A deeper democracy
On December 4th, members of the Boggs Center journeyed to Ann Arbor to meet with students to talk about what we have learned from our movement experiences that might help them navigate the growing fascist atmosphere descending on their campus and campuses around the country.
Among us, we carried more than 60 years of history, including activism sparked by the 1967 rebellion, anti-Vietnam war organizing, the Black Panther Party, and deep engagement with local, visionary organizing work.
We acknowledged that we were gathering on the anniversary of the murder of Fred Hampton in 1969 by the FBI and Chicago Police. It was an important place to begin thinking about the future, as we have much to understand about the workings of state violence against peoples organizing for justice. We also have much to learn from Hampton’s brilliance as an organizer and his vision of a “rainbow coalition” that could create a new kind of democracy.
It was also the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Seattle. We were not able to explore what this means to us today, but I think it is critically important for us to reflect on the organizing efforts at the end of the 20th Century that set the stage for much of what is unfolding in this century.
In 1999 more than 50,000 activists converged on the city of Seattle and shut down the annual meeting of the World Trade Organization. The WTO represented the largest and most powerful expression of global, corporate capitalism. It was completely shut down and forced to call off its annual meeting, sending delegates home shaken by the experience.
The demonstrations were unexpected by government and corporate elites who hid in hotel rooms as people using imaginative tactics of nonviolent direct actions, marching bands, giant puppets, and a tendency to wear turtle costumes claimed the streets. Small groups had been planning for months, organizing, refining ideas and tactics. Coming from hundreds of local organizations, especially those engaged in protecting the planet, advocating human rights and fair labor practices, people asserted a collective power that has found echoes in global mobilizations against war, economic exploitation, Occupy Wallstreet, Black Lives Matters, and Palestinian solidarity work. Relationships, strategies and tactics that evolved on the streets of Seattle helped forge the development of the World Social Forums. These provided an invaluable international context to challenge the economic and military policies of neo liberalism. These efforts helped shift global alignments and enabled us to see that “Another world is possible.”
The demonstrators were met with brutal repression. The Washington National Guard joined the Seattle police in attacking demonstrators with rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray and direct violence. But the demonstrations brought into global consciousness the brutal reality of the consequences of a connected extractive capitalism that was destroying much of the planet, exploiting its people, and devising ways to destroy democratic efforts to create more just relationships and ways of living.
Those who came to Seattle were not only against globalization efforts by capital. They embodied visions of a world defined by a global commitment to justice, to human rights, to peaceful, democratic decision making. They imagined what Michel Hardt and Toni Negri called a new “multitude” converging for an open society, shaped by direct democratic governance, emphasizing local, decentralized ways of deciding how to live in common with one another and the earth.
With an onslaught against the action by the mainstream media, the election of George Bush, and the catastrophe of 9/11, the movement lost its focus.
Today that vision seems very far away. But its power to move multitudes in unexpected ways offers us a path toward a new, “deeper democracy.”