The battle of Seattle

Seattle, 30 November 1999, was a defining moment for the global anticapitalist movement. This was day the movement, which had been growing over the previous five years, finally became conscious of its power.

Years of grassroots action in the USA culminated in the siege of the WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle. Young people had been at the heart of numerous campaigns against corporate America in the Clinton years.

A new generation of activists on campuses across the USA and Canada became politicised by the invasion of the mind-snatchers as the big corporations moved into the classrooms.

Faced with the sheer hubris of money, student politics moved on from the politics of identity and introspection to a strong anti-corporatism - aiming to turn back the agents of Nike, Coca-Cola and McDonalds with their "free education packs".

University authorities resorted to censorship and blackmail against their students anticorporate branding campaigns - terrified of offending big name sponsors. Such heavy-handed attempts only radicalised the campuses even more. Student groups investigated the operations of the big corporations away from their campuses and found that the money used to bribe their administrators was sucked out of sweatshop labour in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and China - the one-dollar-a-day impoverished billions of the Third World.

Seattle put it all together. As Manning Marable said later:

"The demonstrations in Seattle showed that growing numbers of Americans are recognising that all of these issues - Third World sweatshops, the destruction of unions...

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