En breve
En 1999, en un carnaval de no violencia creativa, 70.000 manifestantes cerraron la reunión de la Organización Mundial del Comercio en Seattle, obteniendo una victoria contra el neoliberalismo y lanzando el movimiento por la justicia mundial.
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Teoría clave
When 50,000 lefties take the streets to confront corporate power, you’re going to get 50,000 different critiques. To try to unify all that message diversity, we designed a “framing action.” The day before the big protest, four climbers dropped a massive banner 300 feet above Seattle’s main commuter highway that framed the action as a choice between democracy and the WTO. The photo of the banner went global on the day of the mass action, summing up in stark and simple terms what the Battle in Seattle was all about.
Táctica clave
The shut-down of the WTO blended both soft and hard blockade technologies. Of the thousands who participated, all but a few hundred simply joined hands and stood shoulder to shoulder with their comrades to prevent delegates from getting through. However, several hundred people used lock-boxes, chains, barrels, and other hard blockade technology to hold key intersections where we knew our people power would be lightest. With art and costumes and good cheer, we made these gear-intensive technical “lockdowns” look beautiful, not scary.
Principios clave
Whether your YES! was the freedom to keep making the Roquefort cheese that your great-grandfather made or to continue living in an ancient rainforest unpoisoned by Big Oil or to keep your good union job and not have it outsourced to a sweatshop, you shared a NO! with billions of others. This “unity in diversity” was present on the streets with Teamsters and turtles linking arms, and in the “movement of movements” that organized the protest.
Before the WTO uprising in Seattle, relatively few people in the Global North questioned the process of corporate globalization and so-called “free” trade. Seattle jolted the entire Overton window sharply to the left. Fair trade and other alternatives moved out of the fringe. The idea that militant mass action could stop corporate globalization in its tracks became not only think-able, but popular. Every major summit for the next two years was met with a mass protest.