Customer Reviews

5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond

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A wonderful blend of first-hand, eye-witness reporting and even-handed analysis. Jeremy St. Clair's 40 page "Seatle Diary" alone makes the book worthy of reading. Perhaps the best piece of journalism to emerge from the growing body of Seatle stories. Two clips involving WTO delegates (one pounching a black lady in the face, another waving his revolver at a protestor baracade) utterly blew me away. And in the spirit of the lively and diverse protesters, the book is also funny at times, as when a South Central LA youth named Thomas replies to St. Clair's question, "Why are you here?" He answers: "I like turtles and I hate that ... Bill Gates." To which Sinclair replies, "Good enough for me." You won't be able to put the book down. It has a very genuine, honest and human feel. Along the way, you will run into Brower, the famous French cheese-maker Jose Bove, some interesting college professors, Sierra Club's Carl Pope, many of the so-called "anarchists" which every major media venue categorized all protestors as, and many other important people who turned out for the "Battle in Seatle." The book will not only give you a comprehensive understanding of the issues surrounding the protests and the subsequent media storm, it will also make you feel like you were there. St. Clair's writing is that good.

America had never seen anything like the mass movement that took over Seattle to confront the World Trade Organization in the fall of 2001: environmentalists, religious & human rights groups, farmers, civil rights organizations, ordinary people. They came with a message of peaceful protest. They were met with shock troops, billy clubs, rubber bullets and tear gas. 5 Days that Shook the World takes you onto the streets of Seattle and the protests in Washington, Philly and Los Angeles that followed during that remarkable year. But this book isn't about illusions or myths, but about the hard truths. St. Clair and Cockburn were eerily prescient in their prediction that the vaunted coalition of labor and greens would be difficult to hold together as the demands of political reality set in and as the corporate press and the government moved to counter and undermine the movement(s). Big labor and the big greens soon abandoned the cause by endorsing the campaign of pseudo-Democrat, Al Gore, the chief broker of NAFTA and the WTO treaties. Other leaders turned away from the protests following the bloody reprisals of the police in
Quebec and Genoa. But that doesn't mean the anti-globalization movement is dead. Cockburn and St. Clair point out the fakers, but they also show you where the true heart of the movement for global social and environmental justice beats. This book is a a much needed guide to what just may be the most important struggle of our times...

Despite the book's solid pedigree, I have real misgivings with the result. First, there is not much mention - notwithstanding an entire chapter - given over to Seattle's special cachet. Namely that this was the first major protest mobilized primarily through the internet, proving that this tool's worth indeed transcends traditional capitalist confines. Considering potential value to future efforts, this absence of organizational detail amounts to a serious omission.

Moreover, with the exception of the first two, the chapters of the book follow with little recognition of what has gone before. This is not merely a stylistic or editorial quibble. The absence of narrative continuity produces a disjointed result that fails to illuminate the movement's course from Seattle to LA. Thus events replace movement, direction is lost, and important insights into expectations and preparations versus results recedes. Linearity does have its value, and at the very least some bridging commentary would have been helpful. (Also, why does the chapter touching on Philadelphia follow that of LA when chronolgically it was the reverse, a pagination that only works to disorient the knowledgable reader.)

Despite these serious flaws, there is a strong upside. Jeffrey St. Clair's diary of clashes in Seattle is exciting and informative to one who wasn't there. The color photographs - a rare luxury for a progressive publication - are atmospheric; and the discussion of who won the battle is stimulating. Most important, credit for thwarting WTO is properly given to those couregeous folks who braved the iron heel, rejected liberal moderation, and shut down the elite's star chamber. Thanks to them, the smug world of global capitalism was truly shaken. Nevertheless, a more enlightening account remains to be written.

Within the growing literature of the anti-globalization movement is the book Five Days that Shook the World, which intimately puts you on the street for the events of N30, through St. Clair's Seattle Diary, the DC protests with JoAnn Wypejewski, and the Democratic National Convention in LA. In addition to the firsthand accounts by the people involved in the protests, the book chronicles the growing consciousness of the anti-globalization movement and the concurrent repression of the movement by the police state. This book is an excellent account of both the success of a movement that has unified people throughout the U.S. and world, including steel workers and environmental activists, and also shows how the heads of labor and the environmental movement had their own agenda during the Seattle protests and sold out those on the streets for a seat at the table with the WTO. The photographs by Sekula add a visual element to the work that complements the writing of St. Clair and Cockburn and gives a personal face to the fight against the WTO, as well as shows the facelessness of the jackboot state. Five Days that Shook the World is a vital narrative in the growing history of the anti-globalization movement and the authors are uncompromising in their analysis of where the movement stands, who betrayed the movement, and how the State has begun to work to limit the voices calling for an alternative to the WTO, IMF, and the destruction wreaked by global capitalism.

My first read-through left me thinking "How biased. There's no way to back these ideas up." But that's the way it's supposed to be. A movement is about feelings and humans being; let the sociologists and labor economists debate the facts and figures.

The political bickering - St. Clair et al's pointed attacks on Sierra Club, Carl Pope, and especially labor leaders, seem out of joint with the solidarity aspect of a movement - but this is how it is. And this book could have been more a platform to assault political enemies both near and far, but stayed mostly on task.

Overall, there was a chaotic feel to the narrative, which accurately reflects the state of subsequent public dissents, most noteworthy the pathetic demonstration in Chicago in 2002.

To really understand all aspects of the movement, one needs to include another perspective. I recommend:

"Globalization and its Discontents" Joe Stiglitz - to understand the macro scale of these protests.

"Breaking Rank" by Norm Stamper - a police account of the Seattle riots, written by a progressive police chief in perhaps the most progressive city in the U.S.

Remember folks, Seattle was probably the one city in the U.S. (besides San Francisco) that would be willing to tolerate such large scale dissent - and it did not. There's a reason for that.

The rebellion against global trade policies that erupted on the streets of Seattle was a warning shot heard round the world: transnational corporations and their political servants will be confronted by the people they seek to exploit. Other demostrations followed: in Quebec, Washington, Milan, Davos, and Cancun. The corporadoes have no place left to hide, no place left to hold their secret covens without hearing the voices of the growing global opposition. But there are no illusions here. This new global movement is taking root more firmly in Europe and the developing world than in the US, where its growth is stunted and suppressed by a reflexive loyalty to the Democratic Party, despite its descent into the darkness of neoliberalism. St. Clair's gripping diary of that week describes with chilling prescience the divisions in the movement between the traditional liberals and the new radicals, fed up with being spoonfed morsels by Democratic Party politicians whose real allegiance is to the same network of corporate fat cats who dreamed up the WTO in the first place. These fissures played out first in the 2000 election, when the labor unions and mainstream greens that chanted slogans of defiance in Seattle all came back into the plantation and supported the campaign of Al Gore, a chief architect of NAFTA and the WTO. Now, scared to death by the spectre of another Bush term, the divisions will become even more stark, the rationalizations of surrender more hysterical. This book is must reading for progressives, both for the history it describes and the future it predicts.

This is a relatively brief collection of essays not only by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St. Clair but by JoAnn Wypejewski (on A16) and Laura Flanders (three pages on on the creation of Indymedia). The essays discuss the state of activism not only relating to free trade but also of the type that occured at the Repulicrat conventions last Summer, the tensions within these movements and the increasing efforts of the state to harras and destroy them, within the context of the increasing power of the police and other government agencies to violate our constitutional rights, within the context of the fraudulent"war on crime" and the even more worthless "war on drugs."

I very much liked St. Clair's day by day diary and analysis of the events in Seattle in late 99'. He paints a stark picture of how police handle civil disobedience, especially relating to matters so crucial to status quo as the WTO. That is, when protestors practicing civil disobedience block an intersection, instead of going the least expensive route of arresting them and dragging them away, attack them with tear gas and rubber bullets and then rush at them and beat them, and any innocent bystanders, up with batons and then when a few gang members get attracted to the ensuing mayhem and break a few windows, use that as an excuse to place the city under martial law and arrest and beat up everyone from protestors to people handing out leaflets to observors from the National Lawyers Guild to ordinary, patriotic Americans doing their Christmas shopping or coming home from their jobs and then drag 631 of them, 607 of them on misdemeanor charges, to jail and beat them up some more, while charges against 511 of them are dismissed and 14 of them go to trial, twelve of which were plea bargained or aquitted.

Cockburn and St. Clair analyze the tension within the anti-WTO movement between the liberal reformers--the major unions and environmental organizations, the Molly Ivins types--and between people like themselves who believe that the WTO, at least under the current corporate dominated power structure in the world, is unworkable in any form. Their prime example of this is the AFL-CIO march of 30,000 people during the Seattle protests which was diverted at the last moment away from the convention center by the union bosses, leaving the protestors by the convention center to face the police themselves. They debunk the self-congradulation of the liberals and note that if the protests had been confined to the AFL-CIO march and their staid little symposiums and demands for "a seat at the table" with the corporate execs and bureaucrats, the ideas of the anti-WTO movement probably would not have reached the public at all.

This book by two of America's top lefty journalists takes you right onto the streets of Seattle during the five days of protests that rocked the WTO and grabbed the attention of the world media. It documents in first-hand accounts the vicious police assaults on nonviolent protesters, the calls by the Clinton administration for action by the Delta Force and the National Guard, and the violations of civil rights both on the streets and inside jail cells, where hundreds of protesters were beaten, denied medical attention and meetings with their lawyers. But the book goes beyond the events in Seattle to record a year's worth of demonstrations: in DC against the IMF and in Philly and LA against the two national political parties. Cockburn and St. Clair edit the investigative newsletter CounterPunch ..., known for its fiesty and no-nonsense reporting. And that's exactly what you get with this small, but invaluable book: redhot prose and unconventional expositions. Plus, there's the bonus of lefty photographer Allan Sekula's chilling photos of the action on the streets of Seattle. This is a book for all of those who were in Seattle for that amazing week and for all of those who weren't but wish they had been....

This book does a dis-service to all those hard-working activists who fought the good fight at the anti-WTO Battle of Seattle. Lead author Alexander Cockburn didn't even attend these momentous events which he now purports to write about. True to his published history as a veteran faction-fighter, Cockburn disses many of the labor activists and NGO types who did much of the work to make the protests in Seattle happen. He goes out of his way to trash long-time progressives like Jim Hitower and Mark Cooper for the mere reason that they were -- in his mind-- too enthusiastic about labor's role! According to Cockburn, the 40,000 labor union members who showed up to march against the WTO should have instead thrown their bodies over non-existent barricades to aid the young anarchists battling cops in the streets. This is an absurdity. It's a miracle that labor went as far as it did. To expect these same unionists to become radical street fighters overnight to support Cockburn's armchair fantasies, when Cockburn himself was never even in Seattle to as much as wave a flag, does seem a bit ridiculous and pretentious. The book lacks narrative and rather obviously is no more than a stitched together pastiche. It's padded with some equally weightless contributions from others, like Laura Flanders, who tries to convince us that a few kids putting out an Independent Media web-site is gonna rock the world. Get real. There's just too much political fantasy in this book and a screaming lack of respect for the real-life organizers, Teamsters and Turtles, who made the Battle in Seattle take off. Save your money. If you weren't in Seattle yourself and you want to learn about it, you'd do better to read even the corporate Seattle Times archives before you pick up this empty little book. What a crushing disappointment.

For someone whose main forays to seattle were to buy Indonesian antiques, A sharp anti globalism position seems the height of opportunism, even for an opportunist such as Cockburn. He = actually never bothered to set foot in the tear gas choked area---preferring his minion MR St Clair to do such tedious work--- Cockburn builds on a long history of absentee journalism to concoct yet another volume based on his columns which were fundamentally written by other people, and informed by a political analysis out of date 15 years ago. This old naderista should be turned out to pasture, or sent back to Ireland where he can ruminate on how great his dad was.