Seattle Logistics Zine, May 2000. By the Seattle N30 Logistics Crew.
In 1999, more than 80,000 people took to the streets of Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization (WTO) “Millennium Round” Ministerial Conference. After months of organizing and planning, protesters engaged in creative nonviolent disobedience and shut down the first day of the conference on November 30 (N30). Thousands of people stayed in the streets throughout the week despite extreme police violence and repression. The conference, intended to cement neoliberal corporate domination forevermore, instead ended in failure that December 3rd at the hands of people’s movements worldwide and the nations of the Global South.
The Direct Action Network (DAN) logistics team provided the logistical infrastructure for the mass convergence and direct action protests in Seattle: food, security, meeting space, childcare, legal, medical, tactical, communications, volunteer coordination, etc. Longtime organizers Mike E. and Kim Feicke facilitated the logistics team in Seattle and also trained a number of younger organizers (including me) in the why and how of movement logistics. In May 2000, they edited and published the Seattle Logistics Zine, a collection of writings by people who worked on various support functions. I served as their assistant on the zine project. As Mike E. wrote in the introduction, the zine’s purpose was “to stress the importance of those functions to any large-scale gathering, and to make this information available to anyone that wants to put an event like this together in the future. Even though every organized event is unique, there are certain basic needs that are always present.” Mike E. had been running logistics for mass actions since the anti-nuke movement in the 1980s. Logistics are, he wrote, “often overlooked by the movement, in favor of the actions and marches.”
The art in the zine was contributed by Josh MacPhee.
