By RICHARD HEINBERG

The Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) [in November 1999] – and the rally of somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 people from around the world to protest its policies, even its very existence – are now history. For reasons I hope to make clear below, these events may turn out to have been among the most significant of the 1990s.

Unfortunately (though quite predictably), the mainstream media grossly slanted and distorted their reportage of both the WTO meetings and the protests. For example, in this morning’s Los Angeles Times I read: “Police Chief Norm Stamper said Tuesday that he will step down, a week after his outnumbered officers watched helplessly as mobs of World Trade Organization protesters rampaged through downtown Seattle – leaving $19 million in damage and lost retail sales.”

Rampaging mobs of anarchists! Looting hordes of vandals! The Chief of Police forced to resign because he couldn’t field enough officers and use force soon enough to contain the unruly rabble! That’s the image the television networks and daily papers have tried to sear into our memories. And as for the WTO itself, its failure to forge new agreements has been presented primarily as a defeat and embarrassment for Bill Clinton, and peripherally as a blow to his goal of incorporating labor rights and environmental protections into the WTO rules.

All of this flies in the face of the testimony of those who were there. I must confess that I wasn’t in Seattle during that fateful week, but, with my wife Janet and colleagues from New College, helped organise a local anti-WTO demonstration. However, I kept in touch with friends and New College students in the rainy city, and have read many first-hand accounts circulated via the Internet.

Concerning the violence of the demonstrators, the following words from Portland student/reporter Jim Desyllas paint a picture rather different from the one given by the mainstream media:

It is important to keep in mind that the isolated group(s) breaking windows caused property damage only, and that nearly all of that was against multinationals like McDonald’s, Starbucks, the Gap, and Nike. I’ve heard of no instance of any protesters – not even the anarchists, whom I refuse to condemn – attacking any person, even in self defense. To my mind (and Gandhi, Thoreau, and Martin Luther King made essentially the same point), when the same word – violence – is used to describe both the symbolic destruction of the nonliving property of oppressive governments or corporations, and acts deliberately intended to cause direct harm to humans, then issues are only clouded.

Consider the following interview excerpt from Dr. Richard DeAndrea, who had set up a makeshift clinic in downtown Seattle during the week of protests (his words were tape recorded via telephone by a student reporter):

Finally, consider this summary from Phil Agre, in direct response to the L.A. Times quote in the first paragraph above:

There are many more first-person accounts that I’ve heard and read that are riveting, disturbing, and in some instances horrifying. I simply don’t have space to print more here.

EDUCATION FOR THE PEOPLE

So much for the “violence” associated with the protests – which was the subject of most reportage. What was almost entirely missed in the media accounts were the days of events sponsored by the International Forum on Globalization, Public Citizen, the Alliance for Democracy, Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy, labor unions, and many other nongovernmental organisations.

The following is from an observer named John Shearer, written on 3 December 1999 at 35,000 feet, on his way home from Seattle:

Every demonstrator or observer I’ve spoken with has described the Seattle forums and teach-ins as together constituting the most effective instance of public education in memory.

For what it’s worth, this is my take on what actually happened the week of 28 November: Something like 50,000 people from dozens of organisations and many countries had planned for months to come to Seattle and nonviolently protest the WTO. They arrived, organised themselves, held numerous educational forums and rallies, and on Tuesday succeeded in peacefully shutting down the WTO’s first day of meetings. Then someone very high up the governmental/corporate chain of command issued an order: Get these demonstrators off the streets, no matter what it takes!
The police, National Guard, Army Special Forces, etc., needed a pretext for violence and mass arrests, which they believed was provided them by the vandalism perpetrated by fifty or so anarchists from Eugene, Oregon (of whose presence and planned tactics the police had been warned well in advance). The police made sure the media reported the vandalism, and then went on a rampage – not against the anarchists, but against peaceful demonstrators and bystanders – gassing and beating everyone in sight, then making random arrests, torturing prisoners, and denying them access to attorneys. All of this temporarily ripped the mask of civility and democracy from the face of the American power structure – but only for those actually present to witness the events, which were poorly documented by the mainstream media.

The demonstrators learned, or were reminded of, some key facts. One is that a definition of the state is, “that institution within a society which claims a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence.” The powerful elites of the world use bribery and persuasion as means of social control whenever they can, but if directly challenged they will not hesitate to imprison, maim, or kill anyone. The Seattle protesters set out to challenge a key aspect of the global power structure, and the police response was a gauge of their very real success.

Last, there was the mainstream press’s pathetic analysis of the significance of the WTO talks’ collapse. Yes, this constituted a black eye for Clinton. What went wrong? The media referred vaguely to some member nations’ dissatisfaction with the terms of trade; little attention was devoted to delegates’ complaints about the structure of the WTO itself. Student reporter Jim Desyllas again:

It is likely that Desyllas merely wasn’t speaking to the right delegates; nevertheless, even taken with a grain of salt, his observation is worth noting. The media duly reported Clinton’s statements to the effect that the US wants labor and environmental protections incorporated into the WTO rules; and also recorded objections from the less-consuming nations. Now this was truly confusing. Weren’t the demonstrators there to insist on labor and environmental protections? It seemed as though Clinton was on their side, and his efforts were being blocked by the very nations whose land and people are in greatest need of such protection. Few news consumers were equipped to understand this puzzling set of contradictions – which made Clinton look well-meaning but ineffectual, and the protests utterly wrong-headed and counter-productive.

THE WTO: LOOKING DEEPER

In order to grasp the real conflicts within and around the WTO, some background information is required. Before the Battle of Seattle, few Americans had ever heard of the WTO. Even now, most only know that it is an international organ-isation that somehow resolves trade issues among nations.

Considered in microcosm, the WTO is an organisation created in 1996, consisting of 135 member nations. The ongoing operations of the WTO are overseen primarily by an appointed panel of lawyers who meet in Geneva to arbitrate trade disputes. They have the power essentially to invalidate national and local laws (including environmental and worker protection laws) that are deemed impediments to trade.

The WTO’s sociohistorical context is also important to understand. After World War II, the victorious nations (especially the US) saw the need to rebuild the global economy in a way that would preserve the benefits (to the elites) of colonialism, while doing away with the increasingly costly and divisive aspects of colonial rule. Their new strategy consisted of permitting the independence of former colonies (as long as they stayed outside the sphere of Soviet influence), while maintaining a trade regime that would continue to systematically transfer those “Third-World” nations’ wealth into the pockets of the “First-World” owning class. The institutions set in place then to accomplish these goals were the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT).

Since the 1970s, computerisation has eased and speeded international flows of capital. Since 1990, those flows have proliferated and accelerated to such a degree that the entire system has mutated into a new form of global casino capitalism, with the US as the undisputed rule maker and enforcer. Meanwhile, zonal trading blocs (dominated by regional elites) have emerged – principally, the European Community, the NAFTA nations, and the Asian ex-’tigers.” This is the New World Order. In the 1996 Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations, the ruling powers created the WTO as the slimmed-down, tougher, stealth succ-essor to GATT itself, with the hope of making the world uniformly safe and friendly for elite investors.

But there is an even deeper context that must be understood in order to elucidate the roots and nature of global-isation. A description of this macrocontext takes us all the way back to the origin of the first complex societies. Many thousands of years ago, human groups experiencing resource scarcity began occasionally to raid other nearby groups. Once some societies had adopted a more sedentary, horticultural existence, it became possible for a resource-stressed hunting or animal-herding group not just to raid its gardening neighbours, but to forcibly and semi-permanently enslave them, setting themselves up as a permanent ruling class. This institutionalised domination permitted – even required – the further proliferation of new social classes or castes: full-time rulers, warriors, administrators, peasants, and so on; as well as mutations in existing ideologies to valorise the rulers as gods or representatives of the gods.

But institutionalised domination has drawbacks – principally, that the payoffs from social complexity tend to diminish over time. Taxation rates eventually have to be increased, or new lands and peoples conquered, in order to acquire new energy sources to maintain the social order (since complex societies are always more costly to maintain than simpler ones). Eventually, the society may grow to become a far-flung empire. But as communications, supplies, and armies must move by foot or sailing ship across growing distances, the intensified process of resource exploitation itself becomes increasingly costly, and distant colonies are ever more likely to rebel or to be conquered by a rival empire. Thus the entire society is increasingly vulnerable to collapse.

One solution is to set up client states governed by local, indigenous elites that are still dependent upon the central power. After all, people generally prefer not to be ruled by foreigners. Also, plunder by trade between apparently independent nations is less overt or obvious than plunder by raid. Nevertheless, if one nation can control the terms of trade, it can systematically siphon off the natural wealth of entire continents. But even these more subtle means of domination will not work for long without the discovery of new energy resources and the invention of new comm-unication and trans-portation technologies.

This is the basic patt-ern of history. During the past five hundred years, Europeans – who started out with geographic, technological advantages over other potential global empire-builders – perfected the colonial, mercantilist, and neocolonial systems, but for various historical reasons the actual power centre of the empire drifted across the ocean to the US. With the arrival of fossil-fuel energy subsidies in the past century, plus the invention of the steamship, the telegraph, the airplane, and the computer, a truly global, highly integrated system of trade-based plunder has been emerged.

So: back to the present, and to the WTO. The covert but real purpose of the WTO is, simply, to facilitate global pillage. That’s why every one of its hundred rulings in the past four years has favoured corporate interests. That’s why, for example, the WTO ruled that the US cannot ban importation of shrimp caught in ways that kill sea turtles. That’s also why the US WTO trade representative is pushing for the privatisation of health care in all WTO countries, and for the easing of restrictions on forest product trade (and therefore also on logging), and on trade in genetically modified foods.

Clearly, if President Clinton really wanted substantive environmental and worker protections built into WTO rules, he would have sought that goal four years ago, when the rules were set in place. What he is asking for now is political cover – mere window dressing. He knows as well as anyone that environmental and labor protection is antithetical to the very nature and structure of the WTO.

Still, we haven’t answered the question posed above: Why would less-consuming nations oppose such protections? Do these countries want slave labor? Do they want their forests liquidated?

First, the trade ministers of the less-consuming countries generally represent not the general population, but their nations’ elites – who are dependent clients of the elites in the more-consuming countries. The former want more cash to finance their pet projects, and in some cases to pad their personal Swiss bank accounts. The less corruptible among them fear that wealthy nations’ new-found concern over labor rights and the environment is simply a sham. Up to this point, the message of the more-consuming nations to their poorer neighbours has been: Sell us your labor and raw materials cheap, and with the proceeds you will eventually get rich like us! (Of course, that’s not how any nation ever became prosperous, but who reads history?) Now the less-consuming-nation trade reps are wary that the consuming elites will even further disadvantage poorer countries by writing rules that appear to protect workers and turtles, while actually just cementing the elites’ control over markets.

But looking beyond the less-consuming nations’ elites and trade reps, what about the common people in places like Malaysia, Thailand, Nigeria, or Venezuela? What do they want? Many of them do indeed want jobs, even low-paying jobs. They have little choice: they’ve been systematically forced off their traditional lands and forced to migrate to cities. Or, alternatively, they’ve been lured into cities by the promise of attaining a more-consuming lifestyle. For people in poor nations, television and advertising serve as a perpetually dangling carrot; the drawbacks of the industrial lifestyle, and the impossibility of all six billion human ever realising it, are seldom discussed.

The result is near-universal dependence on the global financial/industrial system. Ultimately, everyone must have a job (except for members of the owning class). No one is self-sufficient. Traditional cultures dissolve into a global monoculture shaped by McDonald’s, Nike, and Disney.

END GAME?

In the end, that’s what many of the protesters were decrying. Their complaint was not just about sea turtles or sneaker sweat shops. It was about the whole rotten system.

Gradually, throughout the 1990s, the elites have made it clear that they intend to deal with the diminishing returns on their investments in social and technological complexity – and with the immanent overshoot of the global carrying capacity, and the exhaustion of fossil fuel resources – not by fundamentally changing course (developing solar fuels, encouraging conservation, moving toward economic equity), but by pushing existing trends to their limits. If a new energy source can be found (Nuclear fusion? Biotechnology?), so much the better. But relinquishment of control is not an option. The plan: Sacrifice whole regions (Africa first, then South America and Asia) to the engines of consumption and commerce. There are too many people anyway. Whatever is required, keep the engines running at full speed. Keep the middle classes in the more-consuming nations as fat and happy as possible (given the gradual exhaustion of resources), because if their allegiance falters, the entire system could be threatened.

That’s why Seattle was important. It represented alliances between popular, grassroots networks in the less-consuming nations and middle-class ones in more-consuming nations. These are alliances that truly threaten the elites’ power and control.

The message from Seattle: The 1990s are over. The New World Order will not be achieved and maintained without organised, active resistance. Like it or not, we are entering an era of greater polarisation, and the increasingly naked exercise of brutal force on the part of the elites in order to protect their advantaged position.
The new era dawning may not be comfortable. But it won’t be boring. ___________________________________________________________
Richard Heinberg is the author of Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age (Quest Books: 1995), Celebrate the Solstice: Honoring the Earth’s Seasonal Rhythms Through Festival and Ceremony (Quest Books: 1994), and A New Covenant With Nature. He also publishes Museletter, an excellent monthly newsletter exploring issues in cultural renewal. Subscriptions are US$18 per year. Send to: 1433 Olivet Rd, Santa Rosa, CA 95401, USA. The above is from Museletter No. 95