The Seattle activists' coming of age in Cophenhagen will be very disobedient

[CHIMO]

The Seattle activists' coming of age in Cophenhagen will be very disobedient

The other day I received a pre-publication copy of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, by David and Rebecca Solnit. It's set to come out 10 years after a historic coalition of activists shut down the World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle – the spark that ignited a global anti-corporate movement.

The book is a fascinating account of what really happened in Seattle; but when I spoke to climate change summit in Copenhagen and the "climate justice" actions he is helping to organise across the United States on 30 November. "This is definitely a Seattle-type moment," Solnit told me. "People are ready to throw down."

There is certainly a Seattle quality to the Copenhagen mobilisation: the range of groups that will be there; the diverse tactics that will be on display; and the developing-country governments ready to bring activist demands into the summit. But Copenhagen is not merely another Seattle. It feels, instead, as though the progressive tectonic plates are shifting, creating a movement that builds on the strengths of an earlier era but also learns from its mistakes.

The big criticism of the movement the media insisted on calling "anti- globalisation" was always that it had a laundry-list of grievances and few concrete alternatives. The movement converging on Copenhagen, in contrast, is about a single issue – climate change – but it weaves a coherent narrative about its causes, and its cures, that incorporates virtually every issue on the planet.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/12/seattle-coming-age-disobedient-copenhagen

[villager]

1. Well, the other side wants to kill us off to keep corporate profits intact -- why do we imagine that

sitting around chatting "politely," and caving in to only half their demands -- when we're being really "tough" that is -- will win the day?

Or the planet?

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Disrupting the conference is a way to keep the status quo going

That might have been productive at Seattle, where the meeting was to make pro-globalization changes; but Copenhagen is to help stop climate change. The demonstrations sound counter-productive, to me. They will (if they do happen as described in the article) help stop action.