WTO@20 thread: Twenty years ago this week - November 1999 - was the WTO protests in Seattle. I was 27 and living there. I had started attending demonstrations in the late 1980s, but nothing I had experienced up to that point prepared me for watching the Seattle PD shoot people.

Nothing prepared me for running from their military vehicles firing concussion grenades. I was fortunate that I only had to endure the sting of tear gas, noticeable even late at night, even with the windows closed, in my Capitol Hill apartment after things had quieted down.

I didn’t get shot. I didn’t get clubbed by the cops. But I watched those things happen just a few feet from me. I didn’t understand anywhere near as much about the world then as I do now.

But those images of American state violence are seared into my brain, and they absolutely inform where I am today with regard to state power, police and corporate rule. It’s probably not fair to say I was fully anticapitalist at that time yet.

I would describe 27-year old me as a Strong Progressive (seems almost quaint to use those words now, considering who was in the White House then), but my experience at WTO Seattle 1999 absolutely informed and shaped part of who I am today.

Before that I was definitely comfortable with the concept of seizing the means of production but I had not fully begun to comprehend the insidious relationship between capital and the state. How they will stop at nothing to protect one another.

How the state will flex its muscles to protect bourgeois property over human rights. How the state maintains an absolute monopoly on violence. WTO99 started a process of questioning for me, one that would take many years.

That process continues today, as it probably always will, even though I’m comfortable describing myself as an anarchist now. WTO99 wasn’t the first event that radicalized me, but it was one of the most significant. And now I feel old.