The Battle of Seattle

As it turns out, 1999 may go down in history as more important than 1989. The latter year promised a sequence of endings — communism, the French Revolution, history itself. More than the Berlin Wall was supposed to come down. Every gesture of the twentieth-century demurral against capitalism would also disappear. While the movement against state control over the economy had been gaining ground since the middle 1970s, it was only after the Soviet Empire collapsed that Western political leaders declared “the era of big government” over. Now, unbridled free market capitalism would be the one true form of social organization. Elites and intellectuals would go on to lose all historical memory — of the IWW, the sit-down strikes of 1937, the creation of the modern welfare state. Or, if remembered, they would be recalled as fitful episodes in the long nightmare of social democracy from which we awoke in 1989.

The Battle in Seattle may have changed all that — and not just in the minds of romantic leftists. For the first time in perhaps a half-century, the “labor question” is back on the table: In this new global economy, people are asking, what will be the status of those who sweep the floors, stitch the clothes, mine the ore, empty the bedpans, answer the phones, enter the data, and, increasingly, heal the patients and teach the students? Does the extension of capitalism American-style automatically translate into benefits for those who have little or no capital, and must work to survive? While workers have been protesting the downsizing of industrial capitalism and the rise of leaner, meaner forms of production for more than a quarter-century, their protests have usually gone unheard. The media has focused on workers’ discontent only when their banner has been raised by the likes of Patrick Buchanan. Now people may be listening, not just here but throughout the world. For Seattle has managed to reignite debates about the relationship between markets and states as few events have. Rather than reaffirm the marriage of capitalism and democracy, the post-communist era is now poised for a reconsideration of their perilous relationship. In the words of William Daley, US Secretary of Commerce, after Seattle, “things will never be the same.”[1]

I advance here two arguments about politics and theory, post-Seattle. First, the conflicts over the global economy which erupted last December are best understood as struggles against corporate capital. Against the pundits and intellectuals who insist that Seattle-style protests arise from collisions between internationalists and nationalists, I argue that the protestors are inspired by an internationalist ethic and a hostility to the unrestrained power that corporate capital has assumed since the 1970s. Their goal is not to erect higher fences along borders nor is it to affirm local autonomy or particularistic identities. Rather, they seek to stop corporations and banks from pitting different groups, laws, and countries against each other in the quest for the cheapest labor, the least restrictive environmental protections, the most opaque forms of political governance.

Second, the terms and categories of much contemporary political theory have made it difficult for us to see, much less understand, this internationalist, anti-corporate politics. Over the last few decades, but particularly since the collapse of communism, we have come to believe that struggles over the economy are a thing of the past. Today’s politics is supposed to be about the assertion and denial of ethnic or other forms of identity, the degree to which states approximate a cohesive cultural unit, whether our obligations extend beyond a narrow perimeter of community affiliation to encompass the globe itself. Commentators and political theorists on the left and right have assumed that the struggle between capital and democracy has been settled, that conflicts over identity are the paramount forms of political contest, and that membership, loyalty, affiliation, and obligation are the complete vocabularies of those engagements.

Seattle has called these assumptions into question. Our analysis needs to come to terms with the increasing hostility of many working men and women (and, tragically, working children) to corporate capital. I do not mean to suggest that class — and not...