How Organized Anarchists Led Seattle into Chaos

By MICHAEL KRANTZ

If you want to label me," says Lincoln, "anarchist is as close as you're going to come." Lincoln is a lanky 19-year-old Texan who came to Seattle to protest "one-world government" and will leave sporting a nom de guerre, a nasty forehead gash courtesy of a tear-gas canister, and a green bandanna for meeting the press. His beliefs mirror a standard anarchist line: Autonomous government, yes. Private property, no. Would he commit acts of violence to further them? In some cases, Lincoln allows.

Is this the face of 21st century activism? The '60s-era left was marginalized by two giddily capitalist decades of leveraged buyouts, Web IPOs and rising tides that lifted the biggest ships. That may have changed last Tuesday, when masked youths started smashing windows in Seattle. In one red-hot CNN Minute, the eclectic concerns of a planetful of protesters--environmentalism, Tibet, child labor, human rights--crystallized right where most of them didn't want to be: beneath the anarchist banner.

Meaning what? The anarchist movement today is a sprawling welter of thousands of mostly young activists populating hundreds of mostly tiny splinter groups espousing dozens of mostly socialist critiques of the capitalist machine. Ironically, the groups are increasingly organized; the Pacific Northwest in particular, with its unionist past, grungy youth-culture present and ever Green future, is an anarchist hotbed. Add to that the hundreds of under-25ers from San Francisco to Vancouver who spent months learning nonviolent civil disobedience from groups like the Ruckus Society and the Direct Action Network. "The WTO," notes Ruckus Society coordinator Han Shan, "gave us home-field advantage by coming to Seattle." The '98 trashing of a Eugene, Ore., NikeTown was an informal dry run for last week's mayhem, some of whose perpetrators call themselves the Eugene Brickthrowers Local 666. "Their goal is to take things to the furthest edge of acceptability," says Seattle activist Dana Schuerholz of the Eugene radicals, "to get their message out by literally smashing the state."

That's the anarchist's primal goal: to replace central government with the sort of self-sufficient, egalitarian collective now aborning at 918 Virginia Street, a largely vacant building on the edge of downtown Seattle. The "squat" popped up two weeks ago as a protesters' crash pad. About 100 people a night sleep there. There's no power or water, but organizers have set up a kitchen and security and toilet systems. House rules hang on one wall: NO ILLEGAL DRUGS, NO ALCOHOL, NO WEAPONS and so on, ending with NO VIOLENCE.

Oops. Most anarchists publicly decried last week's vandalism, which was perpetrated in part by local teens whose direct actions for social justice consisted of looting StarTACs from a cell-phone store. "Several press accounts have stated that there were only 'hundreds of anarchists'" in Seattle, an online activist wrote last week. "This would be true if you only counted teenagers dressed in black. This would have left out...the vast majority of us, who look just plain ole working class."

Or like Portland native Cassandra Mason, a black-clad anarchist and "18-year-old unemployed female. It pisses me off that everyone's saying, 'The anarchists, the anarchists,'" she fumes. "Every anarchist group I know is really peaceful."

But even most peaceful anarchists maintain an uneasy detente with rougher tactics. "I distinguish between violence and property damage," says Ruckus Society director John Sellers. "I think violence is done to living things." And as the debate over globalization and trade grows--the 2000 anarchist calendar features a spring conclave in Ontario and a visit to the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia next summer--footage of the WTO riot, whose date is already canonized as "N30," will make for great p.r. Sellers disapproved of last week's vandalism, "but if the global audience sees it as a political act, the result could be interesting."

Schuerholz embodies the conflicted anarchist mainstream. She's a 35-year-old photographer who helped found the advocacy group Art and Revolution, which spread from a '97 gathering to dozens of groups along the West Coast. She comes off as a smart, sincere woman who disavows violence. But she was also in Eugene soon after the radicals hit NikeTown. "And I have to say," she says of that small blow to global capitalism, "I had a tingle of joy in my heart when I saw those broken windows."

--By Michael Krantz. With reporting by Steven Frank/Seattle and Margot Hornblower/Los Angeles

With reporting by Steven Frank/Seattle and Margot Hornblower/Los Angeles