to plan and figure out. And that was because everyone had been working together. And this was also something that was also more locally driven. It wasn't people from D.C.

Han Shan, Ruckus Society:

“That’s actually a bigger conversation and a really important thing. That’s something that’s new and something that we saw develop in Seattle to a large degree. There are a lot of groups working in very different ways with different constituencies, and maybe different ultimate goals who nonetheless are recognizing that as the right has come together with various goals, but recognizing they have similar adversaries, at least, we’ve recognized that we need to come together. In Seattle, there were a lot of folks who maybe didn’t work super closely with each other in their discrete strategies, in their tactics that they took to the streets, but tried to at least talk and keep the lines of communication open. I talked to a lot of Labor. I talked to folks who were visibly nervous about who Ruckus was and what we might have planned, who nonetheless showed goodwill and recognized that we were allies in this battle. I think that kind of coming together is a rare thing and it was certainly gratifying.”

Robin Denburg, Asia Pacific Environmental Exchange:

“The coalition, I think, while there were ups and downs, it was very effective in allowing a level of coordination so that the environmental community knew what the labor community was doing and then the labor community would then go back and work out the details, but at least there was some level of coordination and that was exhibited during the week of the WTO when you had one day which was focused on labor, one day which was focused on the environment, one day which was focused on agriculture. If you hadn’t had that, the dialogue and the trust established beforehand, you could have had a hodgepodge of seminars and teach-ins and rallies going on at the same time. So I think it was really effective in that respect. I think it was also effective in terms of creating good relationships between communities that hadn’t normally worked together. In particular for me, working with the faith-based and labor communities was, especially the faith-based community, was a new thing for me, so I think that was effective as well.”

To be continued...