Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Seattle WTO Shutdown ’99 to Occupy: Organizing to Win 12 Years Later

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, December 5, 2011

Seattle WTO Shutdown ’99 to Occupy: Organizing to Win 12 Years Later

Click here to access article by David Solnit from The Indypendent.

The author provides a very good review of successful mass action strategies developed by activists in the Northwest of the US to counter ruling class enforcers (police and media) who try to smear, subvert, and brutalize participants.

As the occupy movement grows, wrestles with how to organize and looks forward, perhaps it’s of use to look back to what did and did not work in the space opened up 12 years ago — the global justice movement of movements that followed global South movements and spread across North America in the wake of the Seattle WTO mass occupation of downtown Seattle and nonviolent direct action shutdown of the WTO.