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Patrick Reinsborough has been involved in environmental work for the past 10 years working in the broader Earth First movement. In the last couple of years he’s been working as a grassroots co-ordinator with the Rainforest Action Network, which is an international network of direct action orientated environmental & human rights group working to protect the last of the worlds forests and support traditional forest people. He took part in the action against the WTO in Seattle on 30 Nov 1999. This interview was recorded for the DAAA radio show on BARC FM (Belfast Autonomous Radio Collective), a pirate radio station which ran for a few months in 2000.

Tell us about the Nov 30 Day of Action in Seattle. What happened, how was it organised? Give us an eyewitness account of the event.

Through the tear gas dodging the plastic bullets… What happened in Seattle was really amazing for American politics, particularly radical politics. There’re lots of people working on their own issues & campaigns but it’s been very rare that people have been able to unite & take on the big picture to really target corporate domination, to attack that & get that out to the world. The World Trade Organisation action represented an incredible opportunity for that, an incredibly broad range of people were able to get involved in it. There were a lot of people coming together, environmentalists, human rights activists, indigenous sovereigntists, trade union activists - you had people working on issues all around the world.

The WTO is an example of how incredibly twisted capitalism is. It’s a new global government that’s being imposed upon us, it’s a rule by the corporations of the corporations for the corporations so they can push their extremist economic policies of neo-liberalism & free trade down our throats to put the profits of corporations before any considerations of the environment, any consideration of human rights, any considerations about local communities.

There’s a lot of different levels of critique of the WTO & the one I think stole the day thankfully was the one that said the WTO are a bunch of wankers behind closed doors & they need to be abolished! There’s no way to reform the WTO, we need to literally shut them down & bring the worlds attention to it by doing so. There was a call put out for Nov 30, the first day of their meeting in Seattle, to physically blockade their meeting, to prevent them from meeting, that call went out far & wide & brought together lots of different people to Seattle.

There was a convergence with a group called Art & Revolution who bring together puppeteers, performance artists as well as political activists & they’d been organising a series of convergences around North America for the last couple of years. So a big one was planned for the 10 days leading up to the day of action a time for people to get together and make puppets, props, banners, to form affinity groups & build any technical devices needed to help the blockade. It was a very simple framework, put out the call & hope that people would come & sure enough people came by the hundreds & thousands.

Do you know how many people were there?

Well there’s lots of different reports. In the actual direct action that was planned we met in the morning & the goal was to shut down the meeting there was between 5 & 10 thousand that actually showed up at 7am in the morning with an affinity group that did that. But that was just the core. There was also a number of other mobilisations with an incredible cross section of civic society there to fight against the WTO with a lot of different critiques.

One of the things that brought a lot of people into the city was a labour march that was organised by the US’ largest Union AFLICO which is an umbrella corporate union & they’ve a very limited critique of the WTO. They wanted some labour side agreements & they wanted their seat at the table, to have their rubber stamp on corporations terrorising the planet rather than disrupt them. They brought in 40,000 people for their march & it was set to be less confrontational and it had a legal permit to pass within 3 blocks of the Seattle Convention Centre where the meeting was happening but because so many thousands of people came along for that there were multiple waves of people who came along to join the blockade. So the total numbers of people who were involved in the actions throughout the day probably ranged from somewhere between 80-100,000. It’s the kind of thing where nobody knows but there was a hell of a lot of people on the streets.

I’ve heard there were good links made between Environmental activists & the Trade Union movement which is something we’ve seen in the UK with Reclaim The Streets hooking up with the Liverpool Dockers. Is this happening a lot in the States?

I’d say that Seattle has been the culmination of a lot of work that’s been done to bring environmentalists & trade union representatives together. I think it was very successful. One of my favourite images from the whole day was this giant burly teamster truck driver holding a sign saying ‘teamsters & turtles together at last at a street rave next to 250 people dressed in sea turtle costumes (sea turtle protection has been gutted by the WTO). That’s an image that I think resonated with a lot of people. There was incredible solidarity in the streets things, that don’t usually happen, long haired scruffy forest defenders who’ve the real skills to technically blockade things with their lock boxes & tripods & barricades effectively set up & are joined by fairly rank & file trade unionists.

With the labour march the trade union bosses kind of came in and tried to pull their people back saying ‘no you can’t hang out with those radicals who’re trying to blockade the meeting, how are we supposed to march in and demand our seat at the table if they’re blockading the meeting’. They managed to pull back and actually thwart some of these alliances that were happening, but they happened none the less.

One of the processions that started at 7am in the morning of Nov 30 was led by locked out steelworkers so they defied the conventional wisdom of CAO and the mainstream unions and they said ‘we’re forming an important alliance’ and they were kind of the bridge between both worlds and they helped to make sure that tens of thousands of people broke off from the labour march and supported the blockades and that was the key to the success of the whole day.

It’s really inspiring to see those connections been made rather than the usual arguments ‘they don’t want anyone to have jobs’, ‘they don’t care about the environment’.

Yeah that’s the classic that’s always used by the bosses in the United States to keep the workers and environmentalists separated, while the bosses screw the workers and the environment. One of the great phrases that’s come out of these great alliances that the steelworkers are using is that ‘there’s no jobs on a dead planet’. The response that we use, which starts to get people thinking, is in order to save the planet we need to restructure the economy to be a place for people and we need to put that back in balance.

In Seattle there was a lot of police violence and people getting tear gassed. What was you experience of this?

I got tear gassed a lot, the police used tear gas and pepper spray. One of the most disturbing things we’ve discovered recently is that they ran out of tear gas and relied on the military to provide them with more tear gas. They were either provided with some sort of non-lethal nerve agent or with tear gas that was contaminated with some sort of insecticide that operates as a neurotoxin. It shows how out gunned they were cause there were so many people on the streets. Instead of being able to rely upon the traditional methods of arresting them all and carting them off to jail, they relied on brutality. They started brutalizing people early in the morning. People had deployed around 7.30 and 8am and the entire convention centre was blockaded. I think that’s probably about the time that the local police department started getting pressure from the Clinton administration and the various powers that be saying ‘I can’t believe you’re gonna let something as lowly as the people of this country get in the way of us having our very important free trade talks’.

A lot of officials of different governments got gassed as well?

Well yeah after that point they sort of strategically broke one area one entrance so that they could start getting delegates in. I was at the intersection where they first chose to use tear gas and from monitoring their communications we had 2 or 3 mins warning as the order passed around their communications network to use chemical agents so we had warning and the opportunity to deescalate the whole intersection thing. It was a fairy rowdy protest, people were boisterous and the word spread through that they were about to use tear gas so everybody deescalated the situation by sitting down and locking arms and saying ‘we’re not moving, we’re not moving’ cause theoretically the police in the United States are only supposed to use chemical agents when their lives are threatened and so we were making it very clear that these protestors were no threat. They proceeded to use it any way and to use a great deal of pepper spray.

It’s brutal stuff the extracts of jalapeño and javañero peppers which are incredible hot peppers. They spray it in your eyes, your mouth and you nose, it’s much worse than tear gas actually cause it’s hard to get out and it just burns, you feel like you’re about to die. They just used tons and tons of tear gas and right away started firing plastic bullets into the crowd to disperse this area and just charged in with their batons and started whacking everybody.

You mentioned before in the press conference they tried to deny that this was going on.

Yeah. There was a press conference that the police had within half an hour of the first attacks on the protest and the attacks ran all day after this point. They denied that they were using any plastic bullets but fortunately there were activists that had gone to the press conference and sort of hijacked it and were able to hold up the plastic bullets and say ‘these are what they are shooting at us, are you denying that they are shooting this’. All day long it was just a joke, even the media knew they were lying cause they were out on the streets and were getting tear gassed - several camera crews. There was a lot of activist media but this was the corporate media from the local news stations and their tv crews got beat. There was actual footage on the local television.

Global days of action have been happening for awhile now, before this was June 18, and there’ve been getting bigger and bigger. What do you see as the future for this and what long term movement can we build from these global days of action?

Well I think that’s a really really important question. It’s something that we’ve seen at one level works. We can turn a lot of people out in different cities on these days and I think it helps people’s local organising - to know there’s going to be related actions all over the world. I think that model of saying to people that you organise whatever is appropriate in your community is a good one, it provides for local autonomy and it provides for diversity. Those have got to be the cornerstones of any global movement. What I’d like to see us doing and I’ve seen some of this in the critiques of June 18 is that we need to get a much deeper understanding of the complexities of the system that we’re fighting. I think a lot of resistance that we can put out there to the system actually in some way strengthens it cause they see that. It’s a very resistant system they rely on an incredible lot of propaganda to keep the majority of people in line and to marginalize any criticism of their system and the incredible destructiveness of capitalism. So we have to be very careful and strategic and find ways that we can really disrupt things in a way that will create the sort of mind bomb that will win us more allies and build on the solidarity that we’ve had.

Seattle represents a lot of important lessons in the sense that in the so called democracies of the global north there’s a real limit where you can just get enough people where they rely so much on our obedience to keep this system going and when we find ways to withdraw our obedience in a mass action that is truly disruptive I think it’s a very powerful thing. We have to constantly learn from our mistakes and build a stronger movement. It’s very easy to become the permanent resistance – oh another day of action lets go do this or lets take over a building or as happened in Seattle and interesting phenomenon was about the black blocs that were functioning there.

They were organised separately from the mass action that went on cause the mass action had various guidelines for non-violence, to be as inclusive as possible, that there would be no property destruction. So separately some of the various anarchists around north America and I’m sure joined by allies around the world formed a black bloc where they were all masked up so they couldn’t be identified and attacked symbolic corporate targets - Nike, the Gap, Fidelity Investments - smashed some windows and destroyed some signs. I think the overall estimates, I don’t know if they can be believed, that the Seattle police put out was that $3million worth of damage had been done.

This has been incredibly controversial and very divisive unfortunately the way different groups and different political critiques involved in this alliance have reacted to that. A lot of the groups that had organised the mass action were very displeased that this had happened, they felt they stole the story away, needless to say the media focused on that, the police used it as a cover to hide their brutality to say ‘people were rioting and they were breaking windows’.

I think it raises a lot of questions about the need to be creative, the need to not be constrained to traditional protest methods but the need to also understand how to work most strategically. I don’t necessarily have an opinion about the actions the black bloc took on that day. It’s important to draw that distinction - people who are working above ground and people who organise mass actions need to be very careful and make sure they’re not jeopardising the work of other people. It’s very important that we never called property destruction ‘violence’ for instance which is what the media likes to do.

Unfortunately some of the groups that were involved in organising the mass action were not as good about that. I think that we also have to realise that smashing some windows on some multinational corporation’s store front, y’know they’re a lot stronger than that, their system is much much stronger than that and those type of actions which may be reaffirming in the short term, in some ways it just makes it easier for them to tromp out the storm troopers and gun us all down in the streets.

Yeah it’s something that I have experienced in London for June 18. It's very euphoric whenever McDonalds was getting smashed up but then you know it ends up throwing stones at three police that get caught behind when ever they run out. Where does it lead on to, there’s not a lot of thought in it, it’s just getting carried away in the moment and not trying to think well what are we actually trying to achieve. It’s easy to get caught up in that.

That certainly happened to some extent but overwhelmingly I think the lesson of Seattle was that it was incredible how strategic people were. People came there for a specific action, it was thought out in terms of a framework for affinity groups to take action. What we can do is disrupt this meeting by blockading it, here is where all the hotels are, here’s the maps, all that information was available to affinity groups when they arrived in town, they had a few days to plan, they had a framework created of actions.

Our spokes councils were happening every night and representatives from each of the clusters of affinity groups would come and one person would speak on their behalf and say ‘we’re gonna take this section of the pie’. The area around the convention centre was divided up into a pie, into 13/14 different slices and that framework of saying ‘do what every you’re gonna do but lets keep the common goal of shutting down all traffic into the convention centre’. It became a very powerful direct action because the message was there - why were tens of thousands of people putting their safety on the line by risking tear gas and pepper spray and concussion grenades and risking arrest and why are they doing that to disrupt this meeting and it did make, in America, (where the World Trade Organisation was completely unknown) the front page of every newspaper and the first part of every television broadcast, so it was incredibly effective that way. In the short term it made massive leaps forward in the campaign to educate people about the horrors of corporate globalisation but we’ll see what does it mean for the long term and how will these alliances be continued.

These days of actions are openly organised, it’s not an underground thing. People are saying that we’ve to stand up and be counted and go out and do these things and it’s just by having enough people to go ahead and do that. How important is that?

I think for me it’s very clear I mean I’m an above ground organiser. In America we have a real police state, there are these 2 levels between the freedoms we supposedly have and the actually reality of police repression against activists. That’s encouraged a lot of people to organise underground. To me the lesson from the American experience is that that’s a very dangerous model. It allows you to be marginalized, and separated from a community that can support you. Ultimately it can make it easier for them to liquidate you.

Some of the Earth First! organisers in California who were actually bombed in 1990. Judy Barry & Darrel Cherny were organisers making the same kinda connections bringing together timber workers & forest activists. Then the FBI came in & charged them with being terrorists for transporting a bomb that had been used to attempt to murder them. There was a political trial & they were set up for this. Now it’s pretty clear that two activists with a 25 year record of non-violent struggle hadn’t over night turned to transporting anti-personnel mines in their car but the government was able to use it as an opportunity. Now if they had been underground organisers there would be no way for the community to rise up & support & defend them. The key to them being able to defend themselves was being above ground.

That said & done I think in the organising of Seattle a lot of us are learning more, as we rely on the internet the need for encryption because a lot of our e-mails were monitored. There’s a time & need for certain actions that require privacy but in general we need to be screaming our critiques from the roof tops & creating inclusive direct actions where more and more people can come out & can take that stand. More & more people are getting ready to do that.

A lot of people are saying that with this new rise in technology people have so much better communication and has enabled days of action like this, and has enabled people to be in really quick contact all over the world. What’s your experience of this?

E-mail has been an incredible tool in organising all of these days of actions. In the work that I do it’s an incredible tool for communicating with people all around the world, out network could never communicate without it. I think we have to be careful to not fall into the technophilia of the new world that this is somehow gonna save the world. I think it is great for communicating but it’s also just one tool. When people need to work out the ground rules of what their ideologies are and what their alliances are based upon I think that that needs to happen in a more substantive way that can happen over e-mail. E-mail’s great for continuing networks, it’s great for communicating between networks I don’t think it’s good for building networks.

What’s the nugget of knowledge that you can leave us with that you have gleaned from your experiences in Seattle?

If I was to boil it down to what I personally learned I think that we need to be very strategic in picking our targets. As we throw our bodies onto the gears of the machine we need to find the right gears to throw them on. We’re planning to build upon people’s awareness of the WTO and to take it beyond that and to say it’s really about corporate domination. We’re planning to do a similar thing on Wall Street, to actually shut down Wall Street on May 1^st. To get tens of thousands of people to come there and say business as usual is killing the planet, financial capitalism is robbing people of their homes it’s annihilating fragile ecosystems and indigenous peoples and we’ve got to shut it down. I hope May 1^st can be a day that we can reclaim for action around the world and people can be as strategic as possible in building their local actions and also do the outreach and alliances. Spend 80% of your time doing your own work and 20% of your time going and supporting other people’s work, that’s how you build real alliances - when you start showing that basic solidarity and then we can start becoming a force that is formidable and hopefully we can start making some real changes and turn around this doomsday economy before it kills us all.

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