Cool Zone Media.

Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.

It's a podcast that looks at radical history to help all of us figure out how to live in a radical present and build a radical future.

I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and for the.

Past month or two, I've been investigating the fairly successful fight against neoliberalism that activists from across the world waged.

At the turn of the twenty first century.

But before I even tell you about that, I need to tell you that we have a producer named Sophie who isn't on the call today, and we don't have a guest today because this is one of those Margaret's talking to a microphone in a podcast closet by herself episodes.

We also have an audio engineer named Eva hi Eva, and our theme music was written for us by unwoman.

You don't actually have to go back and listen to all of the parts that we've done about neoliberalism if you just want to learn about the topic of today, the Battle of Seattle.

But there's a lot more context if you go back and listen to those episodes.

And I love context, kind of like I don't know, jo all grew up with Oscar the Grouch singing, I love trash.

It's like that, only I like context.

I also kind of like trash, but that's unrelated.

We started off by talking about what neoliberalism is, and in short, neoliberalism is a system by which the rich people in developed nations strip resources from underdeveloped nations and workers within their own countries.

Then we talked for a while about the Zapatistas, the indigenous rebels of Chiapas, Mexico, who use a diversity of tactics and ideologies to build autonomy in Southeast Mexico.

I promised you that they helped bring together an international assembly of grassroots organizations to help fight against neoliberalism, and this week we're going to talk about some of the fruits of that organizing.

Then last week we talked about the Black Bloc, a tactic developed by a timeonomists and anarchists in Western Germany.

Essentially squatters and anti authoritarian activists trying to build a better egalitarian society found themselves under attack by the state and capitalism.

Rather than rely on what they had.

Seen as the possibilities presented to them in Europe at the time, which was on one hand, you had mass mobilizations that use rigid principles of nonviolence, and on the other hand, the other option that had been presented to them as available was underground, clandestine direct action, like what many urban guerrillas were doing.

During that time.

Instead, these activists forged a third path in which they made themselves hard to arrest and hard to prosecute, and then went ahead and did their direct action in the light of day for all the world to see by wearing all black and disguising their identities.

That tactic, among others, was used extensively throughout the alter globalization movement that we've been focusing on, and so this week I want to talk about the opening salvo of the alter globalization movement, the successful shut down of the World Trade Organization's summit in Seattle, which took place on November thirtieth, nineteen ninety nine.

While it was the Black Cloud anarchists who captured media headlines, the protest was organized by tens of thousands of people from across a wide range of movements and ideologies, including plenty of not Black Cloud anarchists.

The shortest version of the story that I can think of is this, When the World Trade Organization met in Seattle, a new movement of movements stepped onto the world stage.

Tens of thousands of people from all sorts of social movements like the anti war movement, environmentalist movement, global justice, and labor showed up and blockaded the site of the conference.

They held back multiple police departments and held strong.

Six hundred people were arrested.

A state of emergency was declared, and the people won, and the World Trade Organization meeting was shut down, and the World Trade Organization was no longer the rising star of geopolitics, and its influence weighed dramatically, while most of the subsequent protests that happened in the altglobalization movement were less tactically successful.

In many ways, we'd already won the war, so let's talk about how people did it.

We've been talking for a while about some of the early altra globalization protests, mostly throughout Europe, at which tens of thousands of people demonstrated against letting unelected decision making bodies determine how the world's resources should be managed.

In nineteen ninety five, the World Trade Organization was formed.

It was built originally after World War Two.

There was this agreement among a lot of countries called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which sought to foster a tariff free trade around the world, and in nineteen nine, the World Trade Organization was founded out of that with much more like actual attempts at systemic power and things like that.

I've mentioned this in previous episodes, but it's worth repeating.

Global trade and economic policy are both really complicated things, and essentially it's possible for right wing forces to do bad shit with all sorts of positions.

The reason I bring this.

Up like, right now, what we're looking at the world's most influential economy, The US is suddenly throwing up trade barriers and tariffs, and this is greatly disrupting world trade and it is causing all kinds of havoc that is affecting poor people.

My guess is less that Trump and all those people are doing this to try and build up a strong local economy and more that they're just thieves who've broken into the building and are stripping the wire out of the walls of the country.

That's my guess, but I don't know.

But either way, being pro tariff is currently the right way position.

Twenty years ago, being pro free trade was.

It wasn't just the right wing position.

It was the consensus between the neoliberal Democratic Party and the neo conservative Republican Party.

All people who were capitalists were in favor of free trade, and both political parties were very adamantly capitalist when all of this stuff went on.

Essentially, you can use free trade the lack of tariffs to remove the economic protections that smaller economies might want to put up to help keep international companies from basically strip mining them, both literally and figuratively.

One of the main ways that neoliberalism destroys developing economies is by using predatory lending to trap countries into debt and then force those countries to accept something called structural adjustment programs to rewrite their own laws, to remove environmental and labor protections, to basically streamline their economies to funnel money back to the lenders stuff.

I think it's really important to understand this right now, because right now free trade looks like guid right when the fascists are attempting to do trade protectionism in the US, and it's just it really matters in what context people are developing trade policies.

Anyway, The World Trade Organization was formed the idea that it would meet every two years.

It's headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, but it would meet somewhere new For each summit.

Leaders from countries around the world would get together and discuss how to reduce trade barriers and in the process enrich the richest people in the world.

Obviously, that's not what everyone went there to do.

People from poorer countries weren't like, yes, please destroy us, but were forced into compromising positions.

Let's say the people running the wto the World Trade Organization, they probably don't see themselves as cartoon villains, but instead as people who foster global.

Cooperation and togetherness or whatever.

If they actually meant that, if they actually meant an interconnected and internationalist world, they would focus on allowing the free movement of people across borders instead of the free movement of capital across borders.

The difference between those two things is very, very important.

One of the primary slogans of the alter globalization movement is people over profit.

For decades, activists have been calling for what is called fair trade in contrast to free trade.

Basically, the argument is that trade shouldn't cause countries to lose environmental and labor protections, but instead develop those protections, people have been working to develop supply chains and pay fair prices to producers and emphasize working with producers and distributors that treat their workers fairly.

So if you like buy coffee, you know that the person who grew the coffee isn't living in a horrible life, and maybe you have to pay a little bit more for them, and that seems fine to me.

Ideally, you're talking about trying to buy from people who are cooperatives like so that the workers actually own the means of production.

And I suppose we'll probably return to this point fair trade sometime during this series, or at least I certainly hope we do.

But these ideas around fair trade have been around it since at least the nineteen sixties, if not the nineteen forties and the nineteen fifties.

And do you know, wells who treats their workers fairly some places?

I don't know whether it's the ads or not, because we don't vet that, because we can't because we actually don't get to pick our ads.

But here they are anyway, and we're back in January nineteen ninety nine, Seattle was picked for the every two years meeting of the WTO, and this is the first time a major neoliberal summit was happening on US soil.

This was also the Millennium Talks, and it was meant to be Millennial Round of Talks.

You'd think I would have put that in my script, but I didn't.

But it basically was like these are going to be a big deal.

And there's also a lot of like, hey, we're going to finally start listening to the smaller countries, and a lot of promises were being made by the WTO that people were skeptical of.

By February, activists were starting to say things like, I wonder if we can just shut the WTO down.

By spring they figured out a rough idea of how they would do it, and by summer this was more developed.

They were like, we're going to build an incredibly wide series of coalitions, unheardedly wide coalitions across diverse social movements, and then coordinate mass direct action to shut the meetings down.

And when I say coalitions, I mean that there wasn't one group, not even one group of groups, coordinating this whole thing.

There were actually a lot of different forces working together and against each other in complicated ways, and that means we're going to talk about them because I like talking about that kind of stuff.

I feel like it's like worth understanding how people organize things.

I think that when we learned from history, we can't just be like, they did a cool thing.

It's like really worth getting into the recipes, right, It's worth getting into how they did things.

I'm not saying we should do things like these folks did things.

We're in a very different situation, very different context.

But I think there's a lot of really specific lessons that can be learned and applied.

There were maybe five different groups or five coalitions or what have you that started organizing on this, both separately and in tandem with each other, and usually people only talk about two of them, but I'm a taoo five of them.

One of the ones that had very little impact in the end was Okay, this is guy Ralph Nader.

He was famous at the time as a consumer protection advocate and a Green Party presidential candidate, and he ran an organization called Public Citizen, and in that group put together a group called People for Fair Trade SLASH, the network opposed to the WTO, which is too long of a name.

If you have a slash in your name, there's probably some slashes that are earned.

This one wasn't.

You should have picked one or the other if you ask me, And everywhere people just call it people for Fair Trade.

This coalition, which involved more mainstream nonprofits NGOs non governmental organizations, has been less focused on in everything I've read, and they intentionally tried to keep some distance, mostly not antagonistically from the more direct action focused part of the organizing.

So that's them.

Then there was the biggest one by the numbers, There was the labor movement, and they mobilized between twenty and forty thousand people.

Those numbers are very different from each other, but I've read both.

While all sorts of mainstream and radical unions did show up, there was actually also a split within the labor movement around this.

The mainstream labor position was basically, we want a seat at the table.

In these negotiations, and.

If you don't give it to us, then will shut you down, although realistically they were like, if you don't give it to us, then we'll have a big protest march that is symbolic.

The more radical labor unions were like, actually we hate this corporate greed shit.

But they were still part of this labor organizing.

Overall, labor organized independently and they planned mass marches and not direct action.

And the Clinton administration the president at the time of the earlier Clinton Bill Clinton, they referred to the labor march as the legitimate protests compared to the criminal descent of the direct actionists that we're going to talk about shortly.

So these are presented as the good protesters.

But people oversimplify this stuff all the time.

I think that a lot of narratives around the WTO downplay the importance of labor and the struggle.

The march in Seattle was largely symbolic, at least it was intended to be largely symbolic, although actually we'll get to it.

There's the rank and file of labor was a lot more radical than the organizers by and large.

But probably the most economically impactful part of protests against the WTO was what the Longshoreman Union did.

They shut down every port on the West Coast from Los Angeles to Alaska, and also the local taxi drivers in Seattle went on strike, and the firefighters union basically police were like, hey can you turn the hoses on the protesters, and the firefighters union was like, we're not going to do that.

That's not going to happen.

My argument here is that labor is cool.

Then there's a coalition that sort of spawned the next coalition.

So it's like a two and one.

When I said there's five, it's blurry.

There's a group called People's Global Action PGA, which got its start in nineteen ninety eight at one of the Zapatista and Quentros, the encounters, which were global meetings of grassroots move These have been happening for a couple of years at that point.

I believe this was the third one.

You'd think, I know, it's in my notes, but not in my script.

And the nineteen ninety eight in Quentro was in Geneva, Switzerland, which is actually the same place as the WTO is headquartered.

And I don't know whether that was on purpose or not.

It probably was, but no one I read said that specifically.

At this meeting, four hundred representatives from seventy one countries launched a global organization, People's Global Action.

And this was largely people from where you would say the developing nations or the global South.

The terminology around this is shifting.

We it's all bad, it's all whatever.

Anyway Pga chose.

I've seen it referred to as an anarchist inspired organizational structure.

I suspect that was part of it, but I would actually suspect it as like primarily as Apatista inspired horizontal organizational structure, which would make it anarchistic, but actually developed from indigenous practices in Southeast Mexico, although at some point, actually I think we covered it in the magone episodes.

Actually a lot of anarchist practices in Europe did actually come from indigenous practices in Mexico, from a Greek doctor who went there early in the movement.

But that's besides the point.

I get really nerdy about the roots of different practices in social movements.

So they chose this horizontal organizational structure in which no one group or person could control the actions of the entire group.

And this is interesting to me because this seems quite natural and logical.

When you have a group of peers who come together to interact, it's horizontal, like you don't assume among your friend group that one person is in charge, maybe like they're in charge for the night.

They're the one who planned it or whatever, right, but.

They're not the boss.

You don't have bosses among your friends.

And the same is true on a larger scale, By and large, when countries interact with other countries, they assumed that the other is sovereign and equal.

Countries can't tell one another what to do, except when they use force, like military or economic force.

Like theoretically you're talking to your peer now, not in a super egalitarian way.

Obviously, countries are constantly at war with each other and like doing weird diplomatic stuff and all of that, but it's still like there's this assumption that this person sort of should be get to be your equal.

So a movement built out of movements naturally abides by a horizontal structure in which every movement has a right to be heard.

And that's how People's Global Action worked.

So they formed in nineteen ninety eight, and they met again in Bangalore, India in August nineteen ninety nine, and they were like, yeah, we endorse actions all over the world in solidarity with the Seattle protests.

And they also sent a caravan of people to Seattle.

They also and I think we'll talk about this a little bit.

And they also.

Organized a lot of the precursor or inspired a lot of the precursor protests, but we'll talk about that in proper zapatista form.

When they came together and put together a caravan of people going to Seattle, it came from the east coast and it stopped in twenty cities to talk to people about how corporate globalization had impacted them.

And the reason it's in proper zapatista.

Form is those appetistas are constantly going on these like listening and talking tours where they travel around place to place and just interact with people directly, which is cool.

So all of these internationals on this caravan are like, we're down to go get arrested in a foreign country to stop this shit, which is a serious decision to make, but this was a serious issue for them.

Then there's the main group of people who organized the direct action to shut down the World Trade Organization, and they're sort of the main characters in this week's tale, or maybe that's because of a bias in my sources, but you know who's a reoccurring side character, and not just this week's tale, but the entirety of cool people who did cool stuff.

That's right.

It is products and services the only real through line on this show, the only thing that makes you feel connected with the history.

Nay, the legacy of cool people who did cool stuff.

That's right.

The sponsors of this show the people we don't pick and we're back, okay.

The main group that organized the direct action shut down the WTO it's called DAN.

Oh.

Daniell's not the editor anymore.

That would have been funny anyway.

DAN stands for Direct Action Network, or more formally, the Direct Action Network against Corporate Globalization.

They decided that dan AGG wasn't as good of a name.

They were right.

This organization is about as grassroots and scrappy of an organization as they come.

It was built from to author Chris Dixon quote, a loose conglomeration of peace activists, anarchists, environmentalists, international solidarity groups, and unaffiliated radicals, all interested in street theater and or direct action during the WTO end quote.

What DAN offered was a clear and achievable vision for what the protests could and in their view, should look like.

They should be art focused, and they should be non violent, and they should be direct action.

They were like, this is not going to be boring.

And it's not going to be symbolic.

It's going to be.

Colorful and artsy and also direct as hell, and our goal is to shut this shit down.

And they followed through on that promise.

It was dan best as I can tell, that innovated the whole.

All radical protests should be filled with just absolutely gigantic and dramatic puppets vibe that defined so much of the Alter Globalization era, especially in the US, I think, but I could be more certain about things.

I think that in Europe and Mexico, the altglobalization protests were a bit more focused on direct confrontation with the police and less focused on art.

But I might be misreading things, and maybe on change my mind as I continue this series.

The alto globalization movement is something that I know a lot about, sort of instinctively because I was involved in it.

But it's been interesting to actually sit down and really read all of the information on it instead of just talking to people in the streets or reading the discourse of people arguing about this, that or the other.

It's been interesting to try and read it as history.

Interesting is a strange word.

It's so strange to read about a movement you're involved in his history.

I was not involved in the WTO protests and Seattle.

I was too young.

I barely knew about them.

Dan came together when so it started with a San Francisco group of art anarchists called Art and Revolution.

This was part of a West Coast network of groups with that name who did artsy direct action in the late nineties.

And Art and Revolution I think there were the people who, in like February, were like, hey, what if we just did this thing?

And it took a while for people to be like, yeah, totally, let's do the thing.

By June they started having conference calls with folks from around the West Coast talking about direct action in street theater.

They were heavily inspired by the Reclaim the Streets protests that had been happening, especially the Carnival against Capital that had taken place in England the year before, and the Carnival against Capital is this big artsy mass direct action.

The vibe that people were.

Moving to in protests at that point was.

Basically they were like, we want a global street party.

We want to reclaim our cities and streets as common property and they called this movement Reclaimed the Streets.

And this movement was set up by and you probably guessed it because I hinted at this people's global action and therefore sprung up from the organizing.

Done by the Zapatistas.

Some of the initial folks on the DAN conference calls where Canadian organizers who'd just done some shit the year before in Vancouver too, and they have these conference calls and then they take the proposal to a group called Global Exchange, which is like a fair trade organization, and they all agree, all right, yes, there should be decentralized artsy direct action, but it needed to be focused around a specific plan with specific dates and times and locations.

In order to be effective.

You can't just say hey, everyone show up and stop this.

You need to be like, here's how we're going to stop it.

Here is a decentralized framework for people to plug into.

And I think the idea of building a framework is the core idea of decentralized organizing.

And sometimes people who advocate for centralized organizing think that decentralized organizing is just a like, ah, everyone do what they want.

And sometimes, unfortunately people believe in decentralized organizing also think that, but it's actually about building of framework collectively that other people can plug into and hang their actions on.

So Dan put out a call, I'm going to quote it quote come to Seattle.

It is time to raise the social and political cost to those who aim to increase the destruction and misery caused by corporate globalization.

As movements in other parts of the world have, there is an incredible opportunity to use street theater, art, dance, music, giant puppets, graffiti, art and theater, and nonviolent direct action to simplify and dramatize the issues of corporate globalization and to develop and spread new and creative forms of resistance.

This will help catalyze desperately needed mass movements in the US and Canada capable of challenging global capital and making radical change in social revolution.

And that's a lofty goal, right.

We're going to use this moment to catalyze entirely new mass movements with new energy in order to radically change society.

And they succeeded at a lot of this.

They succeeded at creating mass movements that were desperately needed that challenge global capital and make radical change in social revolution.

We did not make a social revolution.

That's a big one.

We didn't succeed at and so people can get kind of hung up on that one.

But on the other hand, fascism is always trying to create a like global fascist state, and they always fail at that too.

Right, there's just a give and take, and as long as we fight, the other side doesn't win.

I still dream of winning, but winning isn't a static win condition anyway.

Whatever, I'm offscript.

So Dan is calling for this thing, and they're like, we should talk to the other people who are doing this thing too, So they start talking to, for example, the American Federation of Labor I think was probably the AFLCIO, but actually I don't remember when the AFL became the AFLCIO.

I've had it on episodes before, but I just don't remember.

And I'm completely offscript.

Dan started coordinating with labor, and some folks that they talked to were like, yeah, that sounds great, do your thing, and others were like, man, you're gonna fuck our shit up.

You should just stay the fuck out of this.

But Dan moved forward with coalition building to greater or lesser success with these other big groups I was talking about.

They worked very well with PGA, who they came out of.

They also coordinated loosely with people involved in public citizen who mostly wanted to stay out of the whole thing.

Meanwhile, by summer DAN was expanding, bringing on some direct action activist groups that are more like nonprofit right, like the Ruckus Society and Rainforest Action Network.

These are people who do like banner hangs to draw attention to issues, imagine like green peace, tight ideas.

If you're in one of those groups that you get really mad being compared to Greenpeace, I'm sorry.

They are distinguishable from that.

They're a little bit more radical.

But they all got together at meetings to discuss the plan, and they all consensed on we are going to call for a specific date and time and location.

And since DAN was a meeting of equals, not a top down organization, they had to work together as equals horizontally.

The anarchists who set the whole thing up did this a little bit on purpose as a way to radicalize the more traditional nonprofit activist groups and not like radicalize like get them in trouble or make them do more direct action.

But actually the thing that's really radical.

Well, I like direct action, but the thing that's really radical is getting people to confront the way that they make decisions internally and getting people to look for structures that don't recreate the systemic power abuses that we fight against.

They were reasonably effective, I think, at injecting more radical ideas within some traditional nonprofit activist groups.

All along there was internal conflict within DAN about whether or not property destruction like breaking bank windows or Starbucks windows or doing graffiti would be accepted within the context of the action.

And this is.

Talked about in a lot of different ways because people who were involved seem to kind of be wreck conning in what happened and being.

Like, no, we were always in favor of just this or whatever.

Right, It's worth knowing that there are anarchists and other radicals on both sides of this debate as best as I can tell.

And you'll notice, like property destruction includes graffiti, right, and in their initial call they talk about graffiti art, and so they're not coming at it morally opposed to property destruction.

Well, some people are morally opposed to it.

What they agreed upon was that property destruction was outside the framework of the direct action they were calling for.

I maybe being a little bit generous there.

I think that a lot of people might have been specifically calling on like, no one better come and do this shit, fuck them if they do.

I suspect that there was a diversity of opinions about that, and I don't know a ton about how people felt about it, partly because like I've literally read the same author refer to it two very different ways in like two thousand and two thousand and six.

You know, when they're talking about it later, and I'm not going to name that person because everyone's opinions and understandings of the past change and stuff.

I'm not truma call this person out.

So it was Dan who put together the basic framework of how direct action was going to work, which was to be clear, when I say direct action shut this down, they're going to be doing blockades.

They're going to be going and locking themselves to things and making themselves hard to move so that delegates and stuff can't get into the building.

So Dan put together that framework, and it was there organizing that shut down the World Trade Organization, although also it was internal conflict within the World Trade Organization also helped it shut it down.

Because whatever anyway, DAN put together the Direct Action with both help and hindrance from other coalitions.

People for Fair Trade never did add DAN actions to the their own calendar of events, and the labor marches were sometimes scheduled in ways to draw people away from DAN.

And then of course the Black block, who will talk about they're the fifth group.

They just ignored the no property destruction guidelines that DAN had agreed upon.

But some other groups worked to bridge the gaps between DAN and others.

Jobs with Justice, a labor advocacy group from Portland, advertised both the more radical and less radical events.

And now after November thirtieth, which spoiler alert is the day that they successfully shut down the wto opening ceremonies and stuff, suddenly everyone loves Direct Action Network because they'd organize this big things successfully.

Like after the fact, everyone's like, oh, yeah, we were totally with you or whatever.

I've read a lot of people who are salty.

I just want to be really clear, my sources are all so salty.

In order to do this organizing that they did, they started doing action camps well ahead of time.

Action camps are basically multi day train where you can show up and learn direct action skills and they are an amazing time and people still put them on and you can go to them.

They also started doing road shows talking about the protest, going place to place and talking about the issues in person, which is an effective strategy that people do still use.

But sometimes people get sloppy and rely on social media alone for outreach.

These days, you.

Can reach more people with social media, but combining it with an in person outreach model is a great combo.

That's all I'm saying.

Also, it's really funny to be like and the way they organize this was super in person and stuff.

They didn't perceive themselves as doing that.

They were very like this is the first Internet protest, because they were also doing an awful lot of internet organizing and in a way that I'm sure we'll talk about it sometime.

They like basically developed indie media, which kind of became social media, and the nightmare world we live in now everything can be recuperated by capitalism.

So these are the four are coalitions involved.

Then there's the wild Card, which is also a coalition to and just sort of people forget that it's actually an organized thing.

The Famed and dreaded Eugene Anarchists the Black Block, which most of them weren't from Eugene, Oregon, but that's what the press picked up on.

DAN organizers get pretty frustrated when media called the Black Block the anarchists, because DAN itself was heavily anarchists and pretty explicitly at least organized along anarchistic lines.

But the Eugene Anarchists were.

Part of the Black Block.

Eugene, Oregon is a kind of hippie college town in Oregon, and in the nineties it was the center of this fairly vibrant scene of militant tree sitters and forest defenders.

We've talked about the scene some in our Earth Liberation Front episodes.

There was a group called CFD Cascadia Forest Defense that would maintain militant road blockades and tree sitty and things like that to protect old growth forests and endangered watersheds.

An awful lot of those people were anarchists and specifically part of this fairly new scene, the Green anarchists.

While anarchism comes out of the socialist movement and has historically focused on issues of class and labor, green anarchists apply the basic principles of solidarity direct action and egalitarianism to the fight for wilderness and ecology rather than focusing on class issues.

Some but not all, green anarchists are also anarcho primitivists.

We specifically say that the root of modern suffering isn't just the state or capitalism, but the concept of civilization itself.

The main theoretician of anarcho primitivism at the time was a man named John Zerzan, who was a local professor in Eugene who had cut his teeth as an anarchist in the nineteen sixties.

To quote a write up from its Going down dot Org quote, Zerzan concluded that the formation of class society, marked by the shift from hunter gatherer bands to sedentary life through agriculture and domestication, led to the creation of the state, patriarchy, and industrialism, and has since sent humanity on course toward our current industrial climate catastrophe.

Moreover, he argued that by giving up such a form of life, human beings were leaving behind in existence largely of freedom and autonomy.

End quote.

I don't agree with everything Zerizen has to say, and I believe that some of his conclusions are based on outmoded anthropology, but he has done an awful lot of work exploring the roots of oppression, and yeah, Eugene was a hotbed of some of the most radical activists in the country in the nineties.

They ran a cable access show called Cascadia Alive and through shows and had riots when people were arrested for forest defense, and they planted community gardens, and they defended trees in the city and secretly at night, a lot of them were participants in the Earth Liberation Front, more directly destroying the machinery that was destroying the natural world.

And in the end, about one hundred to two hundred people, some of them from Eugene, most of them not, went to Seattle to participate in a black Block protest that existed outside the framework suggested by the other coalitions.

It seems likely that the majority of the Black Block protesters were actually local to Seattle, but it's impossible to conjecture exactly who was there and who wasn't, because when you show up to things to be anonymous, you don't tend to tell everyone that.

As best as I understand, the block actually did coordinate on some level with Dan.

There was a lot of tension between these two groups, but the block basically agreed like, all right, as long as the protests are peaceful, we're going to not run around and smash shit.

But if the cops start attacking peaceful protesters, we're going to run around smash shit.

And it seems like they actually did this away from the lockdowns, and that's a pretty good strategy.

It draws police attention elsewhere, away from unprotected people.

But I mean, honestly, this is probably like the most controversial black block that I've ever read about in terms of mixed feelings from the crowd.

Although once again you have this thing where the organizers don't want to lose control of a situation, which makes sense, that's kind of their job.

Even the anarchist organizers that Dan don't want to lose control of the situation.

The sort of rank and file, the people who are there doing things, I actually have read accounts where they're much more in favor of, like hoay, the.

Black block is here.

So those are the five groups that I can point to.

Mainstream NGOs who had very little impact as best as I can tell, Labor which brought the numbers but was presented as the good protesters by the president, PGA consisting of largely people from the Global South, which had a small presence from an organizing and on the ground point of view, but pretty much inspired the entire movement in the first place.

You have the Direct Action Network, who are the above ground bad activists who organize the actual successful direct action and then you have the Black Bloc, which made even the Direct Action Network look like saints in comparison to the media.

Though none of these groups were actually appreciably violent, the violence was done almost exclusively by the police.

Anyhow, Notably missing from this list, you might realize, are the sorts of groups that are doing more organizing these days, traditional leftist and communist parties.

Dan organizer David Soulnett put it bluntly in an interview quote, there was absolutely no Marxist, Leninist or Old Left or old New Left involvement.

Those groups were completely not present.

It was almost exclusively radical and radical anti authoritarian groups.

And the structure in the form of organization that I think is an incredibly positive departure from left traditions, some of which we can learn from, some of which we can leave in the dust bin, and not to push back against the super I am certain that there were Marxists and Leninists and Old Left and New Left people involved in some of these coalitions, but in terms of structure, you just don't have groups like the PSL or the Answer Coalition or these traditional authoritarian communist groups.

But the first action that happened against the WTO in November nineteen ninety nine actually happened in Ocean Away in Geneva, Switzerland, where the WTO has its headquarters.

On November sixteenth, nineteen ninety nine, twenty seven people went to the headquarters and were like, hello, we are students, we would like a tour, And then they were like, just kidding, we're ninety style activists.

So they pulled out chains and chained themselves across the door and then dropped a banner from the roof, which is pretty cool.

As for how all these pieces came together to shut down the WTO, we'll talk about that on Wednesday.

It's your cliffhanger.

What's going to happen?

Well, you know on some things are going to happen.

You know the police are going to attack them, but you know that the testers are going to win and six hundred people get arrested.

But we'll talk about it on Wednesday.

But you know what we should talk about.

First, support the protests that are happening.

They're probably happening whenever you listen to this, I mean probably there's some protests you don't want to support, but a lot of them you probably do.

And remember that everyone is going to protest in their own ways, and that we are strongest when we build movements that accept that pluralism, tactical and ideological pluralism is our strength and not our weakness.

When we tried to hold on so firmly to control, then the fact that we are politically pluralistic and diverse works against us.

When instead we build frameworks and we invite people in, as the Zapatista say, look to find compromises with each other.

That's the glue that holds us together.

That's when we're strong.

And I guess I should also plug some other stuff.

I have a substack.

It's Margaret Kildroyd at substack dot com.

I reflect a lot on the things that I talk about on the show, as well as things happening in the regular world.

Almost everything is free, but when I talk about more personal stuff, it's for paid subscribers only.

I have a new book that's out.

I kind of have two new books that are out.

One of them I've spent so long talking about on the show a couple months ago.

It finally is out.

It's called The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, and it is out from a publisher that I work with that's an anarchist collective publisher called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.

I also helped co write another role playing game book, and this one's called Defenders of the Wild, which is also a board game that I had a little bit less to do with.

I did some world building for the board game, but I had much more to do with the world building for the Almanac compendium.

That is a tabletop roleplaying game.

So you should look for Defenders of the Wild and go out and get it.

It's full of beautiful art.

I worked with amazing co authors on it.

I am not the primary creator, but I did an awful lot of the writing and battle scenes and had a.

Lot of fun with it.

Yeah, those are some things to plug anyway, I'll talk to you on Wednesday.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website goolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple

Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.