Howard Zinn

In

the year 1919, when the city of Seattle was brought to a halt by a general

strike – beginning with 35,000 shipyard workers demanding a wage increase – the

mayor reflected on its significance:

"True

there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution…doesn’t need

violence. The general strike, as practiced in Seattle, is of itself the weapon

of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet. To succeed it must suspend

everything; stop the entire life stream of a community….That is to say, it

puts the government out of operation. And that is all there is to revolt – no

matter how achieved."

What

happened in Seattle recently was not as large an event as the general strike of

1919, but it suggested, as that did, how apparently powerless people, if they

unite in large numbers, can bring the machinery of government and commerce to a

halt. In an era when the power of government, and of multi-national

corporations, is overwhelming, it is instructive to get even a hint of how

fragile that power is when confronted by organized, determined citizens.

When

the civil rights activists of the South in the early Sixties put into practice

the principle they called "Nonviolent Direct Action", they were able

to make heretofore invincible power yield. What happened recently in Seattle was

another working out of that principle. Whatever the substance of the Seattle

protests, they revealed, as happens at certain times in the history of

societies, how vulnerable are the holders of power when people unite in large

numbers for a common cause.

We

must acknowledge that many of us, even veterans of social movements of the past,

have begun to feel helpless as we observed the frightening consolidation of

control, the giant corporations merging, the American military machine grown to

monstrous proportions. But we were forgetting certain fundamental facts about

power: that the most formidable military machine depends ultimately on the

obedience of its soldiers, that the most powerful corporation becomes helpless

when its workers stop working, when its customers refuse to buy its products.

The strike, the boycott, the refusal to serve, the ability to paralyze the

functioning of a complex social structure — these remain potent weapons against

the most fearsome state or corporate power. Note how General Motors and Ford had

to surrender to the strikers of the Thirties, how black children marching in

Birmingham in 1963 pushed Congress into passing a Civil Rights Act, how the U.S.

government, carrying on a war in Vietnam had to reconsider in the face of draft

resistance and desertions en masse, how a garbage workers strike in New York

immobilized a great city, how the threat of a boycott against Texaco for racist

policies brought immediate concessions.

The

Seattle protests, even if only a microcosm of future situations, even if only a

gleam of possibility in the disheartening dark of our time, should cause us to

recall basic principles of power and powerlessness, so easily forgotten as the

flood of media nonsense washes over the history of social movements.

It

has been discouraging to watch the control of information in this county get

tighter and tighter as megacorporations have taken over television and radio

stations, newspapers, even book publishing. And yet, we saw in Seattle that when

tens of thousands of men and women fill the streets and halt the normal flow of

business and government, and march with colorful banners and giant puppets and

an infectious enthusiasm, they could break through the barriers of the corporate

media and excite the attention of people all over the country, and around the

world.

Of

course, the television cameras rushed to cover the fires (set actually by

exploding tear gas bombs) and broken windows. The term "anarchist" was

used to describe the perpetrators, by journalists ignorant – as were the window-smashers

themselves – of the philosophy of anarchism. But it was not lost on viewers that

the vast majority of people marching through the streets were angry, even

obstructive, but peaceful – yes, non-violent direct action.

In

Seattle, the demonstrators were grappling with economic issues impossibly

complex – globalization, protectionism, export trade, intellectual properties —

issues the most sophisticated experts have had a hard time explaining. But

through all of that complexity, a certain diamond-hard idea shone through: that

the schemes of well-dressed men of finance and government gathering in ornate

halls were dangerous to the health and lives of working people all over the

world. And that thousands in the streets, representing millions, were determined

to resist.

In

one crucial way, it was a turning point in the history of the movements of

recent decades – a departure from the single-issue focus of the Seabrook

occupation of 1977, the nuclear-freeze gathering in Central Park in 1982, the

great Washington events of the Million-Man March, the Stand for Children, the

parade of women. This time, the union movement was at the center. The issue of

class – rich and poor, here and all over the globe – bound everyone together.

It

was at the least, a flash of the possible. It recalled the prophecy of A. Philip

Randolph in November of 1963, speaking to an AFL-CIO convention shortly after

the civil rights March on Washington of 200,000 people, black and white.

Randolph told the delegates: "The Negro’s protest today is but the first

rumbling of the under-class. As the Negro has taken to the streets, so will the

unemployed of all races take to the streets."

There

will undoubtedly be more rumblings, with more people of color involved, of

unemployed and employed, men and women. Seattle was a good sign.

A version of this Commentary will soon appear in the

Progressive Magazine.