THE POWER OF PROTEST: U.S. GLOBAL AGENDA COMES UNGLUED IN SEATTLE
By Richard Becker
Seattle
It took Charlene Barshefsky, chief U.S. trade representative, all day to travel the one block from her hotel to the Seattle Convention Center. And when she finally made it to the opening day of the World Trade Organization’s meeting, Barshefsky was shocked to find that the world had changed.
Barshefsky, her immediate superior President Bill Clinton, and their big-bus iness bosses had long expected this WTO meeting to be a victory parade signaling the triumph of U.S. capitalism in extending its worldwide economic domination.
Instead, the meeting ended in total disaster for the Clintonites and their corporate sponsors. After three days of bitter internal fighting, it adjourned without being able to agree on even the most vaguely worded closing communique.
Why? How could all of their calculations have turned out so wrong?
The Dec. 4 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the local morning newspaper, highlighted the answer in a headline: "WTO Meeting Collapses—Protests Continue."
As the whole world now knows, more than 50,000 demonstrators converged on Seattle on Nov. 30. At least 10,000 of them took part in direct action protests, endured tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets in a courageous and determined effort to achieve their goal: shut down the WTO.
More than 40,000 people joined in a very spirited march to the convention area, organized by the AFL-CIO. Many of those marchers, rather than returning to the march staging area, stayed downtown and joined the direct-action protesters.
The demonstrators’ determination was exemplary. The first day, the protesters’ numbers and militancy overwhelmed the police. The opening ceremony of the WTO had to be canceled.
It was not until late afternoon—and even then with very few delegates in the hall—that it was possible to begin the first plenary session.
>From the evening of Nov. 30 through the next two days, the cops expended immense amounts of gas and rounds of rubber bullets in their attempt to crush the protests.
But the protesters, mostly young people, refused to be intimidated. Thou sands were repeatedly tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed. They were hit with police batons and rubber bullets.
More than 500 were jailed.
But as the Seattle paper’s headline reported, the protests were still going after the WTO talks had collapsed.
The protests, moreover, were the key element in causing the WTO meeting to fail. The WTO’s basic agenda is imperialist globalization: tearing down any barriers to the penetration and domi-nation of capital, particularly U.S. capital.
The United States, when it was a rising capitalist country, depended on tariffs to protect its young industries from being overwhelmed by technologically superior English manufacturing. But now the United States is the imperialist top dog, and has declared that all developing countries must dismantle any protections and allow U.S. banks and industries free access to their markets, resources, and labor.
The freedom of capital is the only freedom the U.S. ruling class really cares about.
>From the point of view of the U.S. capitalist class, nothing—including environmental protections and labor laws—can be allowed to stand in the way of maximizing profits. The Seattle WTO meeting was supposed to demolish the remaining barriers to capitalist penetration at the expense of the developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The militant street protests against the WTO had strong anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist elements. In the bigger, labor-led rally, the biggest response from the crowd was to militant and anti-corporate speeches.
The question "Whose world?" was on many placards and signs. Many banners and posters bore anti-capitalist slogans like "Capitalism kills all life."
The Seattle protests were interpreted in many developing countries like Brazil, Egypt, Cuba and elsewhere as taking a stand with the oppressed countries against the U.S., European and Japanese imperialists.
Beyond any doubt, the Seattle street protests emboldened and invigorated the opposition to capitalist destruction and imperialist exploitation all over the world.
And the demonstrations’ success strengthened the hand of these governments—even some which have been very much under the thumb of the United States—to resist the demands of the "Great Powers" in the WTO.
This led to a stalemate and then the collapse of the WTO meeting.
WHAT THE RULING CLASS MISCALCULATED
The failure of the WTO talks was a stunning blow, not only to the Clinton administration, as the New York Times reported in its lead story on Dec. 5, but to the U.S. ruling class as a whole.
How did the U.S. ruling class and its paid staff—the government officialdom—fail to anticipate what was coming in Seattle? Because in their calculations—as Sam Marcy, the late chairperson of Workers World Party, often pointed out— they usually ignore the most critical element: the intervention of the masses.
The U.S. ruling class has been riding high in recent years, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Engorged with record profits, they have had seeming impunity to unleash state terror on Iraq, Yugoslavia and other countries which in any way try to resist the new U.S. order.
They had been feeling quite strong, maybe even immortal, as a class.
The great Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro once remarked, "Every ruling class thinks itself invincible until history teaches it otherwise."
Instead of being invincible, the U.S. ruling class found itself unable to control the street actions and unable to conduct one of the most important international gatherings to be held in recent years.
The great demonstrations in Seattle reaffirmed the most basic reality of all: The masses of people, especially the working class, are the real makers of history. There may be long periods of quiet and "class peace," but when the masses move, there is no more powerful force on earth.
