Thread by @Itmechr3

1. On the 20th anniversary of the Battle of Seattle a lot of people are focusing on the role unions played in the movement that basically stopped the WTO in its tracks. This is almost pure revisionism, the WTO wasn't defeated by organized labor,

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2. it was defeated by leftist direct action campaigns and a wave of revolutions. The crucial part of this story, and the part that the unions don't want to talk about because they essentially weren't involved, was what happened after Seattle.

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3. A Zapatista-founded international network called Peoples' Global Action, which had been heavily involved in the Seattle protests (summit hopping was actually the Zapatistas' idea in the first place), began to get involved in a series of other

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4. movements across the world, from the massive Indian peasant anti-GMO protests to the Water and Gas Wars in Bolivia. What followed was a wave of revolutions, starting in Argentina in 2001 where workers seized their factories, took the streets,

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5. and organized mass horizontal networks of neighborhood councils to fight against the Argentinian government and the IMF structural adjustments it was attempting to implement. They ran out something like 5 successive governments and nearly

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6. succeeded in carrying out the successful first socialist revolution in 2 decades, but the movement was blunted when Cristina Fernández de Kirchner took office and declared that Argentina would do the unthinkable: default on its debts.

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7. Fiscal and literal rebellion spread across Latin America. In Venezuela, a massive wave of protests reversed an American backed coup against Hugo Chávez. In Bolivia, an incredibly powerful and radical Indigenous Aymara movement allied itself

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8. with unions of coca growers and eventually urban trade unions against attempts to privatize Bolivia's gas and water systems. Like the protests in Argentina, the Bolivian protests featured massive horizontal networks, democratic seizures of

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9. utilities, and local and community assemblies. But the Bolivians had another weapon at their disposal: road blocks. The Bolivian left, as I have said elsewhere and will continue to say, are the fucking Paganini of road blocks. No one before or

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10. since have used them as well as the Bolivians, who brought down two successive governments in 2003 and 2005 and nearly succeeded in destroying the Bolivian state by blocking every major road in the country and literally starving out the ruling

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11. class. Eventually in 2005 Evo Morales, a leader in the coca growers movement, decided to prop up the government and end the protests, and was subsequently swept into office in the 2006 elections. Meanwhile in Europe an attempt by the G8 to

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12. meet in Genoa was met with essentially outright insurrection. Something like 200,000 protesters fought a newly militarized police force in the streets for day, pioneering new tactics like the Ya Basta marshmallow bloc, where people would

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13. basically cover themselves in pillows and mattresses until they looked like the fucking Michelin man and were impervious to police riot batons and then bowl over police lines. Every subsequent WTO and G8 meeting not held under full-scale

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14. dictatorships (like the 2000 WTO conference in Doha) has been met with protests and rioting. These direct action campaigns hit on two fronts. They exposed the giant global bureaucracy at the center of the world economy, forcing organizations

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15 that hitherto thrived on anonymity to justify their existence to the public (and increasingly angry revolutionaries), and they hit the IMF and its allied governments by essentially issuing a global threat to anyone who tried to implement

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16. structural adjustments that the revolutions would be coming for them next. The WTO was stopped in its tracks and the IMF nearly collapsed entirely, as @davidgraeber documented here.
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-…

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17. The initial success of the movement was absolutely stunning and took the ruling class both domestically and internationally completely by surprise. Their response was wars. @davidgraeber tends to focus on Iraq but I think a better example of

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18. the military response to the ascendance of left-wing social movements in Mexico. In 2006 3 different left wing movements sent the Mexican bourgeoisie into full scale panic. AMLO, the current Mexican president, almost certainly won the 2006

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19. presidential election, but Felipe Calderón was essentially installed as president instead. AMLO led a mass protest movement in an attempt to contest the elections and caused a massive crisis in the Mexican political system.

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20. Meanwhile the Zapatistas were running a movement called The Other Campaign in which Zapatista representatives visited every Mexican state and held assemblies about Indigenous rights, anti-capitalism, LGBTQ rights, feminism, and a variety of

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21. other left-wing causes. This campaign also resulted in mass mobilizations and forced alterations to the Mexican constitution to protect Indigenous rights and in theory protect against the worst effects of neoliberalism.

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22. At the same time a completely unrelated strike and occupation of the central square in Oaxaca by the powerful Mexican teachers movement set off a full scale revolution when the police attacked the sleeping teachers in their tents in the early

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23. morning of June 14th. The teachers fought back and held out long enough for the city to awaken to a war zone of tear gas and rubber bullets. In a pattern incredibly familiar to anyone paying attention to the current wave of revolutions, when

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24. ordinary Oaxacans saw people getting the absolute shit beaten out of them for no reason whatsoever they got incredibly pissed off and joined the fighting on the side of the teachers. When the police opened fire in to the crowds with live

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25. ammunition, the crowds literally ran them out of the city and began setting up barricades to stop them from returning. Within about a month a network of direct democratic councils called the (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca) APPO

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26. had essentially taken control of the city. Women stormed local radio stations and transformed them into revolutionary media outlets that did everything from send messages between the barricades to allow victims of police violence to speak.

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27. Eventually the APPO was weakened by a takeover by local politicians and the 800,000 strong megamarches faded. 5 months later the police retook the city, accompanied ominously by the Mexican army in a sign of what was to come.

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28. The APPO's are hunted down and the government backed paramilitaries that had been killing Oaxacan protesters (and most famously Indymedia journalist Brad Will) were given free reign. Felipe Calderón's repose to these three crises was to start

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29. the War on Drugs. The deployment of the Mexican army led to an unprecedented increase in violence as the army, police, cartels, paramilitaries, and self defense groups shot each other and everyone around them to pieces. The death toll is

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30. staggering, with estimates ranging from 160,000 to over 500,000. All sides of the conflict targeted the left-wing social movements. Most famously in 2014 a coalition of cartels and police (to the extent the two can even be separated) kidnapped

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31. 43 Mexican students from the radical Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College and slaughtered them. The dramatic rise in violence was incredibly effective at suppressing the resurgent Mexican left and similar military-bourgeoisie-cartel coalitions

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32. showed up across the globe to roll back the gains of the revolutionaries. But we should understand that the revolutionary wave made real gains, even if it was unable to consolidate them. The IMF was forced to do debt forgiveness and had

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33. retreated from most of the globe by 2008. What ultimately saved it, ironically, was the crisis of global capitalism, which gave it a way back into solvency through looting the wrecked economies of the post-crash world. Even that limited

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34. victory, however, is an absolutely stunning accomplishment when you look at the history of global anti-IMF movements. The Soviets basically couldn't do shit about the IMF, OPEC and the ENTIRE G-77 at the height of their power in the middle of

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35. the greatest crisis the world had seen since the Great Depression couldn't stop them. What did was a bunch of anarchist punks attacking their offices literally every time they had a meeting and Latin American revolutionaries going into revolt

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36. and throttling the bourgeoisie until their only choices were to lose the IMF or lose their countries. That is the legacy of Seattle. Direct Action works. It is quite possibly the ONLY thing that works. And if we're willing to stand up and

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37. fight the most powerful forces in the world head on WE CAN WIN. Pretty soon it's going to be our turn to go into revolt. The alternative is no long socialism or barbarism, it is socialism or death. But we must remember that the ruling class is

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38 fucking terrified of us. They were willing to make their own conferences basically impossible to carry out just to make it seem like we can't wing. The only thing they have left is that illusion, and if we shatter it we will win.

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