“The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated,” was one of the most commonly heard chants in the days of marches protesting the WTO summit in Seattle. However, one of the most striking elements of the WTO protests was the level of conflict between adherents of a “nonviolent” protest method and those who preferred to more concretely express their feelings toward global capitalism. A tide of reaction has been swelling against the latter, with great arrogance on the part of the former. As a group of activist intellectuals, we feel the need to state our support for the group the media has been calling, only somewhat inaccurately, “the Anarchists from Eugene.”

We—the broad Left, anti-corporate, pro-livable world community—controlled the streets of downtown Seattle from 7 a.m. to roughly 7 p.m. on Tuesday After that period—with Mayor Schell and Governor Locke’s declarations of martial law and the violent offensive by local, county, state police and the National Guard—the streets were a war zone. But during that period, they were a liberated area. Inside that liberated area a spectrum of protest and resistance activities took place, many of which warmed our hearts.

Violence against property, as we’ll call the attacks against corporate chain stores, was one of the conscious strategies that was employed. These activities began on the afternoon of Monday, November 29, with the smashing of a window at McDonald’s. The next day, November 30, they started again shortly after 10 a.m. at the corner of 6th Ave. and Pike St., when police began shooting tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into the crowd. Throughout the day activists, protecting their identities with hoods and kerchiefs, formed “black blocks” to move en masse to attack unoccupied chain stores such as the Gap, Nike, Levi, Disney and the Bank of America. This is a key point that the media and President Clinton, among others, are trying to obscure: The crowd did not attack “mom and pop stores,” but the physical manifestations of “McDomination.”