Heads up!  By now we've been thoroughly debriefed about what happened in Seattle during the World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial.  But it's time to examine the significance of what happened in terms of strategic planning to end not only the WTO but the whole system of corporate rule that it represents.
    What was different about Seattle?  It wasn't a standard, regimented protest --- more yelling at buildings.  As an insightful activist wrote before that week: "Unless the struggle against the WTO shows itself to be more than a reformist request to respect the sham of the democratic nation state, it will just be a bigger and more stressful example of the same 'direct action' we have been doing with diminishing returns in recent years.  Alternatively, if we move beyond tactical stagnation, we show that our demands go beyond tweaking labor laws of saving a particular species."  In Seattle we started moving beyond tactical stagnation --- the actions we took were diverse and fluid, yet there was overall coordination to achieve tangible goals.
    Logistically, what did we do right?  Our plan to disrupt the ministerial by preventing the delegates from entering the meeting worked.  Why?  The explanation that security forces underestimate our will and numbers doesn't make much sense.  The cops had infiltrators in our big Direct Action Network spokes-council meetings --- our plans were completely out in the open, and our numbers were obvious.  Our presence in the street empowered delegates from so-called "Third World" countries to block the meeting's negotiation from going forward, giving us an unexpected victory --- no agreement coming out of the meeting at all.  Our role in this development indicates the susceptibility of the global financial system to psychological tweaking the pressures pitting one set of delegates against another.  Unifying tolerance and solidarity helped bring Seattle closer to a general strike than at any time since 1919.  Such a general cessation of "business as usual" is the necessary precondition to establishing alternative society.
    November 30 was not just activists on the street.  Thousands of Seattle residents, not dissuaded by tear gas, joined the ranks.  It is dramatic evidence of successful movement building where "non-activists" cross the line and become "participants".
The movement must take on a life of its own --- a critical mass when each individual realizes that they have a stake in the process, has the power to participate in the process and have a responsibility to get involved though there could be dire consequences.  This signifies the potential for a true grassroots, evolutionary change in the dominant paradigm.  Paradigm shifts are an exciting but also frictional time.  The shift we saw in Seattle marked the end of "safe" but ineffectual mass protest.  While we can diminish the number of injuries and deaths by maintaining our nonviolent stance, serious action to stop the dictatorial empire builders will elicit heightened repression.  We can't expect our necessary escalation of effort and numbers to result in a bloodless or sanitary revolution.
    Yet without entering this next stage, nothing substantive for saving the natural world, indigenous cultures --- and each other --- will be accomplished.  Seattle was a beacon for organizers illuminating the direction we need to go, but there were no single leaders --- part of the beauty of the event.  Everyone in Seattle created a ferment.  Like worker bees, we contributed to the final outcome by fulfilling different roles within a grand scheme.  There's a limit to what "organizers" can do.  If we give endless teach-ins and not enough respond with sufficient action, we all lose.  Everyone needs to be an activist.
    The corporate globalization system (internationally fused capitalism to benefit the rich at the expense of the made-poor) is balanced precariously in a non-real world of electronic pulses --- money exchanges based in turn on CEOs' ability to deceive the people as to their real aims, the real meaning of life, the ecocidal consequences of mass consumerism and neocolonialist resource exploitation.  Transnational corporations don't have real homes, a community or reciprocity with others beyond a narrow circle.  Their base of support is shallow and must be bolstered by military force through take-over of national governments' sovereignty.  This is an old story, as old as feudalism, empires, slavery and oppression of the many by the powerful few.  The WTO and the larger system of which it is part are just the latest innovations to consolidate political/economic power.  On a global scale, this consolidation is now so pervasive in its power that it completely destroys indigenous cultures, wipes out species and disables fundamental ecological systems.  Countering the headlong rush of corporate rule toward the end of cultural and ecological diversity and global ecological collapse must be the dominant, over arching activism of our time if virtually anything real that we value (the Earth, real community, meaningful life, peace, etc.) is to survive.
    So where do we go from here?  The power of direct action has been reaffirmed, but is only meaningful in the context of a larger, fleshed-out campaign.  The WTO protest's success was built on the strength of teach-ins across the country, cooperation across movements, nonviolence trainings and educated respect for diversity.  Unlike the antiwar protests of the '60, this time we have the added leverage of finally focusing on the overarching system causing all the problems, not just single issue.  Now diverse movements are acting together.  Labor and environmental activists, for instance, did not often come together this way in the '60s protests.  We need to keep the momentum of the WTO Seattle experience going.  There is no magic button to push to end corporate rule.  Instead, we need to organize face to face.  But we must also focus on the slower work of building trust and solidarity across movements.  We need to reach across color and cultural barriers, not by token representation or agenda takeovers but by getting involved in each other's causes and taking the time to talk at length, listen to each other and help each other without obtrusive grandstanding.
    Dismantling the mechanisms of corporate control entails identifying targets for nonviolent action: the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Trade Advisory Councils, Business Round Tables and the Federal Court system (which gives corporations the rights of people).  We need to research in order to identify these bodies, where they meet, how they operate, where their weak points are, how to effectively dissolve these bodies and prevent the emergence of their clones by other names.  Collectively, we need to get on with the task of asking the right questions and dog our targets with the spotlight of public exposure.  We must guild networks of like-minded groups across the country and the world and set our strategic agenda (based on unifying common goals).  We must work with an eye towards corporations' assumed roles as "citizens," "players" and "persons" and reassert their true subservient status as mere instruments to serve the way, we must foster conditions that build a movement to the point of critical mass that can change the political climate and the future of the earth.  We must conscientiously avoid divisive tactics, labeling (such as saying "the anarchists" destroyed property in Seattle) and using the co-opting language of the oppressors.  Armored tanks in the street are not "peacekeepers," there was no "battle" or "riot" in Seattle.  "Battle" implies two sides engaging in violence (which is usually defined as harm to life, not property) and "riot" implies unorganized, unfocused disruption.
    No matter how appealing physical action (breaking windows) is, we need to recognize that the success or failure of revolutions hinge on the effective, uncompromising use of language and the building of a mass movement.  Despite the isolated incremental victory in Seattle, the WTO is still operating.  Even if we abolish the institution tomorrow, we would still have the rest of the system of global corporate rule to defeat.  We still have a lot of basic outreach to do (most of the country still doesn't know or understand what the Seattle WTO non-round really means), a lot of alliance building to begin or solidify and much strategic thinking to do.
    For instance, how will we deal with the likelihood of the WTO holding its next meeting in a police state where protest is put down with massacres?  What other ways can we use to bring down the WTO and other institutions of corporate governance?  ow do we prevent the emergence of similar institutions in their wake?  How do we stem public demand for cheap goods made through sweatshop labor, unsustainable exploitation of lands and processes driving the extinction of species?  How do we work with "Third World" delegations so that workers' rights, social welfare and environmental protection are seen by them as necessary to their countries' well-being and future?  How do we reconcile the need for to protect small countries from transnational corporate governance with the need to avoid installing and perpetuating political dictatorships (i.e. make real the guiding ideals of anarchism in an ever more difficult geopolitical context)?  And how do we do all this fast enough and in coordination with other efforts to prevent more irreplaceable losses of culture, species and ecological integrity while not losing the democratic values of consensus process, gradual trust-building across movements and the preservation of a nonviolent praxis along the way?  From a purely pragmatic perspective, we lose real fast if we give the weapons-rich state the excuse in the public eye to murder us en masse.
    We have a lot to think about.  We need to start doing this thinking together, to come out of closets of pacifying technology and meet face to face so real discussion of ideas can take place --- not just in the elitist choir of CIA-monitored e-mail, but out in the real world where everyone else works, talks and takes action.  We must move from the bottom up, from deep currents based on masses of unified thought waves, like rip-tides and tsunamis.  It will take a lot of us.  Leaders denote followers and become targets in isolation.  We must all be leaders.
    Some tangible steps:
    Direct Action:  he next big day of resistance currently under planning is May Day 2000, a significant day in labor history, so work with labor activists!  As with June 18, planning is decentralized.
    Outreach:  Set up a venue and participants for workshops and strategy discussion o n ending corporate dominance in your area.  Networks and organizations focusing on ending corporate rule are forming study groups and speakers bureaus, including facilitators for workshops and more intensive training.
    Join ;an existing labor/environmental alliance.  Write Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and Environment, POB 3536, Eureka, CA 95502.
    Come to the next End Corporate Dominance conference in Portland, Oregon, in late May to hook up with like-minded folk and learn more.
    For more information, contact Wolverine c/o EarthFirst! Journal, POB 1415, Eugene, OR 97440.

february-march 2000 EarthFirst!