Twenty years ago this week, 40,000 protesters gathered in downtown Seattle and attempted to shut down a ministerial meeting of the then fledgling World Trade Organisation.

Some were worried about cuts to public education. Others, dressed as turtles, were concerned about marine welfare. A few were self-styled anarchists looking for a Starbucks to smash up. But regardless of their special interests, all seemed to coalesce around the belief that huge, multinational corporations, in cahoots with increasingly hands-off governments, were the key problem.

These masters of the post-Cold War universe were seeking to rig the world’s economy for their own personal gain. And they were doing so through what amounted to their ‘own global charter of rights and freedoms: the Multinational Agreement on Investment’, as one of the era’s key figures, Kalle Lasn, put it in Culture Jam (1999). This was supported, the protesters argued, by a raft of global institutions, from the International Monetary Fund to the World Trade Organisation, all of which allowed the all-powerful corporations to sell and move their businesses and other assets wherever they sniffed profit.

The protests began on 30 November and lasted for several days. The police attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets, and the protesters had their violently suppressed cause broadcast into millions of homes. A protesting template was born. For a few years, almost every G7 or WTO meet-up was accompanied by similar scenes.

Some presented these anti-something-or-other protests as the birth, or revival, of a left-wing critique of capitalism – a welcome reinvigoration of the political amid the dull Third Way consensus of the Clinton and Blair years.