The Mythmaking Begins

Hardly had the tear gas dispersed from the streets of downtown Seattle before a struggle broke out as to who should claim the spoils. It's still raging. On one side the lib-lab pundits, middle-of-the-road greens, a recycle bin full of policy wonks from the Economic Policy Institute and kindred DC think-tanks, Doug Tompkins (the former czar of sweatshop-made sports clothing who funds the International Forum on Globalization), and Medea Benjamin (empress of Global Exchange). On the other side: the true heroes of the Battle in Seattle--the street warriors, the Ruckus Society, the Anarchists, Earth First!ers, the Direct Action Media Network (DAMN), radical labor militants such as the folks at Jobs With Justice, hundreds of longshoremen, steelworkers, electrical workers, and teamsters who disgustedly abandoned the respectable, police-sanctioned official AFL-CIO parade and joined the street warriors at the barricades in downtown.

At issue here is the liberals craving to fortify the quasi-myth of Labor Revived--a "progressive coalition" of John Sweeney's AFL-CIO, Hoffa's Teamsters, and mainstream greens--poised and ready to recapture the soul of the Democratic Party. The way they're spinning it, the collapse of the WTO talks in Seattle was a glorious triumph for respectable demonstrators, achieved despite the pernicious rabble smashing windows, harassing the police, and bringing peaceful mainstream protest into disrepute.

Here's Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, in an internal memo to his board of directors: "The Sierra Club was completely separate from the illegal protest, both violent and non-violent..." Pope went on to quote Kathleen Casey, one of his staffers, to the effect that "The new coalition that worked together to thwart the WTO came out a clear winner. The Sierra Club achieved many of our goals despite the chaos and unfortunate violence that occurred in some of the actions ... Some small factions engaged in vandalism and provocation, and the police sometimes over-reacted in kind."

To the fervid imagination of Michael Moore the union protests in Seattle had an effect on President Bill Clinton akin to that exercised by Jesus Christ on St. Paul on the Damascus road: "He completely changed his position [he didn't] and called on all WTO countries to enact laws prohibiting trade with nations that use children in sweatshops and do not honor the rights of all workers to organize a union ... this was nothing short of Paul being knocked off his horse [he wasn't] and seeing Jesus [he didn't!] ... You could almost hear the collective seething of the hundreds of CEOs gathered in Seattle. Their boy Bill--the politician they had bought and paid for ... had betrayed them. You could almost see them reaching for their Palm Pilots to look up the phone number of The Jackal." In this blinding curve of balderdash, Moore manages to conflate Christ, Clinton, St. Paul, and JFK--truly a grand slam of liberal hagiography!

To concoct the myth of respectable triumph in Seattle, divorced from dreadlocked and locked-down Earth First!ers, turbulent Ruckusites, and kindred canaille, the respectable liberals have been torturing the data and the data confessed. Here's how it goes: initial scouting parties of liberal policy wonks arrived in Seattle over the weekend prior to the WTO assembly and embarked on a series of sleep-inducing debates and panels, chewing over the minutiae of proposed WTO rules and regulations. Then, the liberal fantasy continues, on Monday battalions of clean-limbed environmentalists in their turtlenecks and turtle costumes moved in disciplined array to a [police-approved] rally where they were uplifted by the measured words of that Lenin of mainstream greenery, Carl Pope. After the speechifying, the battalions redeployed to the Methodist church on Fifth Avenue, which sheltered the command and control center of the progressive Non-Governmental Organizations (a.k.a. NGOs).

Its official finale was the great labor march of Tuesday, Nov. 30, when some 25,000 union people rallied under the indulgent eyes of the Seattle constabulary, to listen to John Sweeney, James P. Hoffa of the Teamsters, and Gerald McEntee of the AFSCME, among others. The divorce of rhetoric from reality was best represented by McEntee who reiterated Carl Oglesby's famous line from the 1960s: "We have to name the system." Unlike Oglesby, who was a genuinely radical SDS leader, McEntee has been among the most fervent of all of Big Labor's supporters of Clinton-Gore (a.k.a. the system).

When the rally was over, Sweeney and Hoffa led their thousands towards downtown where at that precise moment the street warriors were desperately but successfully preventing delegates from entering the Convention Center and the Paramount Theater, where the opening ceremony was scheduled to take place. It was touch and go as cops steadily got rougher and the tear gas got thicker. Certainly the arrival of thousands of labor marchers on the scene would have made it much more difficult for the cops to gas, beat, and shoot the activists with wooden dowels and rubber bullets.

The labor marchers approached and then ... their own marshals turned them back. The main march withdrew in respectable good order and dispersed peacefully to their hotels, where Molly Ivins and the other scriveners began composing their denunciations of the anarcho-trashers who had marred their great event.

It would no doubt be polite to treat this mythmaking as contemptible but harmless self-aggrandizement. But real social movements for change shouldn't be built on illusions, and the self-aggrandizement is far from harmless.

Take Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, an NGO that has made its name on the sweatshop issue, dickering with Nike over the pay rates and factory conditions of its workers in Vietnam, Indonesia, and China. Whatever cachet Benjamin might have won by sneaking into a WTO session and being arrested and briefly addressing the delegates was swiftly squandered by her subsequent deeds defending Niketown. Benjamin and her Global Exchange cohorts stood on the steps of Niketown and sweatshop outlets in downtown Seattle to defend the premises against demonstrators. As Benjamin herself proudly described her shameful conduct to the New York Times: "Here we are protecting Nike, McDonald's, the GAP, and all the while I'm thinking, Where are the police? These anarchists should have been arrested."

But those who were arrested endured awful treatment in jail. An early report by Amnesty International describes "systematic cruel treatment was used to coerce or punish violent protesters for acts of non-compliance such as refusing to give their names in King county jail. One person was slammed against a wall, beaten while lying on the floor, and his fingers forced back with a pencil. In another case guards squeezed a man's nose, almost suffocating him, when he refused to give out his name... Also at King County jail, people were allegedly strapped in four-point restraint chairs as punishment for nonviolent resistance or for asking for their lawyers. In one case a man was striped naked before being strapped into the chair. One woman was stripped naked by four women guards, while a male guard outside watched. She further had her arms and legs folded behind her and was held down on the floor with the full weight of two guards on top of her."

The larger political agenda of the liberals with their myth-making is far from benign. By falsely proclaiming a victory for peaceful pro-cop protesters, they now can move on under a largely fictitious banner of "unity," and hunker down with the government policymakers to rewrite the WTO treaty to their satisfaction. This is the core meaning of co-optation, and certainly the writers at the London Economist understand it well enough. In the wake of Seattle, the Economist ran a long article discussing the rising power of NGOs, which successfully challenged the World Bank, sank the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and engineered the brilliant anti-landmine campaign.

But, the Economist continued, there's hope: "Take the case of the World Bank. The Fifty Years is enough campaign of 1994 was a prototype of Seattle (complete with activists invading the meeting halls). Now the NGOs are surprisingly quiet about the World Bank. The reason is that the Bank has made a huge effort to co-opt them." The Economist went on to describe how World Bank president James Wolfensohn had given the NGOs a seat at the table, and now more than 70 NGO policy wonks work in the Bank's offices worldwide, and half of the Bank's projects have some NGO involvement.

Finally, the mythmaking actively demobilizes radical struggles against the two party status quo, since it pretends that one of the two parties--naturally, the Democrats--can actually be redeemed. Just listen to Michael Moore proclaiming the redemption and possible martyrdom of Bill Clinton. These are people who'll be rallying next year outside the Republican Convention in Philadelphia but not outside the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, notwithstanding the fact that there is at least some disagreement between the Republican presidential aspirants on the WTO, whereas Gore and Bradley are in harmonious concord on this issue.

But of course it's all a myth, which can be easily popped with a simple question: if the direct action protesters had not put their bodies on the line throughout that entire week, if the only protest had been the official AFL-CIO one, would there have been anything more than a 15-second image of a parade on the national news headlines that Tuesday evening? The WTO would have gone forward with barely a ripple of discord, except for what the African and Caribbean nations had managed to foment from the inside.

Contrast the outlook of Benjamin and the other protesters of corporate property with the attitude of a 34-year-old Oregon farmer who found himself in the midst of the downtown protest, was arrested, and harshly treated in jail: "To break a window in a retail facility in downtown Seattle is nothing compared to what some of these CEOs are doing daily."

Note: this article is an edited version. The full-length text can be found in the Dec. 15, 1999 edition of the Anderson Valley Advertiser ( 12451 Anderson Valley Way, Boonville, CA 95415, $40/year).