<nettime> The World after Seattle

[Ivo Skoric <ivo@reporters.net>]

A few days ago I spoke to a Japanese exchange student from 
Seattle. She participated in the protest but left when she smelled 
tear gas and realized she could get beaten by the police. Coming 
to the protest was a part of her education in the U.S., as she 
understood - and Japanese are serious about that, it seems, but 
getting beaten up by the U.S. police was kind of too much of an 
extracurricular activity she was ready to take. She has a course in 
American Politics at the university and her teacher offered her and 
other students to go to the protest and get credited for that. 90% of 
her class, including her, took up on the offer. She was right there, a 
first hand, non-partisan observer, she did it solely for a purpose of 
learning about American political process. And what did she 
observe? She observed that police caused/started the violence. 
They freaked out, she told me. They just started shooting rubber 
bullets and tear gas into the crowd for no reason at all. Then the 
'anarchists' broke out and started smashing windows, setting fires 
and breaking stuff. And she left. She is very careful, polite and 
oblique when asked what does that make her think about the U.S. 
political process.

Unexpectedly or not, Clinton in the end sided with the protesters, 
allowing the trade talks to sink ungracefully and drawing the angry 
wrath of Washington Post, Newsweek and other editorial pens. 
They all made the same assumption: Clinton is protecting the U.S. 
labor, all right, near-sightedly though, but he is definitely hurting the 
third-world workers by trying to tie the labor laws to trade talks. 
What's the matter with him? His place is to protect the rich 
faceless corporations, not think about the quality of life of some 
poor illiterate nobodies in some country that he probably can't even 
find on the map. Plus, the delegates from the third world countries 
were furious. That was their general take on the collapse of WTO 
talks. But they never seemed to ask themselves whether the 
delegates from the third world countries were the legitimate 
representatives of the people from those countries. I highly doubt 
so. The majority of third world countries are run by oligarchies that 
are deep in the pockets of multi-national corporations. They just 
look our for their share in the looting of their peoples and how to 
stash their off-shore accounts.

Anarchists that, perhaps not intentionally, made such a reckless 
stand of American president at the WTO conference more 
politically understandable, destroyed quite a list of stores: Bon 
Marche, Carroll Fine Jeweler, Washington Mutual Bank, FAO 
Schwarz, Banana Republic, Warner Bros Store, Speedo, Nike 
Town, Planet Hollywood, Old Navy, Eileen Fisher, Nordstrom, 
Seafirst Bank and two (2) Starbucks caffes. Starbucks, once an 
epithome of the Northwestern cool, in recent years became viewed 
as everything that went wrong with the U.S., as something that 
took away and destroyed the tradition of the Northwestern laid 
back grande latte lifestyle, so a special hatred is reserved for it. In 
the Austin Powers sequel Starbucks was chosen as headquarters 
for Dr. Evil (I am sure that Starbucks paid for 'product placement'; I 
am not sure if they were cheerful about how they were placed...), 
and in The Fight Club, the Starbucks caffe is destroyed with a giant 
metal ball in one of the "project mayhem" operations - and the 
theater (at least when I was watching it) was screaming in positive 
excitement. The black clad troops on the streets of Seattle 
definitely reminded me of the 'project mayhem', though. 
Newspapers say they come from Eugene, Oregon. Media link them 
to John Zerzan, writer who made his home there, anarchist and a 
close friend of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Eugene must be a 
swell place. J.Palahchiuk, who wrote The Fight Club, also comes 
from around there, and Valdas Analeuskas, a Lithuanian dissident 
who just recently wrote a book about his disappointment with the 
U.S., lives in Eugene. Eugene is very high on my list of places to 
visit.

One last observation: for quite a while capital and those who 
control it move freely across the globe, discussing things that 
annoy them, like tariffs and trade barriers in talks behind closed 
doors, while the rest of us are still subjected to customs, visas, 
immigration laws, and other anachronistic chains of the nation 
state. In 19th century Marx envisioned capitalists entrenched in 
their nation states and globally organized work-force dictating 
terms. He was painfully wrong - it happened exactly the opposite: 
the nation states were retained and politicians employed to make 
work-force nationally conscious, parcelized, making them more 
pliable to exploitation and more marketable as consumers, while 
capital and those who own it float freely over the national borders 
like some modern day nobility. The story of Seattle shows that this 
is changing now: bringing unions and environmentalists, French 
and US farmers, political organizations and Medecins Sans 
Frontieres together. The new technology is out and easily 
accessible by more and more people - the Internet - that makes 
that change possible. Now not only the capital is global, but those 
who produce it and depend on its distribution are becoming a part 
of the global equation, too. This makes the process of globalization 
more socially acceptable.

ivo

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net