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./english/31.txt:8:So, measured by what the left in Europe actually needs - ie, the highest organisational unity in a party we can achieve - the event was rather disappointing. This is of course not the fault of the Greek Social Forum, the key organising force of this year’s ESF. Rather, the main working class organisations across Europe are criminally negligent in relation to our historic tasks.

./english/31.txt:38:l Structures that allow us to debate a joint programme to challenge the Europe of capital and its bureaucrats, as well as our own national ruling classes.

./english/31.txt:39:l The recognition that coordinating our campaigns and activities is not just a nice idea, but vital. We need continent-wide campaigns, strikes and demonstrations against cuts, privatisations, war and all attacks on our class and the democratic rights it has won.

./english/41.txt:20:Friday afternoon: I was scheduled to interpret in the workshop: “Governmental participation of the Left in Europe” in the evening, so I went to the beginning of the seminar on economic democracy with Micheal Krätke (an expert on Marxism), Gérald Ryser (author of a concept of a cooperative third way), Stefan Sjöberg (workers’ ownership of means of production). Yet then I was requested in the seminar “Socialism and Communism in the 21st century”, and interpreted for Boris Kagarlitsky (a famous expert on the transition in Russia), several Greeks (via relay from the English) and for my colleague Connie Hildebrandt from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation into English. The speakers dealt comprehensively with the question of socialism in the 20th century, what was good and worthy to be kept from that experience; with the role of the classics; a young Russian speaker emphasised the changed role of the proletariat at computer/virtual work places; and with questions of strategy and tactics of the movement as well as approaches to the question of governmental participation.

./english/41.txt:66:Vendredi après-midi : J’étais censée interpréter dans l’atelier « Participation gouvernementale de la Gauche en Europe » le soir, donc je suis allée d’abord au début du séminaire sur la démocratie économique avec Michael Krätke (un expert sur le marxisme), Gérald Ryser (auteur d’un concept d’un troisième chemin coopératif), Stefan Sjöberg (propriété des moyens de production par les travailleurs). Mais alors j’étais requise dans le séminaire « Socialisme et Communisme dans le 21e siècle » et interpréta pour Boris Kagarlitsky (un fameux expert sur la transition en Russie), plusieurs Grecs (par un relais de l’Anglais) et pour mon collège Conny Hildebrandt de la Fondation Rosa Luxemburg vers l’Anglais. Les orateurs discutèrent d’une façon compréhensive de la question du socialisme au 20e siècle, ce qui avait été bon et valait être maintenu ; du rôle des classiques ; un jeune orateur russe souligna le rôle changé du prolétariat à ses places de travail computérisées/virtuelles ; des questions de stratégie et de tactique du mouvements et des premières approches à la question de la participation gouvernementale.

./english/44.txt:146:In Turkey, where there are no freedoms, the militarist fascist character of the state still continues. The increasing exploitation of the working class and the oppression of the Kurdish people has not come to an end.

./english/45.txt:76:Psychiatric patients from countries of the Emergency Group are mainly dying inside institutions, because then the ‘food’ can go to the working class. This is a severe economic problem. Severe neglect, sever abuse, lack of medication, malnutrition are real problems to be solved.

./english/45.txt:146:Underneath also lays a main cultural problem, which we intend to call the neoliberal explanation of “Own responsibility”, which causes individualism across society, where people are like rivals, and not helping each other. In this neoliberal climat pointing at the borders of acceptance, dropping each other down and “own responsibility” is way more accepted than to make efforts to help the not-working, and help-needing class.

./english/45.txt:148:Often the very real strengths and skills of people in this class are denied, so that the contributions they can and do make to their community, without being employed, are not valued and encouraged.

./english/54.txt:12:The forum met against the background of a major upsurge in the class

./english/54.txt:103:class collaboration, which will throw the Italian movement into confusion.

./english/54.txt:161:blockade, and last but not least supported co-ordinated working class

./english/54.txt:188:its leadership), and the fact that the class struggle from Nepal to

./english/54.txt:312:the ESF, which can respond to urgent tasks arising from the class struggle

./english/54.txt:319:class, should press ahead with creating such a forum of struggle.

./english/54.txt:378:The rising tempo of the European class struggle, plus the revolutionary

./english/54.txt:381:working class. Gathering the forces to break the logjam that is blocking the

./english/62.txt:41:On the other side, activism refers to an actual engagement with social movement participation that it entails concrete contentious activities, organizing and leadership, claims, questions, discussion and reflection on goals, strategy, tactics, means and ends, ideological corroboration, enduring commitment to the struggles of the movement and conscious concern about the followed directions (Flacks). All these are practical activities and they involve a great deal of theory, which cannot be monopolized by social movements scholars. In fact, activists produce theory too – at various levels of abstraction and sophistication – in processes of practical activities, in which they are committed and engaged. This activist merger of practice and theory is what Eyerman & Jamison used to call ‘cognitive praxis.’ According to them, cognitive praxis develops in a threefold frame composed of a cosmological, a technological and an organizational dimension. However, not everybody finds convincing this analytical scheme of Eyerman & Jamison: for instance, Barker & Cox contend that it reifies existing distinctions as given. Rather than that, they posit that activist theory is dialogical and developmental in the sense that activists strive to answer the question of ‘what is to be done?’ in situations throughout their struggles that they do not fully control. For Barker & Cox, activist theorizing exhibits certain situational and pragmatic features stamping the distinctive character of forms of knowledge produced by activists in such a way that activist knowledge cannot be divorced from the struggles of the process of movement activity. In fact, it was Gramsci in his discussion of knowledge and the labor process who was distinguishing the official forms of knowledge – produced in and by an authoritative institutional context – from the unofficial forms of knowledge – generated inside the struggles of the disadvantageous classes when they aim to resolve their practical problems without really knowing what needs are driving them but only being determined to find out through their struggle and solidarity (cf., Wainwright).

./english/62.txt:89:1. Academic research is a power driven, hierarchical, formalized place within capitalist structures. Most of us are white-middle-class- city-slickers. Knowing this, the idea sounds odd to me that we can have any kind of privileged voice to tell others (activists, activists researchers) what to think. Not without reason one of the first questions activists ask me is who actually finances my work.

./english/147.txt:86:n Amsterdam in 1997, during a huge summit against the European Union, about 40 activist projects established a network called “admission free.” The network gave way to the “Noborder” network in 1999, formed in front of the Finnish Tampere Conference Center, where the EU-Migation Summit was taking place. Actions and activities were developed and executed across national borders, most dramatically in July 1998 when a few hundred activists put up tents for a ten day stay near the border of the River Neise, leading to summer camps in the following years along the borders of the European Union. Instead of campfire romanticism the motto was, “hacking the borderline.” Characteristic of the border camps was a multiple strategy consisting of the exchange of experience and political debate, classical political education in the remote areas, and direct actions to disrupt the idea of the border regime.

./english/150.txt:23:With the election of social democratic governments in several key countries a situation has arisen in which social democratic parties are in office in the majority of EU countries, but these parties are generally carrying out neo-liberal policies. Euromarch could be seen as a way of exerting pressure on these parties to alter the course of their policies at the national and EU level. Alternatively, Euromarch could be viewed as a way of linking and coordinating struggles with a view to developing an anti-capitalist strategy to challenge not just government policies but also the whole dynamic of capitalist restructuring. In this sense the debates which are occuring are debates about the orientation of the labour movement and what Christophe Aguiton (Euromarch Secretary) calls a redefinition and reconstruction of the working class and its relationship to social movements.

./english/162.txt:30:It was an anthropologist, Karl Polanyi, who provided the most striking description of a systemic crisis, in a book called The Great Transformation, published in 1944. The story begins with the enclosure of community pasture lands in England, known as commons, which were transformed with fences into private property. This privatization of resources led to the appearance of rural poverty in the course of the eighteenth century. The threat of famine then made possible an unprecedented exploitation of labor power, which former peasants were compelled to sell for a bare minimum in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution. In this way, the owning class accumulated great fortunes, which split away from the nationally instituted money to employ the international currency of gold bullion. Polanyi pays special attention to demonstrating the directive role that independent bankers played in the creation of the gold standard, which served as a universal, but legally private equivalent between all the different national currencies. He shows that a cycle of three privatizations – land, labor, and money – leads finally to the worldwide market of the nineteenth century.

./english/162.txt:32:The Keynesian welfare state of the post-war period could appear as an answer to Polanyi's vision. It submitted industrial and financial activity to a social regulation, conceived within each national framework in a more or less democratic fashion. But the dynamics of capitalism rapidly overflowed this national frame, as one can see in the evolution of the world monetary system. After the war, the Bretton Woods treaty tied signatory countries into a system of relatively stable exchange rates, whereby all the currencies were pegged to the dollar, which in turn was convertible into gold. But this system proved untenable, and after the United States suspended convertibility in 1971, the currencies began to "float" against each other; since the outset of the eighties they have been subject to the fluctuations of a highly speculative exchange market, operating at the speed of computers and telecommunications. At the same time, controls on crossborder investments have gradually been lifted, and many state services and industries, considered as unfair competition with the private sector, have been suppressed. In a world which no longer erects any significant barriers to the directive capacity of money, capital flow into the stock markets now commands the majority of productive investments everywhere; and every material reality comes to be dependent on highly volatile financial information. In this way there arises what Rem Koolhaas has called "the world of ¥ € $": a world-economy built around the incessantly changing equivalence of the yen, the euro, and the dollar, representing the three major poles of world prosperity. One can see the convertibility of these three currencies as a new kind of economic language, serving primarily to convey the opportunistic speech of private investors, indeed, of a transnational capitalist class. ¥ € $ is the monetary language of the flexible personality.

./english/162.txt:42:This situation of suspended crisis appears likely to spread, leaving open, at least for a time, the possibility of very different responses. The illusions of the 1990s, however, are definitely over. The collapse of the stock markets, and the economic slowdown that has followed, brings a threat of deflation, unemployment and exclusion to bear on most of the world's populations. Under current political conditions, the only possible response seems to be a strengthening of the barriers that separate the privileged classes from all the others – and this, even within the richest countries. The new military posture of the United States, while directly motivated by the September 11 attacks, also represents an attempt to restructure society, and to institute a new form of discipline in the face of the void that has been left by the collapse of the speculative bubble. It is in this way that the ideological version of economic flexibility meets its own limits. This shift toward heightened military and police control takes away much of the legitimacy that flexible modes of management were able to confer on capitalist society. Still the opportunistic model of the flexible personality will probably continue to orient the behavior of privileged individuals for years yet to come, even as it subjects them to strong contradictions. Under such conditions, the various forms of resistance to capitalism will clearly intensify, not least because they find a vital energy in the feeling of absolute necessity brought on by the crisis. Now I want to deal specifically with one such form of resistance: the resistance to the privatization of knowledge, the fourth "fictive commodity" whose importance Polanyi had not yet measured. It is through the cooperative production of immaterial knowledge that we will rejoin the enigma of the networked protests.

./english/162.txt:51:Four attributes of the networked information economy appear as preconditions of commons-based peer production. First, information must be freely available as inexhaustible raw material for products which, in their turn, will become inexhaustible raw materials for further productions. Second, potential collaborators must be easily able to find the project that inspires them to creativity and labor. Third, the cost of production equipment must be low, as is now the case for things like computers and related media devices. Fourth, it must be possible to broadly distribute the results, for instance, over a telecommunications net. Under these conditions, quite complex tasks can be imagined, divided into small modules, and thrown out into the public realm where individuals will self-identify their competency to meet any given challenge. The only remaining requirement for large-scale production of cultural and informational goods is to be able to perform quality checks and integrate all the individual modules with relatively low effort into a completed whole – but these tasks, it turns out, can often be done on a distributed basis as well. The fact that all of this is possible, and actually happening today, allows Benkler to contradict Ronald Coase's classic theory, which identifies the firm, with its hierarchical command structure, and the market, functioning through the individual's quest for the lowest price, as the only two viable ways to organize human production. In other words, in the cultural and informational domain there is an alternative mode of production, functioning outside the norms of the state-capitalist economy as we know it, but without any rhetorical need to proclaim a clean break or an absolute division between them.

./english/162.txt:62:"All these phenomena are at once legal, economic, religious, and even aesthetic, morphological, etc. They are legal, including public and private law, diffuse and organized morality; they are strictly obligatory or simply praised and blamed, political and domestic at the same time, involving the social classes as well as the clans and families. They are religious: including strict religion and magic and animism and diffuse religious mentality. They are economical: because the idea of value, of utility, of interest, of luxury, of wealth, of acquisition and accumulation as well as consumption and even purely sumptuary expenditure are everywhere in them, even though these are all understood differently than by us today. What is more, these institutions have an important aesthetic side to them... the dances that are carried out alternatively, the chants and parades of all kinds, the dramatic performances... everything, food, objects, and services, even "respect," as the Tlingits say, everything is a cause for aesthetic emotion." (18)

./english/162.txt:85:From my point of view there can be no mistake. The revenge of the concept is the reappearance, in broad daylight, of the global class struggle: a political struggle over to right to share in the fruits of technological development, and to guard against its many poisons. But if this re-embodiment of class struggle can also be an artistic experience – and an experiment that reverses and transforms the concept of art – it is because the articulation of the old divides has radically changed. In the face of an all-dominating capitalist class which has imposed a global division of labor, and extended its ideological grip over core populations through the devices of popular stockholding, speculative pension funds, and the seductive traps of consumer credit, the focus of struggle is no longer so much the rate of the industrial wage, as the very existence and production of that which lies outside the cash nexus: land in the sense of a viable ecology; labor as the energy of life from its beginnings in travails of birth; knowledge not as fragmented commodities but as an overarching question about meaning; trade and exchange as an institution of human coexistence. Arising within these fields of struggle are new desires and political designs, irreducible to the organizing schemes of capital and state. In the best of cases, opposition becomes a prelude to radical invention.

./english/162.txt:111:18. Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don (1923-24), online at www.uqac.uquebec.ca/zone30/Classiques_des_sciences_sociales.

./english/162.txt:115:22. For the classic example, see Benjamin Buchloh's assertion that conceptual art failed "to liberate the world from mythical forms of perception and hierarchical modes of specialized experience," and was "transformed into absolute farce." "Conceptual Art 1962-1969," October, Winter 1990, 143.

./english/193.txt:20:Phil Hearst, a member of the SWP and of the 4th International, raised the example of Argentina. In the deep crisis in 2001 movements like the Piqueteros emerged. They did not refuse state offers, they tried to use state benefits for their self-organisation. But lastly, Hearst claims, they failed: one could not get self-determination without a change of social relations and institutions as a whole. There is a need for a sustaining party on a national level (in opposition a woman from Argentina threw in that the old left militant parties brought the movement to death). In other places, for instance Venezuela, the transformed state is pushing civil society and indigenous communities to self-organisation.2 That kind of politics is founded in existing social conditions, not in a mythical concept of revolution. Revolution is not possible in a sudden crisis, it is a long process, Hearst insists: the left needs institutions for continuous politics. The plurality of movements alone does not develop a solid strategic convergence of positions. Moreover the different movements do not play an equivalent role in this process. A party, and not simply the sum of social movements, might still be the best agent of conscious ‘unification’ (Bensaid) in a ‘worker’s state’. Again the point is unification (instead of pluralistic coherence) and again it is the working class as essentially united, leaving the current weakness of workers’ resistance out of consideration as concrete relations between movements and party too. A Basque disputant put the point that Argentina was ‘a moment of subjectivity’, that will have far reaching consequences, not a failure of autonomous politics and social movements – but the example clearly shows the contradictions in such a process of social transformation.

./english/193.txt:37:This link to concrete situations of resistance in time and space on the ESF is sometimes difficult to achieve. In many seminars and workshops you just get flat, already known analyses, simple propaganda and wishful thinking. Again and again the common enemy (neoliberalism, transnational corporations, the US, the WTO etc.) is condemned – in this sense the perspective on the ESF seems too unified; the few times debates became concrete consensus was melting away – the different approaches and goals were too diverse: a necessary result emerging from the contradiction of the ESF (and WSF) process itself as open space for discussion and self-education, without a real attempt to develop some applicable and visible alternatives. Therefore the Forum is no movement in itself (in contrast to Thomas Ponniah’s view8), but maybe a space for a new political consciousness and sovereignty, the modern form of articulation and association of structurally fragmented groups, classes and movements. However, because there is no alternative social project formed, the actual representative crisis of neoliberalism does not lead to a weakening of its hegemonic position. Pierre Khalfa supposes that diversity paralyses. 9 But its not diversity as such – which might enrich the movements – but a lack of deep analysis, including the production of neoliberal hegemony from below, in combination with non-committal plurality. This undermines a generalization of experiences, views and understandings (without closed unification under one primary force) preventing us from achieving coherent approaches and strategies. On the one hand there are more or less successful local social movements, creating autonomous spaces and transforming subjectivities, sometimes re-appropriating the essential means of reproduction from below, but hardly touching the relations of power on national or even transnational level. On the other there are global events for the altermondialist, national and transnational NGOs, some national parties, getting some media presence, shaping the public discourse, but far away from the everyday experience of the people, acting in some kind of representative vacuum without really questioning the ruling political form (Brand 2004). There is a need for intermediate political forms. At the heart of the problem lies the relation between representation and participation. A permanent movement (in the strict sense of the word) is difficult to sustain, movements are fragile forms with periods of higher or lesser activity, they develop out of concrete situations of dissent with the ruling mode of production and living, with a perspective of (molecular) social transformation, while the struggle for this transformation has to be a very long-standing one. Out of this results a need for institutionalisation to bridge times of less activity, disintegration, defensive situations and to overcome defeats, save experience and knowledge for the next generation of activists etc. A renewed concept for left political parties could be one possibility to create intermediate institutionalised political forms.

./english/193.txt:39:What is a party? A party does not simply represent a group or class; it is always a result of inner struggles between different interests and struggles with other parties or social forces. It only represents a group or class when it is able to intervene into the culture and politics of other groups and classes, reorganising the whole class and social structure (including the groups and classes it wants to represent). The bourgeois understanding of political representation as passive element therefore is only part of the reality. The opposition between representation and participation is not that hard when the mutual organising and transformative aspects between representatives and represented, between social movements and parties come to the fore. If we take this seriously representation on both sides is an active one, directed to convergence between the two sides while never achieving it, because they represent two different cultural/political forms. Parties are the fields of struggle between self- and foreign (or alienated) social association (Selbst- und Fremdvereinigung) virulent in every society.

./english/193.txt:49:One problem is that the existing radical left parties are representatives of a completely undermined social basis, while the trans-nationally restructured social groups and classes have not jet created their own political institutions. The altered conditions of struggle in a new mode of production and living are not yet reflected, leading to sectarian particularities. Sometimes old forms of the welfare state are the orienting measure (or even older concepts of world revolution of a unified world proletariat), sometimes the complete rejection of these structures throwing their progressive elements over board. The idea of a rifundazione comunista (see Haug 2003, 292ff) in its broadest sense therefore is a very reliable one (although the Italian formation is still quarrelling with its hierarchical constitution).10

./english/193.txt:51:Gramsci warned against sectarian, narrow-minded thinking: ‘A political party is not only the technical organisation of the party itself, but the whole active social bloc.’ (Gef7., H.15, 1774) In a specific hegemonic constellation ‘nobody is unorganised or independent from a party, if organisation or party is understood in its broadest sense not formally’ (Gef.4, H.6, §136). Each social bloc, as a convergence of different social groups, classes, genders etc., generates only one formation in the sense of this broader integral understanding of a party (that is nearer to the notion of social forces and movements than it is to parties in the narrow sense). All different partial formations, the non-commitment to plurality, are only transitional ‘reformist’ forms, oriented on simple negation or on transforming only partial dysfunctional elements, not the existing mode of production as a whole. Therefore a communist refoundation is more than a renewal of given party organisations (where you could become a member, pay your fee, and vote for your ‘leader’). It requires the reinvention of proletariat as Marx put in the Manifesto: ‘the proletariat recruits itself from all classes of population’ (MEW 4, 469), a diffuse milieu of released, redundant people without property except their own labour power. Under circumstances of the neoliberal, transnational mode of production this includes the increasing global industrial labour force, the modern precariat as well as the modern cybertariat, the rural labour force as well as landless people, the non-paid reproductive workers (mostly women), the migrant labour force – all of them shaped by differentiations along class, gender, race, nation, their positions in production processes, political alliances, cooptation by ruling forces, etc. If we take all these diverse fragmentations seriously we could come to a deeper understanding of a contradictory multitude that is to be worked out to a coherent social bloc of forces able to form social transformation. This new modern prince (Gramsci) cannot be understood ‘as a singular form of collective agency, for example a single party with a single form of identity’ (Gill 2003, 221). What is required is an articulation of the different political forms due to concrete situations, permanent reorganisation of organisational forms in the face of developing conditions, including the collective and individual ‘molecular change of modes of thinking and acting’, forcing this transnational partiality (Parteiung) to rearticulate again and again, arranging new and original problems to solve (Gramsci, Gef. 8, §51).11 This is not possible without involving constantly the active elements of subjectivity.

./english/197.txt:29:One of the most effective actions in decades was the worldwide protest on 15 February 2003 against the American war in Iraq. Possibly because we weren't actually able to stop the war (no one could have done that), people may have classed the day as a `failure' and not reflected enough on its huge significance-15 February was in fact a historic first. During the Vietnam War, thanks to arduous months of planning and expensive transatlantic phone calls, it was occasionally possible to stage simultaneous demos in Europe and the US, but never anything on the scale of 15 February. In 2003 it wasn't just Europeans and North Americans, but Latin Americans, Africans, Asians, Australians, citizens of many Muslim countries-every continent was involved, including Antarctica, where a scientific mission took part. This unified, organised outpouring of protest caused a reluctant New York Times to refer to the peace movement as `the second superpower', even if that statement (like much else of what one can read in the New York Times) turned out to be not quite true. We must now try to mobilise the same kind of strength and unity in the name of global justice and put them on the front page.

./english/205.txt:56:The most remarkable thing about it is how it clearly is about capturing subjectivities made diffuse and disjointed by the transformations of the last years and provide them with a new class subjectivity. While the concept of the ‘multitude' was too abstract for any immediate political use, what we saw this year was a rise of the ‘precariat': precisely the new ‘class' created by the regime of flexible accumulation, the ‘flexible', ‘flexploited' workers of the world. With no fixed job, no access to welfare, the precariat is the anomalous contradiction within the historical trend of capitalism towards the decrease of the labour journey: they work more for less. More than that, the concept makes possible a transversal analysis of contemporary society, in the sense that the precarious condition is extended to issues like housing and legal status, thus incorporating struggles such as those of the sans papiers and migrants, which were also very visible in the autonomous spaces.

./english/209.txt:7:This distance from the political debates of the rest of the continent has many roots. Britain 's early industrialisation , its sectoral craft based trade unionism, and the way this trade unionism created the Labour Party giving it a monopoly over working class political representation, prevented the growth of a significant Communist Party with internationalist traditions, however ambiguous. A more recent factor, until the blows of Thatcherism, has been the immense self-confidence and industrial strength of the British labour movement, almost to the point of arrogance. This produced a highly independent stance, as if the British trade unions did not need support or allies. They presumed that they could win on their own. If there were problems, these were thought to be merely local ones of betrayal and weak leadership. This was especially true at a national level: from the 70s onwards there were always radical trade unionists organising from the factories of multinational companies to build international workplace to workplace connections, through for example the Transnational Information Exchange. Thatcherism destroyed whatever basis there was for this somewhat arrogant self-confidence. As the unions now rebuild themselves, there is a new orientation towards Europe which is already showing itself in a significant union mobilisation for the London ESF.

./english/238.txt:10:Language is at the heart of the Social Forums. Or at least it should be. The Porto Alegre Charter that continues to shape and guide the ESF process makes clear our collective commitment to “ reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action”. It reminds us that the Forum must always be open to pluralism and “the diversity of genders, ethnicities, cultures, generations and physical capacities, providing they abide by this Charter of Principles.” Breathing life into these worthy principles requires that people have the means to communicate with and understand each other in ways that are egalitarian and democratic. As Susan George writes in her new book ‘Another World is Possible If …', political activists are as guilty as the ruling classes in using language for purposes of power, control and domination:

./english/248.txt:9:Bringing the European Social Forum (ESF) to London was never going to be an easy option. The Thatcher legacy, continued by Tony Blair, has made London one of the most thoroughly marketised, privatised and expensive cities in Europe . But when the ESF itself started to mirror these tendencies, many activists suspected something was up. Babels ( www.babels.org ), the international network of volunteer interpreters, used the occasion of a meeting where Ken Livingstone was scheduled to speak (he did not turn up) to deliver a statement accusing the Greater London Authority (GLA) of following “classical neo-liberal practices of organisation, management and service delivery… with the result that the Forum has been entirely dependent on the state.” Others, such as Anne Scargill and the network of women in mining or ex-mining areas in the UK , didn't even get that far: “No way could we afford the fees, transport and accommodation.”

./english/260.txt:41:Title of the research: “Mirroring the ‘self’: racialised, classed and gendered

./english/260.txt:47:racialised, gendered and class discriminations. In other words how liberal multiculturalism

./english/260.txt:48:reinstates racism and classism through the back door, by establishing the

./english/260.txt:49:cultural and ethical superiority of the ‘progressive’ middle class against both working

./english/260.txt:50:class christians (‘greeks’) and poor muslims (‘turks’). I chose to focus on a

./english/261.txt:191:Drawing on an evaluation of a fourth-year university class by Adelle Bish, this paper briefly describes the 19 different mechanisms which (in the reports of class members) assisted learning from experience

./english/267.txt:33:The researcher offers him/herself as a subject of the synthesizes of experience. S/he is the one that explains the rationality of what happens. And s/he is preserved as such: as necessary blind spot of such synthesis. He himself, as the meaning giving subject remains exempted from any self-examination. He and his resources –his values, his notions, his gaze- constitute themselves into the machine that classifies, gives coherence, inscribes, judges, discards and excommunicates. In the end, it is the intellectual who "does justice" regarding matters of truth, as regards the administration –or adequateness - of what exists under the present horizon of rationality.

./english/269.txt:15:Precarias a la Deriva is an initiative between research and activism which arose from the feminist social center La Eskalera Karakola in Madrid, initially as a response to the general strike in Spain in June of 2002. Faced with a mobilization which did not represent the kind of fragmented, informal, invisible work that we do – our jobs were neither taken into consideration by the unions that called the strike nor effected by the legislation that provoked it – a group of women decided to spend the day of the strike wandering the city together, transforming the classic picket line into a picket survey: talking to women about their work and their days. Are you striking? Why? Under what conditions do you work? What kind of tools to you have to confront situations that seem unjust to you?…

./english/272.txt:20:2.This in turn led to a recognition of the differentiated nature of reality: people’s immediate experience of oppression and subordination was as real as the structures of class and or gender domination that produced them. Social movements of that period sought to act in a way that acknowledged all levels of reality, seeing people’s direct experience as important clues to understanding the hidden, structural causes of oppression and valuing their practical insights as vital sources of knowledge about the solutions. The new movements paid attention to language, culture and the expression of distinct identities but understood these as related to underlying structures of power. (This is in contrast to political parties dominated by a positivistic paradigm who tended to reduce reality to one level or one structure e.g. reducing gender to class, to regard direct experience as merely `proof’ or an `instance’ of a general theory; and not to value practical insight or skill as a distinct source of knowledge not anticipated by some general law and a source of potential power in the process of social transformation. It is also in contrast to the later development of a post-modernism which focused exclusively on language, discourse and meaning, denying the existence of material realities independent of our knowledge of them – I will discuss this briefly later).

./english/274.txt:17: It is a common observation among radicals that the order of the world easily becomes naturalized, normalized, and reified. Why do things work they way they do? Because that’s how they operate. Perhaps the most striking way to examine how this phenomena works is by trying to imagine alternatives, or even to imagine how previously existing social orders (such as Bronze age Greece or the classical Greek and Roman eras)

./english/274.txt:27: To this there will be many objections: Isn’t utopian thinking just a frivolous waste of time better used with pragmatic forms of organizing and action? Isn’t there a danger that one could recreate the same class based structures of power and domination in one’s vision that exist now, as Foucault was fond of constantly objecting with an almost defeatist tone? Isn’t it classist to be engaged in this kind of visionary thinking? These are objections with varying degrees of validity. It would be silly to say that one should be spending time coming up with utopian visions instead of engaging the day to day struggles to alleviate the wretched conditions which face large segments of the world’s population. But it also equally true that even when there exists a period where revolutionary change becomes possible unless one has some idea of what sort of arrangement one wants to create, it is all the more easier for such situations to recreate the same oppressive structures or become dominated by the most malicious “liberators.” The Russian, Cuban, and Chinese experiences should be sufficient examples of such.

./english/275.txt:13:We start from the existential situation of activists as we understand and have experienced it. In this view, the process of becoming an activist is primarily a process of learning, which we will describe as if it happened to an individual, though of course often this learning is that of a class or movement.1 Initially, we become ‘activists’ because we find that something is not right in the world, and more specifically that it cannot be fixed within the normal ‘channels’. To become an activist, then, is to learn that the system does not ‘work’ as it claims, and to move towards the understanding that to achieve change we need to organize and create pressure.

./english/275.txt:55:This first approach, theory as consciously generated knowledge, is the point of departure for much radical adult education,18 community development,19 humanist Marxism20 and cultural studies,21 all of which have reflected on the ways in which working-class people and peasants have generated their own ways of understanding the world.22 An example from a very different starting point would be the development of environmental movements.

./english/275.txt:129:The unique and extraordinary character of working class self-organisation has been that it has tried to connect particular struggles to a general struggle in one quite special way. It has set out, as a movement, to make real what is at first sight the extraordinary claim that the defence and advancement of certain particular interests, properly brought together, are in fact the general interest56

./english/275.txt:187:De Angelis, Massimo 2000 ‘Globalization, New Internationalism and the Zapatistas’, Capital and Class, 70: 9-36.

./english/275.txt:227:Lebowitz, Michael 2003 Beyond Capital: Marx’s political economy of the working class (2nd edition). Basingstoke: Palgrave.

./english/275.txt:229:Lukács, Georg 1971 [1922] History and class consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics. London: Merlin.

./english/275.txt:255:Rose, Jonathan 2002 The intellectual life of the British working classes. London: Nota Bene.

./english/277.txt:8:Strategies of research into movement contexts parallel these possible organising modes: given the diversity of participants’ orientations and of external interventions, there is necessarily a politics of research characterised by collusion with some participants’ knowledge interests and conflict with others. The paper draws on Gramsci’s conceptualisation of class consciousness to argue for a critical realism that extends the logic implicit in participants’ skilled activity to a more comprehensive standpoint, using the researchers’ own standpoint and knowledge interests critically as a part of this dialogue. The use of metaphor, illustration and other “hegemonising” strategies are geared to developing this two-way communication between different knowledge interests, which remains precarious unless it is developed into the coordination of shared activity.

./english/277.txt:10:Such a politics of knowledge makes sense only given particular starting-points. A concrete example is given in the case of my own PhD research, which moved from a participant’s developing choice of priorities to a traditional intellectual’s attempt to relate the milieu to externally-determined projects. The class and other relations involved in this process are examined critically, with a view to bringing out the ability of participants to “locate” the researcher and fit my activity in turn into their own perspectives and projects. The cognitive implications of this analysis enable a more complex understanding of such research activity and point to important political and ethical issues around the potential value and limitations of research for participants and researchers alike. The paper includes a brief postscript, written in 2005 for this publication.

./english/277.txt:20:The paradox here is of course that Marxism has frequently identified itself as a theory from and for social movements: at once a theoretical reflection on the experience of the workers’ movement and a source of analyses for the use of that movement2. How is it, then, that this “social movement theory” possesses no “social movement theory” of its own, no separate and coherent body of theory which could define the nature of social movements, explain their existence, analyse their development and theorise their effects? What can one say of a theory which is no longer capable of reflecting on its own conditions of existence, and whose contribution to the analysis of contemporary movements is limited to the chimerical pursuit of a homogenous and objective class basis to their existence and the drawing of undemonstrable assumptions about the revolutionary potential or otherwise of such movements?

./english/277.txt:26:A first glimpse of what this might mean can be offered by the first section of the Communist Manifesto, with its dramatic claim that “The history of all human society, past and present, has been the history of class struggles” (cited from the Ryazanoff edition in Mills 1962: 47). This claim is developed into an analysis of the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie in the destruction of feudalism and the creation of a new world order, transforming economics and technology, national and international politics, communications and cognition; following this, by the analysis of the development of the workers’ movement from the experience of misery to the struggle against oppression, aided by growing concentration and communication, into a complex learning process of increasing political self-confidence and clarity towards another and final revolution. It would be more than possible to distil from these few pages the presuppositions of a general Marxist theory of social movements which was not other than the Marxist theory of history - but paying perhaps more attention to the discussion of the nature of movement activity, its preconditions and the context of its development towards the reshaping of society than has sometimes been the case.

./english/277.txt:30:As the title of this paper indicates, the most developed expression of this point of view is Gramsci’s (1971, 1991), and my reconstruction of western Marxism as a theory of social movements depends in particular on my reading of Gramsci and the associated positions of Williams (1980, 1985). The other defining author within this tradition is the young Lukács (1971), who develops a movement-centred ontology and epistemology which is elaborated further by Touraine (1981), despite the latter’s abandonment of the Marxist periodisation of history. I would add two other sources for this reconstruction: Thompson’s (1963, 1993) analysis of working-class history, theorised further by Vester (1975), and Wainwright’s (1994) movement-oriented theory of knowledge4.

./english/277.txt:36:Class and hegemony

./english/277.txt:38:Within the western Marxist tradition, two names in particular have been given to these practices, concepts which I am arguing represent the Marxist version of a theory of social movements. These concepts are social class, in particular class-for-itself or class culture, and hegemony. In one formulation, which can best be identified in Lukács and Touraine, social movements are class movements in the sense that they are essentially movements of one class only; they represent a subordinate class coming to consciousness of its own situation and interests and expressing that consciousness in conflict with a dominant class which has already achieved this level of self-awareness and self-organisation. In Gramsci’s formulation, however, social movements are class movements in the rather different sense that they are movements led by a single class or social formations representing that class; they entail an interaction between the way in which a given class organises its own activities and the way in which it organises the practices of other social classes. Can these positions be reconciled?

./english/277.txt:40:One possible answer is that they can be combined if Gramsci’s formulation is weakened to the point of representing a purely external alliance between the formal organisations and leadership élites of essentially separately organised social classes. Such situations do undoubtedly occur; a case in point might be the alliance between the Swedish workers’ and peasants’ movements in the 1930s, an alliance which entailed agreement on the basic outlines of the new social order but left separate parties which even identified themselves with different possible governnments. At this level, however, the “hegemony” of the Swedish workers’ movement over the peasant movement was no different from its relations with the representatives of capital - a relationship which might be identified as compromise or even consensus, but hardly as hegemony in Gramsci’s sense.

./english/277.txt:42:A more plausible and consistent answer would be a historicising one. On this view, it might be said, it is unlikely but not impossible that a class could develop into a “class-for-itself” without at the same time achieving some measure of hegemony over other social classes. This double articulation is of course the normal situation for a ruling class; its active side is expressed by Gramsci’s concept of a “passive revolution” or “revolution from above”. A ruling class which fails to maintain this hegemony is almost by definition in deep crisis. From the other side, Thompson’s account of the “making of the English working class” identifies the important role played in this process by a “demotic culture”, including important elements of the petty bourgeoisie; Gramsci’s analysis of the need to build links between the working class and the peasantry points in the same direction. (Everything depends, of course, on the question of who is exercising hegemony over whom in such situations, as the post-war history of the PCI illustrates.) It is, however, not impossible under unusual circumstances for a class to attain a high level of self-organisation in isolation, as the example of the SPD in Bismarck’s Germany suggests; the case of the PCF in contemporary France points to the possibility of such a situation arising precisely as the result of a loss of hegemony.

./english/277.txt:58:If, then, we cannot know a prior what form social movements take, if they can neither be identified exclusively with unconventional political activity nor with politics from below, what is movement research to look for? The logic of the argument I am outlining is that we need to start from more general categories and work our way towards specific analyses of the shape movement activity takes in particular times and places. I want to suggest two such categories in particular. If social movements are the way in which human practices are socially articulated, they can and perhaps must be approached both from the foundational level of the practices being articulated and from the viewpoint of the totality within which, and oriented towards which, this articulation takes place. One way of making this connection, which I have presented elsewhere (Cox 1999a), is in terms of “local rationalities” elaborated in specific movement milieux. Such rationalities represent an elaboration, a formalisation and a decontextualisation of particular practical (material and social) skills developed in particular social locations; this decontextualisation enables the generalisation of such rationalities as means of articulating multiple social milieux dispersed spatially, socially and even temporally. One example of such a rationality - an extremely powerful one - is the abstract form of capital, which moves from particular forms of local calculation to a “capitalist rationality” capable of coordinating a global economic system. Another such rationality is that known within the Marxist tradition as working-class consciousness, whose formalisation and generalisation of course includes Marxism and the workers’ movement.

./english/277.txt:74:On an aside, this analysis of institutions as skilled activity has interesting implications. It makes it possible to discuss the ways in which such skill can be lost - not only in contexts of deskilling and the obsolescence of traditional forms of skill, but also for example in periods of reaction, which consist among other things in a sustained assault on the institutions that embody the skills of subordinate movements and classes: from political parties and the movement media through to what Gramsci defines elsewhere as the basic mode of reception of a social movement: “a conception of the world with a corresponding ethics”. Even the us / them distinction, and basic ethical categories such as solidarity, then, are sedimentations of skilled ways of understanding and responding to the world, and as such subject to erosion and attack.

./english/277.txt:76:(C) This points to the third element of the analysis, which is to see human activity as practical learning activity. If skill can be lost, it can also be developed; whether practically, in direct interaction with the natural and social world, or indirectly, for example by transmission of particular modes of organising social movements and of thinking about politics. The point of Marxist theory, and socialist organisations, within the workers’ movement is arguably precisely to enable such indirect learning, to avoid having to reinvent the wheel. Social movements are a privileged case of such learning, as Vester’s (1975) analysis of Thompson’s The making of the English working class seeks to establish. Vester argues that social movements represent “collective learning processes”, in which the elements Marx analyses as key to class conflict - an increasingly clearer self-understanding, a fuller grasp of social structure and historical process, and an increasingly adequate mode of organisation and struggle - are generated in the conflict with a movement’s opponents. The history of recent decades suggests that skill can be lost as well as developed. Hilary Wainwright’s (1994) analysis of the “politics of knowledge” of social movements also points, I think, in this direction, as does, from an earlier age, Banks’ analysis of social movements as a form of “social technology” (1972). As we shall shortly see, this is not all social movements are; but these points should be enough to establish an internal link from the bases of skilled activity to the articulation of social movements.

./english/277.txt:106:If our categories are to be historical, if they are to be geared to movements as they develop and are eroded over the short and long timescales of conflict, they must be oriented to the whole history of a movement, not simply to its current appearance at a single point in time. But how is this to be done? The western Marxist tradition offers two related ways of thinking the problem. The first is that outlined by Lukács, in his discussion of “imputed class consciousness”. It is interesting to note, given the disfavour into which the concept has fallen, that Lukács himself thought that the concept was similar to Max Weber’s “ideal type”; in other words that it was oriented to asking what, all other things being equal, one could expect the interests and self-understanding of a particular social class to be: “class consciousness consists in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions ‘imputed’ to a particular typical position in the process of production” (1971: 51; cf. note 11 on p. 81 for the reference to Weber). The problems with this point of view hardly need to be stressed; ah it is interesting that the obvious criticism - that this legitimates virtually any external imposition in the name of the “true” interests of the working class - is frequently made when these interests are identified as revolutionary; rather less frequently when social interests are identified in more conservative terms.

./english/278.txt:7:How to Study Class Consciousness …and Why We Should

./english/278.txt:13:According to Marxist theory, a socialist revolution requires a class conscious working class. Consequently, most socialist political activity is directed one way or another to raising workers' consciousness. Yet relatively few Marxists have gone beyond theoretical analysis to studying the class consciousness of real workers. In part, this is due to the belief, widespread among Marxists, that such consciousness is a necessary by-product of capitalist economic crisis, or the belief, equally widespread, that class consciousness can only be observed in political actions (in both cases, studying class consciousness now is impossible or irrelevant). In part, this neglect is due to a post Lenin overemphasis on developing political strategies and organizations, on the assumption that class consciousness is sufficiently advanced—once effective leadership is provided—for revolutionary activity to occur (in which case, studying it is unnecessary). Proponents of this view often confuse, as Lenin never did, simple anger directed against a boss and trade union consciousness with revolutionary or class consciousness.

./english/278.txt:15:Given the complexity of our subject, the paucity of Marxist studies of class consciousness is also due, in part, to lack of a workable method (in which case, such studies are unthinkable). And, finally, if truth will out, this situation is due, in part, to an unhappy tradition in which many renegades from Marxism have begun their descent from grace by noting the non-socialist character of real workers (in which case, investigating class consciousness has appeared to some as politically suspect and even reactionary). The absence, until relatively recently, of Marxist scholars in the universities who might have conducted such studies has only served to exacerbate these tendencies.

./english/278.txt:17:There have been, of course, numerous Marxist studies of the working class, particularly by historians and sociologists, that describe important aspects of their class consciousness. E.P. Thompson (1966), Eric Hobsbawm (1984), David Montgomery (1979), Herbert Gutman (1976), Harry Braverman (1974), Andre Gorz (1967), Serge Mallet (1975), Erich Fromm (1984), Michael Mann (1973), John Leggett (1968), Stanley Aronowitz (1973), Eric Wright (1985), Adam Przeworski (1977), John McDermott (1980), and Paul Willis (1981) are some of the chief figures here. But few of these authors have made consciousness their main focus. And fewer still have made independent studies of the consciousness of today's workers. In the main their evidence comes from non-Marxist research (which they reinterpret), working class actions (which they deconstruct), government statistics, literary texts, personal experiences, anecdotes, and unique events and testimonies. More serious still, there is no consistent method that helps us as readers and potential researchers and political actors to get what we want and to understand what we have once we've gotten it. Usually, we are provided with a highly suggestive collage, generally with many parts missing, of theoretically undigested facts and insights. Until these findings are reformulated in terms of Marx's theory of class consciousness and integrated in turn within Marx's broader analysis of society, their full potential for helping us either understand or change capitalism cannot be realized. Clearly, a better focused, more systematic, and more effectively theorized Marxist study of class-consciousness of today's workers remains to be done.

./english/278.txt:19:In the meantime, non-Marxist social science has made class-consciousness one of it main topics of study, though, of course, the conceptual frameworks that are used have little to do with Marx's own. The preferred approach is the attitude survey, simply asking workers a whole range of questions as to how they feel, think, and act in regard to specified social and political situations. One of the most influential examples of this approach is found in Goldthorpe, Lockwood, Bechhofer, and Platt (1969). Those who conduct such surveys generally assume that the answers they get back are honest, of similar intensity, easy to interpret, and—most suspect of all—relatively stable. But Seymour Martin Lipset, whose many writings on the working class have made extensive use of such materials, admits that no attitude survey has even foretold any of the great bursts of working class consciousness that have occurred (1983a). Public choice literature offers another, increasingly popular, non-Marxist approach to studying class-consciousness. Here, the emphasis is on examining the practical reasoning that leads individuals to make decisions on whether to participate in class actions. Based on a highly individualist sense of decision making and an extremely egoistic view of human nature, most of the studies that have come out of this school, beginning with the path-breaking work of Mancur Olsen (1971), have demonstrated conclusively that individual workers have nothing to gain by thinking and acting as members of their class.

./english/278.txt:21:A third approach has simply linked class-consciousness; or rather the lack of it, to the increasing segmentation of the work force that follows from changes in the structure of the job market. What distinguishes different groups of workers from each other, it is held, has become greater than what they have in common, establishing a variety of occupation or sector consciousnesses in place of class consciousness (Lockwood, 1975). This account is sufficiently materialist and stucturalist to attract the support of some radicals (Edwards, 1979), but the class consciousness that is undermined never gets the same attention as what undermines it. Hence, we are in no position to estimate the pull of conflicting forces on workers' consciousness either now or in the future.

./english/278.txt:23:But perhaps the most influential non-Marxist approach to studying class consciousness is one that uses cross-cultural data to answer the question, "Why no socialism in the U.S.?" In this case, what workers think is deduced from what they have achieved, especially politically, and what American workers have achieved in this regard is considerably less impressive than the powerful socialist and communist parties and trade unions thrown up by the European working class. By concentrating on what there is in European history and conditions that contributed to these developments (such as a feudal past), and what there is in the U.S that restricted them (such as greater social mobility), this comparative approach tries to show not only that class consciousness does not exist here, but that it could not have come about and—by implication—will never come about. For the classic statement of this position, see Sombart (1976; first published 1906).

./english/278.txt:25:The assumption here, of course, is that there is only one way of becoming class conscious. This is clearly disproved, however, not only by the variety of paths taken by the working class in different European countries but also by the degree of class consciousness that relatively large numbers of American workers achieved in the period just before World War 1 and again in the 1930s. The point is that capitalism, just like any complex organism, contains many compensating mechanisms, so that the absence of any one of them is not sufficient reason for believing that its function will not find expression through some other form. Conversely, the presence of conditions that exist only in the United States is no guarantee that the sum of capitalism's other conditions will not sooner or later produce a class-consciousness equal to, or even greater than, that found in Europe. Besides their conservative implications and the questionable methods adopted by all these non-Marxist studies, they can also be faulted for focusing on only part of class consciousness, which narrowness is also largely responsible for their conservative implications.

./english/278.txt:29:Making a Marxist inquiry into the class-consciousness of today's workers on the other hand, requires that we bring the whole of this notion into focus. For this, we must clarify the nature of class and the consciousness of a class in Marxist theory. To begin with the latter, "consciousness" in the expression "class consciousness" does not mean the same thing as it does in the expression "individual consciousness." It is not just a matter of individuals being conscious, or having a certain understanding, of their class. Rather, class is the subject, and consequently, consciousness is not just a larger version of individual consciousness. What is it then? Before answering we must shift our attention to class.

./english/278.txt:31:We find that defining "class"—or indeed any other important notion in Marxism—proceeds from the whole to the part (class, in this case) rather than from still smaller parts (individuals) to class, viewed as some larger composite notion. According to Marx, "the subject, society, must always be envisaged as the precondition of comprehension" (1904, 295). This whole, this society, is capitalism, or more specifically, Marx's analysis of capitalism, which captures both its distinctive character as a social formation and the unique dynamics, or "law of motion," that has transformed it from its beginnings in feudalism to and through the present to whatever future awaits it. Before we can offer more precision on Marx's notion of class, we need to have a better idea of the whole in which it plays such a crucial role.

./english/278.txt:39:In capitalism, grasped in this way, class is first of all a place in the system, a property of the whole at whose core we find the interrelated functions of capital and wage-labor. The groups of people, who realize these functions, i.e., use capital to exploit workers and use labor to produce value, are the capitalists and workers. Marx often refers to capitalists and workers as "embodiments" or "personifications" of capital and wage-labor (1958, 10, 85, 592; 1959, 857f.) Without denying that these classes are composed of real people, this is a way of saying that what makes them classes is not so much the qualities of the individuals but the relation of the group, qua group, to a central organizing function of the system. It is clear that workers, in this sense, are not more male than female, white than black, unskilled than skilled. As classes, the capitalists and the workers are viewed as extensions of the functions of capital and wage-labor, which themselves are only meaningful as parts of a system whose functions they are. Marx himself goes so far as to say, "capital is necessarily at the same time the capitalist... the capitalist is contained in the process of capital" (1973, 512).

./english/278.txt:41:In the labor theory of value and the materialist conception of history, the major theories through which Marx interprets capitalism, capitalists, and workers generally make their appearance as embodiments of capital and wage-labor. When describing the broad lines of capitalist development, the origins of different social pressures and constraints, the opening and closing of options, and especially what happens in the majority of cases over time, Marx did not think it necessary to move much beyond this essentially functional approach to classes. This same approach lies behind his oft-quoted statement that, "The question is not what this or that man or even the whole of the proletariat at the moment considers its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do" (Marx and Engels, 1956, 53). What real flesh and blood capitalists and workers did and said and thought and wanted was either deducible from the way the system works and has developed (or else it would not work or have developed like that) or irrelevant (since even without the contribution of these individuals the system works and has developed as it has). Both necessary and sufficient conditions are easy to decipher after the fact. For example, that the French Revolution occurred indicates that the conditions for it happening at that time were not only necessary but sufficient. Consequently, where the acts and words of particular individuals are cited in Marx's more general historical and economic writings, it is to illustrate a point or to otherwise facilitate exposition rather than as evidence or as part of an argument for his conclusions.

./english/278.txt:43:In dealing with the possibility of socialist revolution in the present however, whether Marx's present or our own, it is not enough to treat people as embodiments of social-economic functions. As much as this helps us understand their conditions, the pressures they are under, and their options and opportunities, the people involved must still respond to these influences in ways that make what is possible actual. In Marxist terminology, they must become class conscious. To study whether this can actually occur here and now, or at least soon, we must add a subjective, people-oriented, more directly and narrowly human element and focus to the objective, system-oriented view of class that has been presented so far. In short, in analyzing history and political economy, Marx could operate with an essentially functionalist conception of class derived from the place of a function within the system. Class here is something to which recognizable individuals are attached. In this way, incidentally, it is possible for an individual who serves more than one function (managers and wage-earning professionals, for example) to belong to more than one class. But in analyzing the present state of the class struggle and in developing political strategy, this view has to be supplemented, not replaced, by a conception of class that gives priority to the actual people who occupy this place and perform this function. Sharing a social space and functions, they also tend to acquire over time other common characteristics as regards income, life-style, political consciousness, and organization that become, in turn, further evidence for membership in their class and subsidiary criteria for determining when to use the class label. Here, class is a quality that is attached to people, who posses other qualities—such as nationality, race or sex, for example—that reduce and may even nullify the influence on thinking and action that comes from their membership in the class. Conceived as a complex social relation, in line with Marx's dialectical outlook on the world, class invites analysis as both a function and a group, that is to say, from different sides of this relation.

./english/278.txt:45:There is even a third major aspect of class, conceived of as a complex relation, which is the abstracted common element in the social relations of alienated people. Their tendency to interact with each other as instances of a kind rather than as unique individuals, a tendency that is expressed mainly through mutual indifference and competition, takes on independent form in the notion of "class". It is the alienated quality of social life of the individuals who embody the aforesaid economic functions. We will return to class as alienation later in this paper, when we discuss the various difficulties workers experience in becoming class conscious. All these aspects of class—place/function, group, alienated social relation, and there are others—are mutually dependent, but their relative importance varies with the problem and period under consideration. Each is distinctive for the dimension of reality it brings into focus. Essentially, they are different ways of cutting up the "pie". Their real content largely overlaps; though the way each organizes its content makes this difficult to recognize.

./english/278.txt:47:Returning to the example of the French Revolution, it is clear that the classes involved were not only embodiments of functions, but groups of real people and expressions of social alienation. As people they made decisions, and there was always the possibility that on any given occasion they might have chosen otherwise. However, it does not follow that each of these aspects of class should get equal treatment in an account of this event, or that the aspect of class that is emphasized for an event that has already happened, like the French Revolution, should be emphasized in trying to understand developments that lie ahead. One should be open, in other words, to using "class" in somewhat different ways when analyzing the present and/or future than when analyzing the past.

./english/278.txt:49:Corresponding to our two main senses of class—as embodiment of a function and as a group—is a bifurcated conception of class interests. In one case, class interest are attached to class in the sense of function, and in the other to the social group who performs this function. The first can be referred to as "objective interests" and the second as "subjective interests." Thus, in the case of the workers, class interest not only refers to what real workers, viewed as a group, actually believe to be in their interest (these are subjective interests), but it also refers to those practices and changes that serve the workers, being who they are, i.e., in their function as wage-labor (these are their objective interests). The most important of these objective interests involve the kind of social structural changes that are required for the mass of workers to realize their subjective interests. This is how these apparently independent sets of interests are linked. Capitalist power relations, for example, simply do not permit most workers to get the good, high paying, secure, healthy, interesting jobs they want, that they know and say they want. To understand why this is so and what order of changes would secure these aims, that is, realize these subjective interests, requires the kind of analysis of capitalism that Marx made and most workers have not. As a result, most workers are unaware of their objective class interests in transforming capitalist power relations, which - given what capitalism is and how it works - is the only way that the mass of the workers could secure their subjective interests over time.

./english/278.txt:53:Having defined "class" and "class interests" as both objective and subjective, we are now in a position to approach class-consciousness. First, as regards its content, its main elements include one's identity and interests (subjective and objective) as members of a class, something of the dynamics of capitalism uncovered by Marx (at least enough to grasp objective interests), the broad outlines of the class struggle and where one fits into it, feelings of solidarity toward one's own class and of rational hostility toward opposition classes (in contrast to the feelings of mutual indifference and inner-class competition that accompany alienation), and the vision of a more democratic and egalitarian society that is not only possible but that one can help bring about. These are the main things that a class conscious working class is conscious of. Studying workers' class-consciousness, then, is looking for what is not there, not yet present in the thinking of real workers, as well as for what is. How can this be?

./english/278.txt:55:It can be, because class consciousness brings together (and is equally a part of) both the function and group aspects of class. To begin with, it is the understanding that is appropriate to the objective character of a class and its objective interests. We can call this the objective aspect of class consciousness. Given this is the place and function of a class and this its objective interests, its class consciousness must be such and such. The one is deducible from the other. It is an imputed class consciousness. George Lukacs (1971) is the Marxist scholar most associated with this view. However, class consciousness is also the consciousness of the group of people in a class in so far as their understanding of who they are and what must be done develops from its economistic beginnings toward the consciousness that is appropriate to their class situation. This is the subjective aspect of class-consciousness.

./english/278.txt:57:Class consciousness in this subjective sense differs from the actual consciousness of each individual in the group in three ways; (1) it is a group consciousness, a way of thinking and a thought content, that develops through the individuals in the group interacting with each other and with opposing groups in situations that are peculiar to the class; (2) it is a consciousness that has its main point of reference in the situation and objective interests of a class, viewed functionally, and not in the declared subjective interests of individual class members (the imputed class consciousness referred to above has been given a role here in the thinking of real people); and (3) it is in its essence a process, a movement from wherever a group begins in its consciousness of itself to the consciousness appropriate to its situation. In other words, the process of becoming class conscious is not external to what class consciousness is but instead is at the center of what it is all about.

./english/278.txt:59:To claim that class consciousness is a group consciousness is not to deny that individuals also have something that may be called an individual consciousness, that this may include political and social elements, and that such consciousness both affects and is affected by their group consciousness (or that they may have—really participate in—other kinds of group consciousness, racial, national, religious and sexual as well as class). Individual consciousness may also be politically in advance of or lagging behind class-consciousness. Class-consciousness, however, is something other. It is kind of "group think," a collective, interactive approach to recognizing, labeling, coming to understand, and acting upon the particular world class members have in common. It is a set of mental moves and a store of knowledge and judgments reserved for these common situations and what these situations tap or set into motion, where the individual's fate is inextricably linked with the fate of the group. It is a manner of thinking that is done in common, most of the time in a common place on common problems, phrased in a common terminology, pushed forward and held back by common pressures and constraints. It is not only the Australian Aborigines who solve problems in a group (apparently to the point that individual Aborigines have trouble taking Western IQ tests). We all do. It is, at least in part, a professional deformation of intellectuals, of people whose work involves a lot of thinking in isolation, to believe that thinking can only be done by individuals operating on their own, with the result that what I have called "group thinking" is generally either ignored or denied the honorific label of "thinking".

./english/278.txt:63:Obviously not all problems are submitted to group thinking, but just those which circumscribe our existence as members of the group, class in this case, though the same thing applies to problem solving as a member of racial, national, religious and sexual groups. Individuals who do not participate in the consciousness of their class in this way, no matter how numerous they are, should be viewed as the exceptions and, no matter how long the wait, as temporary exceptions at that.

./english/278.txt:65:Politically, what counts is what an individual understands and does as a member of a class and not his private reflections and intimate behavior. In coming to recognize, as most of us have in this Freudian century, the undeniable influence of the latter on the former (not to mention the reverse), there has been a regrettable conflation of these two forms of consciousness. The study of class-consciousness as part of developing a strategy for socialist transformation requires that group and individual consciousnesses, at least initially, be kept quite distinct.

./english/278.txt:67:Class consciousness is also different from individual consciousness, as we said, by having its main point of reference in the situation of the class and not in the already recognized interests of individuals. It is this that enables Marx, on occasion, to conceptualize class consciousness as an aspect of class (again, grasped as a complex relation), with the implication that workers are not fully a class until they become class conscious (1934, 19). The main content of class consciousness, therefore, is not to be had by asking members of the class what they think or want, but by analyzing their objective interests as a group of people embodying a particular societal place and function. It is, again, the appropriate consciousness of people in that position, the consciousness that maximizes their chances of realizing class interests, including structural change where such change is required to secure other interests. What these same people, occupying this same place, think before they acquire this class consciousness is not really class consciousness, except in so far as it is used to highlight what is not there. In this sense, and to this degree, class consciousness is a consciousness waiting to happen. It exists in potential, not an abstract potential but one rooted in a situation unfolding before our very eyes, long before the understanding of real people catches up with it.

./english/278.txt:69:It should be evident now the degree to which "class consciousness" is a theory laden expression, and that what non-Marxists mean by it is not and cannot be the same things that Marxists mean by it. Therefore, what non-Marxists find in their research into what they call "class consciousness" is not easily transferable into a Marxist analysis. Likewise, what Marxists discover in their investigation of class consciousness will not be readily accepted or even understood by non-Marxists. The questions that Marxists address generally take the form—"Why haven't the workers become class conscious?" and "When are they likely to do so?" (which inclines us to look for the barriers to such consciousness). While non Marxists ordinarily ask such questions as "What is the consciousness of workers?" and "Are the workers class conscious?" (which ignores the very analysis, Marxism, that leads us to raise these questions in the first place). The difference is between Marxists—who are looking for something that they believe is already there, in one sense, and not there, in another, something they grasp the broad outlines of from their analysis—and non Marxists investigating the same subject who appear to be simply looking. But are they? We shall return to this in a moment.

./english/278.txt:71:Finally, and possibly what distinguishes it most from individual consciousness as ordinarily understood, class consciousness is elastic and changing, and encompasses all the stages in the process of becoming what it potentially is along with the time it takes for this is occur. As such, class consciousness cannot be captured in any instant, nor can it be expressed in any simple, straightforward description. The time frame is stretched to cover the whole journey, but it is a journey with an end, a goal established by the situation of the class as such and evoked by all the conditions and pressures that constitute that situation, though most members of the class may not recognize this until very late. One of the most puzzling features in Marx's use of "class" is how he could claim that class is "the product of the bourgeoisie" while maintaining that "All history is the history of class struggle," and refer to various pre-capitalist groups as "classes" (Marx and Engels, 1942, 77; 1945, 12). In fact, class (in all of its aspects), class struggle, and class-consciousness all develop, mature, become over time, and only in late capitalist society do they realize their full potential. It is in this sense that each may be said to be a product of capitalism. In so far as many of their elements are present earlier, however, class, class struggle, and class consciousness can be said—if this limited sense is kept in mind—to have existed before. Moreover, viewed as historical processes, the mature form of each can be taken as present as a germ in its earlier stages and vice versa. Such is the nature of becoming as a dialectical category. As regards class-consciousness at the present time, rather than what any single person thinks, class-consciousness refers to how, when, from and towards what a whole class of people are changing their minds.

./english/278.txt:73:Studying class consciousness has something in common with trying to catch a wave at the moment when it breaks. All movement toward this point is treated as development, as preliminary, as the unfolding of a potential. Everything that either contributes to or retards it movement is equally the object of study, but the constant point of repair, the perspective from which the whole process is viewed and interpreted, the event that gives everything that proceeded it its distinctive meaning, is the moment at which the wave breaks. Naturally, there is the assumption, derived from a Marxist analysis of capitalism, that the waves will almost certainly break, that sooner or later the worsening problems of the system, together with the reduction and eventual disappearance of system-approved alternatives for dealing with them, will drive most workers to embody the consciousness of their class.

./english/278.txt:75:But why do Marxists insist on making Marx's view of the most probable future of class consciousness the key element in understanding its present form? Are we unnecessarily burdening class consciousness with something that just is not there? Why can't we be satisfied with whatever class consciousness emerges from simply questioning workers and leave it at that? Our answer can be summarized in the following points: (1) That class consciousness has a future is incontestable. (2) No one can avoid having some idea of what that will be, as evidenced by our expectations, by what surprises us, and by what developments we think need to be explained and accounted for. (3) Marx arrives at his idea of what class consciousness will become through an analysis of the changes going on in the conditions in which people live and work (this seems reasonable). (4) Non-Marxist social scientists also have an idea about the future of class-consciousness, though it is generally left implicit (see number two above). Most probably believe that class-consciousness will stay more or less the same, while some may believe that every conceivable change is equally possible. (5) The basis for the first view could only be that it is class consciousness in its present state that determines future class consciousness, or that the other conditions that influence class consciousness, whatever they are, will never change, so that the effect they have now will continue into the future. The basis for the second view could only be that there is nothing we know about our past and present that is relevant to learning about our likely future, or that what we do know suggests that no one outcome, no particular development in class consciousness, is more likely than another. On the surface, none of these arguments seem reasonable, so that the beliefs they support—that no change in class consciousness will occur, or that every kind of change is equally possible—are never openly defended.

./english/278.txt:77:(6) Moreover, one's view of future class consciousness, whatever it is, greatly affects one's interpretation of its present state. In Marx's case, it is what enables him to view much of what today's workers actually think as false consciousness and ideology. Among non-Marxists viewing future class consciousness as identical with it present state—what I take to be the more prevalent alternative view—gives to class consciousness in its present form an appearance of natural truth. What is becomes reified, unchanging and, apparently, unchangeable. The Marxist ideas of false consciousness and ideology are not only rejected but ridiculed. It is not just that these non-Marxist beliefs go beyond the evidence; they are held in the absence of any attempt to get the evidence. So much for the notion suggested earlier that non-Marxist social scientists investigating this subject were simply looking, that they brought no assumptions with them, and that this might be an advantage. (7) Hence—and finally— it seems clear that to fully understand what class consciousness is in the present requires a serious effort to learn about its likely future, using, as Marx does, all the available evidence.

./english/278.txt:79:What if the majority of the workers in capitalist society never become class conscious? This certainly is a possibility. Our effort to integrate the probable future into the present is not an exercise in crystal ball gazing. But imputed class consciousness, the workers' rational understanding of their situation and of what kind of actions are required to serve their interests, can be treated as future class consciousness even if it never takes place. It is after all only the probable future as determined by Marx's analysis of the worker's situation together with its developing patterns and trends. What needs to be stressed is that the probable future is an internally related part of the present, and exists there (here) as the point toward which real pressures are directing us. Grasped as "becoming", it is a form assumed by the future within the present, and as such affects how we understand the present, how we should study it, and what we can do to help change it.

./english/278.txt:81:Does understanding imputed class consciousness as future class consciousness imply that socialism is inevitable? No, because class conscious workers are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a successful socialist transformation of society. How effectively these class conscious workers are organized, what political action they take, the character of the then opposition, and even luck will help determine the final outcome of the class struggle. Marx himself offered barbarism—the disintegration of advanced civilization—as one alternative to socialism, but living one hundred years ago, he did not give it the attention that it would receive today. The Cold War has led to the recognition that another all too realistic alternative to socialism is the death of humanity brought about by nuclear holocaust. Still another awful possibility is ecocide, or the destruction of our species through the rapidly escalating destruction of our natural environment. Many rate this last as the most likely outcome of our species' relatively brief sojourn on this planet. While occasionally sympathetic (if this is the right word) to this view, it should be clear that the factors effecting this outcome are, at least to a large degree, of a different order than those that influence the progress of class consciousness. Consequently, the possibility of ecocide, like the possibility of barbarism and nuclear holocaust, does not prevent us from treating imputed class consciousness as future class consciousness within a notion of present class consciousness viewed in the process of becoming.

./english/278.txt:83:What emerges from the foregoing is that our object of study, class consciousness, is much larger than the mind or understanding of any individual and much longer than the present moment. It is the class, its interest and self-understanding, in the context of the situation, especially its interaction with opposing classes, that constitute it as a class, and all this as it has developed, is developing and will continue to develop into the future. At its broadest, the study of class consciousness is a study of an important part of capitalist society, which, through its interconnections, is simultaneously an investigation into capitalism, into how it works and where it is tending, viewed from the perspective of that moment when the mass of workers have acquired the understand that is necessary for engaging in revolutionary activity.

./english/278.txt:85:Given the spatial and temporal dimensions of class consciousness, it is obvious that examining small pieces of this process, such as the consciousness of individual workers, which is separated from its social context and viewed statically, as it appears in an instant, simply will not do. This is, of course, what happens in most attitude surveys. Even if the questions are fair and the respondents honest (big "ifs"), attitude surveys cannot capture a process, a context, and a potential for change. It is as if one sought to catch the moment a wave breaks by photographing an earlier moment (and small piece) in its movement. But class-consciousness is not the kind of thing that shows up in a photo, or even in moving pictures. There are just too many aspects that are not immediately perceptible.

./english/278.txt:89:What is the alternative? Until now, I have been constructing a dialectical conception of class consciousness that could be studied directly and not only as a dependent aspect of class structure or class struggle. In what follows, I sketch what such a study would look like, its advantages and problems, and its relation to political practice. The dialectical alternative to examining class consciousness in the attitudes of individual workers, then, is to study the objective aspects of class consciousness in the situation of the class, and its subjective aspects in the thinking and activity of the group of people who make up the class, and both of these over time. On the objective side, what we have called the situation of the class must be studied on two different levels of historical specificity. First, we must clearly establish the place and function of the working class together with its objective interests in capitalism as such, that is in capitalism as it has existed for the past three to four hundred years, in order to derive the class consciousness that is appropriate. Reconstructing this situation not only provides the goal or finished form of class consciousness but puts us in touch with social and economic pressures arising out of the most basic relations of capitalism that move the actual consciousness of living workers in the direction of this goal. Given our concern with class consciousness, the focus is on the workers and hence the rest of capitalist society comes into view chiefly as part of the necessary conditions and/or results of the workers appearing and functioning as they do. In reconstructing how capitalism looks and works from the vantage point of the working class, there are some tendencies that deserve special attention. Among these are the accumulation and centralization of capital, the falling rate of profit, the increasing rate of exploitation, and the immiseration of the working class (that is relative to capitalists and viewed on a world scale). Though sometimes referred to as "laws," Marx's tendencies all admit—indeed often require—counter-tendencies, and should be understood and investigated with this in mind.

./english/278.txt:91:The second level on which to study the situation of the working class is the more specific one of world capitalism today. As well as the tendencies mentioned above, which are characteristic of capitalism as such and apply with varying degrees of tenacity to the whole capitalist epoch, there are a number of often contradictory tendencies—each exercising some influence on consciousness—which taken together express what capitalism has become in our day. Among the most important of those helping to expand class consciousness are recent developments in automation and related changes in job structure and employment; the movement of viable industries out of the advanced capitalist countries to the third world where labor is cheaper; the closing off of traditional non-socialist solutions to the problems associated with capitalism's need to expand investment and trade due to the saturation of older markets; the "debt bomb" with, among other things, its implicit threat to the savings workers have in banks that are threatened; the invasion of even the advanced capitalist countries, including the United States, by foreign and international capital, seriously weakening the link between capitalism and nationalism (if most workers could believe "What's good for General Motors is good for America": it is difficult to substitute "Renault" or "Toyota" or "Honda" for "General Motors" and feel the same sentiment); and the increase in workers' "ownership" of industry, whatever its pro-capitalist form and however little it affects who exercises real control (the question of power has been joined and the potential of workers to take and use power for their own ends has become that much easier to conceive).

./english/278.txt:93:On both of these levels, in capitalism overall as well as in modern capitalism, there are also a number of relations and tendencies that pull in the opposite direction, that make the attainment of class consciousness more difficult. As regards capitalism in general, the most important of these find expression in Marx's theory of alienation: workers are separated from—and hence lack control over—their activity, products, and other people, at work and throughout social life. While the resulting feelings of isolation and powerlessness (both subjective factors) receive most of the attention, the core of alienation lies in the workers' objective situation as workers in capitalism. Oddly enough, Marx never offered the workers' alienation as part of the explanation for the continued inability of the mass of the workers to become fully class conscious, just as he never introduced the progress many workers have made in becoming class conscious as a factor qualifying their alienation. Yet, each condition acts as a major check on the other, and until we succeed in integrating the theories with which Marx grasps these opposed developments—something that must be left for another time—we will not be able to gauge with any accuracy the real potential for change inherent in each one.

./english/278.txt:95:As regards modern capitalism, the most important of these retraining relations and tendencies include the increasing segmentation of the labor force (with its accompanying fragmentation of interests), institutional racism, sexism, nationalism and other means of dividing the workers, the enormous expansion of the consciousness industry (some would put capitalist ownership of all mass media at the top of our list), and the spread and then failure of Soviet-style socialism, which is widely viewed as a dystopian model of what happens to all attempts at radical reform. All of this constitutes so many barriers and pressures rooted in the objective situation of workers, in their work, life, and world, against their becoming class conscious.

./english/278.txt:97:How these contradictory tendencies (promoting class consciousness and undermining it - whose main parts I have only been able to list) are related to each other in each modern capitalism and capitalism overall, and how the sum of the tendencies in the former facilitate, give expression to, or inhibit all the tendencies in the latter constitute the core of a Marxist study of the objective side of class consciousness. One way to bring out the objective character of these heterogeneous elements is to subsume them under the notion of class struggle. The class struggle is not, as most commentators left and right would have it, a subjective, consciously chosen form of class behavior. Rather, it is "the form of motion of classes." It is what a class—grasped as a place/function in the system, as the group of people who embody this function and who as a result tend to develop other common characteristics, and as the common element in their alienated social relations—becomes in and through its complex interaction with other classes, particularly over class interests and the conditions and possibilities for their realization. All that a class does, or what happens to it, that directly or indirectly affects its power vis-à-vis other classes is class struggle. Viewed in this way, class struggle encompasses what Gramsci calls the war of position, the adding and subtracting of advantages and disadvantages, as well as what he calls the war of movement, or those occasions when all that has been acquired (and lost) serves to fuel more direct forms of confrontation; and both of these "wars" rage throughout all sectors of society (1971, 108-110, 229-235, 238f., 243). The contradictory tendencies within class consciousness that we referred to above are recast here as internally related causes, expressions, and effects of the interaction of classes.

./english/278.txt:99:To be sure, when a class, in the sense of group, is conscious of itself as a class together with its interests, its involvement in class struggle is more purposeful and usually more effective than when it is not. What makes the interaction of classes a "struggle," however, is not the consciousness of the actors, nor even the intensity or undisguised nature of the clash, but the incompatibility of their objective interests and paths of development, both of which are inherent in the structure of capitalism itself. And it is this that makes it possible to organize the key contradictions of capitalism as a class struggle and to treat class struggle as the over-arching expression for the objective forms of class-consciousness.

./english/278.txt:101:In most Marxist accounts of this subject the opposite occurs, which is to say class struggle is the main object of study, and class consciousness, to the extent it is addressed at all, is treated as a minor and dependent aspect, as a mere reflection of the class struggle ("For workers to have arrived at this degree of struggle, their consciousness must be such and such"). We have also seen that Marx could conceptualize class consciousness as an aspect of class as such, as something that develops as a class realizes its full potential as a class. While such approaches to class consciousness are adequate for treating the past, where the evidence of what happened is in (so that we know roughly what the level of class consciousness must have been for classes or class struggle to have progressed so far), it is my view that a serious Marxist study of how the present is opening onto the future requires as a complementary focus, one that makes class struggle a subordinate aspect of class consciousness. (A similar point was made earlier in this essay about the limitations of understanding class simply as the embodiment of an economic function). This, then, is not an attempt to deny the material basis of Marxism or the priority it gives to activity, political as well as economic, for analyzing capitalism. It is only that the dialectical method allows us to approach capitalist social relations from the vantage point of class consciousness - a vantage point neither Marx or his followers have made much use of - and that for understanding our present moment as well as for affecting it there are certain advantages in doing so.

./english/278.txt:103:In investigating the different objective aspects of class consciousness, now conceptualized as class struggle, care must also be taken not to prejudge the particular combination of factors that will carry the wave to its breaking point, or, conversely, will ensure that it not get there, at least not now anyway. As we said earlier, any complex organism, and none is more complex than capitalism, has many compensating mechanisms for what is missing or not working as expected. Consequently, no social feature, either through its presence or absence, exercises an absolute veto on the development of class consciousness. No doubt the way in which consciousness develops has an important influence on the pace and form of the revolution. It does not follow, however, that there is only one road, a royal road, to socialism, and that socialists who are not on it are doomed to failure. Given the changing though still highly structured context provided by the process of capital accumulation, the class struggle allows for enormous flexibility and variety in how workers become class conscious. Yet, it remains the case that some paths of development are more likely—indeed far more likely—to be taken than others, and studying the objective aspects of class consciousness for each time and place is the surest means of uncovering what these are.

./english/278.txt:105:While an overly deterministic reading of any of these relations is in error, Marx clearly saw a particularly close connection between worsening economic conditions and improved prospects for socialist revolution. The tie between the two, however, is not automatic and necessary, but probable and mediated through a series of changes that make the development of class consciousness easier and more likely to take place. Such changes include the intensification of capitalist exploitation, which occurs in any crisis, the concentration of capital and the accompanying accentuation of class differences, the closing and narrowing of existing career options (small business, for example), increasing evidence of the irrationality and immorality of capitalism (particularly, conspicuous consumption and waste amid growing poverty), unemployment for many and job insecurity for the rest, the loss of savings, homes, farms and small businesses, the steady erosion of welfare state benefits acquired in better times, and the evident failure of traditional economic and political strategies (like trade unionism and voting for the Democrats). As various life options that have been available to workers are closed off, as the connections that have to be made appear more obvious, as the material penalties for not making them grow larger, as the surrounding injustices become more blaring, and as the benefits to be won through a redistribution of economic and political power (what is sometimes called the "revolutionary positive") become easier to see and to imagine, in sum, as the objective forces propelling workers toward full class consciousness become overwhelming, it is difficult for any worker to retain his old outlook. (That many still do is another matter—based chiefly on a different set of considerations—and we will return to this shortly.) Minus many important details and qualifications, this is the most general conclusion to be drawn from studies already done on the objective side of class consciousness.

./english/278.txt:109:Having acquired some understanding of the objective aspects of class-consciousness, of the consciousness appropriate to the situation of the class together with everything in the situation that is working toward its full actualization, we are now ready to examine its subjective aspects. Proceeding in the opposite order, dealing with subjective aspects first, there is a serious danger of mistaking a part, usually the psychology of workers, for the whole, and ignoring the objective aspects of class consciousness or treating them as minor conditions and qualifications. Psychology today has become a lot like Pac-Man, gobbling up one discipline after another. The only sure way to avoid psychologizing social problems is by laying out the main objective conditions (pressures, constraints, and options) in and with which people think and act first. Then, and only then, can their thinking and acting be judged for what they are.

./english/278.txt:111:On the subjective side, the study of class consciousness should proceed by dealing with groups of workers as groups, especially in situations where some dramatic change had occurred that triggers off a heightened interaction between the members. A change of this kind generally increases their awareness of their place and role in the system as workers and with it the likelihood of thinking, even of personal problems, in class terms. A strike offers one example of this. Visits to the unemployment office is another. Observing what the group does and the interaction and degree of participation of members, listening to what is said, reading what is written, asking questions aimed at bringing out their understanding and intensity of feeling about whatever is pushing them toward class consciousness and whatever is holding them back, making remarks on similar topics in order to provoke a response, asking workers what they see in pictures and cartoons that are relevant to their situation, judging their reaction to political jokes, beginning a story taken from their lives and asking them to finish it, showing videos of their own discussions and asking them to comment on what they have seen, and even acting alongside workers to get a feel for what is going on are all recommended.

./english/278.txt:113:It is also extremely important to conduct such inquiries over a period of time in order to chart both the direction and pace of change. One of the most neglected aspects of class consciousness, largely because the process of becoming is not put at the center of what it is, is the speed at which it can develop (and also, unfortunately, undeveloped or come apart). This is still another reason for the priority we have given to the objective side of class consciousness over the psychology of workers. For if class consciousness can develop and spread with the speed of a forest fire, then—sticking with this analogy—it is more important to know the conditions under which this can occur, including the dryness of the grass, the extremes of heat, the duration of the heat wave, what kind of events can start a fire and how likely they are to occur, what techniques of fire preventions are available, etc., than knowing details about the currently nonflammable state of particular blades of grass.

./english/278.txt:115:Dialoguing with a group of workers in a stable situation, where nothing dramatic has taken place, is less revealing but still worthwhile. Working class colleges and high schools, hiring halls, trade union meetings, welfare offices, bars and churches in working class neighborhoods, hospital waiting rooms, dances, summer camps, sporting events, funerals, over food, waiting for parades or demonstrations to begin, parks and beaches provide some of the occasions for such research. The particular locale chosen, of course, will greatly influence what can and cannot be learned. Still, each of these is an occasion for the group to interact and react to the researcher's questions and provocations as a group, and for studying class consciousness this is crucial. How many people speak, the way in which answers feed into or oppose each other, the intensity with which positions get expressed, the nods of the head as well as the expletives are all raw data for such a study.

./english/278.txt:117:It is probably worth stating once again the importance we attach to the group, and therefore to group studies, for understanding class consciousness. Class consciousness is an evolving quality of the class. It progresses in and through the class's evolving response to its determinate situation and corresponding interests. The class displays the level of its consciousness, the factors that are currently influencing it most, and the direction and pace of its development whenever workers interact with each other, which occurs in all the different subgroups in which members of this class come together. Approached on their own, individual workers may not even know or feel or be able to put this consciousness into words. For the individual, class consciousness is not so much something they have or do not have as it is something they give expression to or participate in when in a group along with other workers, when acting and thinking in their capacity as group members dealing with the situation and problems that are peculiar to the group. At these times, the people in the group both perceive what is taking place (which includes how they hear the questions of the researcher) and respond to it (intellectually, emotionally, and practically) differently than each individual does or would on his own.

./english/278.txt:119:Changes of mind, in particular, are strongly affected by the group. For example, in a group that is moving in one direction, it is easier for the individual, given some degree of identification with the group, to change his mind in the same direction than it would be if he were on his own. While in its more conservative moments, of course, a group may have just the opposite effect. Earlier, I said class-consciousness is how, when, and toward what a whole class of people change their minds. It is because most of the changes that make up the content of class consciousness take place in group interaction and can only be observed and correctly evaluated in this context that the group must be the focus of our study.

./english/278.txt:121:I would also like to insist once again on the need to study class consciousness as a developing rather than a static phenomenon. Examining what is there in light of what is not (imputed consciousness), tracing the changes in the class' objective situation, following a group of workers over a period of time, stressing sharp transitions in their situations or behavior or thinking - all this is generally not enough. The very concepts we use in which to think about class consciousness, starting with "class consciousness" itself, must be opened up to allow the passage of time, to include where the content that is brought into focus has come from as well as where it is likely to go as part of its very meaning. Other change-oriented concepts, such as "process," "moment," and becoming," should be used in preference to "attitude," "factor," and "variable" to convey its relational parts. Only then can everything uncovered at a moment be consistently grasped as arising out of and arching toward something else. Otherwise, temporarily stalled processes are likely to combine with reified social forms and all too frequent intellectual laxness to produce prematurely finished results. Everything in class consciousness is in transition and must be viewed and studied as such.

./english/278.txt:123:As for which subsection of the workers should be given priority as subjects of study, the answer can be found in an updated reading of Marx's texts. Besides constituting the largest section of the working class in nineteen-century capitalism, industrial workers worked and lived in conditions that were in the process of becoming generalized. In this, as in so much else, they led the way. Because of their place and numbers in industry, industrial workers also had the power to bring the entire capitalist system to a halt. Hence, Marx's political as well as economic emphasis on this section of the working class. Today, industrial workers are no longer the majority of the working class, and their proportion as part of the class is becoming smaller, and while they set the pace when material conditions for the whole class were improving, the current drop in real living standards finds them trailing after other less favored, generally less unionized, sections of the class. Granted, they are still the main source of all real (as distinct from paper) wealth in our society, and they still have the force to bring capitalism to a halt by withdrawing their labor-power. From this, it would seem that industrial workers should continue to be a main subgroup in any study of working class consciousness, but—on the basis of current trends in capitalism—they must now share the spotlight with others. As the fastest growing sectors of the working class, highly skilled technical workers, low skilled services workers, and government and office workers should also be heavily represented in studies of working class consciousness.

./english/278.txt:125:There are, of course, serious dangers of distortion in conducting the kind of interviews and interventions I have called for, especially those held in less conflictual situations. Here I can only sketch the most important of these. What does one do, for example, with the people who choose to remain silent, a problem that grows of necessity with the size of the group? In part, and where this is feasible, this can be dealt with by asking everyone for their opinion. Beyond this, one must be attentive to various signs and noises that show how people feel about what is being said and done. Enthusiasm, delight, anger, disgust, disappointment, and resignation are all relatively easy to detect, but the bulk of what constitutes class consciousness remains beyond our perceptual reach. An equally serious problem is that people tend to be more spontaneous and truthful in responding to questions when they are dealing with pressing life problems.

./english/278.txt:129:For understanding class consciousness, it is essential—I have argued—to concentrate on groups rather than on individuals; just as earlier I maintained that the objective aspects of class consciousness should precede its subjective aspects in the order of treatment. Given the spatial and temporal dimensions of our subject and, in particular, its character as an evolving quality of the group, this is the only way to avoid trivialization and one-sidedness. Having stressed this point, I am now ready to admit that there are some studies of individuals that may also be of help. Of these, the least useful are just those attitude surveys that constitute the great bulk of mainstream research on workers' consciousness. Besides suffering from all the proble

./english/281.txt:2:BARBARA BIGLIA (Questionnaire) 1) How would you define your social class? (Explain your terminology) BARBARA BIGLIA: What is social class? I think the meaning of this category varies both culturally and geographically between north and south Europe. In my experience here in Spain (and this also applies to Italy), the class divide is not as vast as Britain. This does not mean that people are not discriminated against for lots of reasons (including economic ones), but not necessarily in the same way as Britain. To be sure there exists very rich and very poor people but the majority of people are part of the ‘middle class’. We are not rigidly defined by class from childhood. Our accent, schooling or university education does not define us for life. I believe that in the south, with the demise of farmers, the introduction of flexibility into the labor market, the increase in competition and the isolation felt by so many in urban centres, class consciousness is almost disappearing. Perhaps new immigrants could potentially constitute a class group but unfortunately, most of the time, they are divided along ethnic lines. Within this panorama, I think of myself as fortunate because I have a lot of resources at my disposal and many close friends but I am also aware that my grant is precarious and I lack an independent source of income. I recognize I am fortunate because I probably enjoy certain objective middle class privileges but, in any case, I still feel (mostly) working class.

./english/281.txt:5:3) What is your assessment of the current status of capitalism and the class struggle? BARBARA BIGLIA: I am not a political theorist and I feel uncomfortable dishing out a general ‘prescription’ on this issue. So the best I can do is to give an impressionistic account. Firstly, I believe that ethnographic differences are really important. Even if oppression is globalized, it does not hurt people in the same manner. We live within different zones of capitalism, which subjects us to a differentiated system of domination. In some areas there still exists a certain class-consciousness that seems to have died out elsewhere. The presence or absence of social networks underline cultural differences. Today the class struggle represents an interesting and potentially subversive factor in certain areas of the planet. However, in other areas we need to take onboard non-class issues in order to fight oppression imaginatively. Finally, I am pessimistic about the anti-globalization movement, which in my view is rapidly becoming a reformist project with a radical mask.

./english/281.txt:13:The first big set of doubts arose when I read the expression ‘class struggle’. My political engagement started years ago with the end of the strong working struggle movement in Italy. We found ourselves, in the second part of the 1980s, without the class (consciousness) that, in theory at least, is meant to be related somehow to struggle; the factories around us where closing and consciousness was almost non-existent. Most of the old activists had disappeared; some were in prison, others in exile, most dropped out of public life; almost all the ones still visible became completely institutionalised. So, as young activists, we moved from the class referent to a more complex set of references including the oppressed and marginalised- subjects more similar to us. For this reason I find it odd to talk about the ‘class struggle’ in the here and now even if it may be possible elsewhere. If Social Movements do not entirely consist of middle and upper class ‘activists’ then neither are they a genuine expression of the working classes in the ‘Marxist’ sense of the term3. The second set of doubts arose when I tried to think about Critical Psychology. What exactly is it? Does a critical psychology exist? Is it not better to talk about Critical Psychologies? Am I a critical psychologist? I can’t really give an answer to these questions because it seems to me that many people, influenced by different ideologies and practices, describe themselves as critical psychologists. Before writing this article I looked through the library database and came to the conclusion that the only thing these critical psychologists had in common was that they are not yet part of mainstream psychology. Burman4 writes, ‘Critical psychology is what people do in challenging the oppressive and disingenuous actions done by psychologists or in the name of psychology’. But in reality, being ‘critical’ is becoming fashionable and not all the people calling themselves critical have the ethical or political principles expressed by Erica. At the same time, I have the impression that sometimes tools and instruments used by critical psychologists acquire an unwarranted radical status. As Gordo-Lopez suggests,

./english/281.txt:14:3 A section of the Italian political literature (related to the Autonomist tradition) defines the new categories of immaterial worker as intellectual workers because, even if they are working in the tertiary sector of the economy, they are subjected to flexibility measures and therefore they no longer have job guarantees. Moreover, their position in the labour market makes them exploited subjects. Although, this group, due to its particular characteristics (for instance its middle-upper class supervisory status, lack of class consciousness and solidarity, its perennial competitiveness and individualism, etc) cannot be considered the same as the factory working class of the 1960s and 70s. 4 Interviewed by Ian Law and Bill Lox (1998).

./english/281.txt:43:instigate difference amongst groups (the banal discourse on violence is one of them, see Lopez-Adan, 1996). However, I firmly believe that the division between ‘physical’22 and theoretical activists is the most significant factor. This is a division that academics actively encourage. This is because the intellectuals tend to reproduce exclusive jargons that continue the very technical and social divisions of labor they purport to want to deconstruct. Fearing academic manipulation, groups then tend to either evolve around identities devoid of theoretical elements, or exalt theories. Both alternatives when not destroying the subversive power of the collective imaginary at least limit its scope. An additional problem is that the ‘anti-capitalist movement’ still contains figures who consciously or otherwise wish to resurrect Marxist-Leninism’s desire to ‘educate the people’. Its more intellectual dimension tends to normalise certain positions and by default exclude other struggles as secondary. For example, women have frequently been asked to subordinate their struggles against discrimination to those of the class (Charles, 2000, Diaz, 1983, Sardella, 2001, Schuman, 1998, Vázquez et al., 1996). All this causes a separation between the alleged intellectuals and those who practice politics from within their own skin. In this context the comments of some Chilean activists that I interviewed in 2001 are of relevance23. These pobladoras24 have been fighting for years firstly against the dictatorship and today against the falsehood of the democracy and the various discriminations (class, ethnic and gender ones) that persist. They may not possess academic knowledge but if you stop and listen to their words an entire world of wisdom unfolds before your eyes. They have recounted several experiences to me when they felt excluded by professional feminist activists: They don’t look at you badly, but the discourse they use is not pluralist … it is not a discourse that involves pobladoras women…there are just a few professional women who ‘come down’ to

./english/281.txt:44:22 Physical activists are those who perform the tasks that the movement requires, those who clean the toilets, cook, work behind the bar, put their body into actions etc…Theoretical activists are those who generally plan the activities, write flyers, make contacts with other groups, talk as representatives. Women of any age, young males and people from ethical minorities or lower class background are frequently reduced to the role of physical activist. 23 This interview is part of my PhD on the reproduction of gender discrimination within the Radical Social Movement. More information on the thesis on http://www.ub.es/donesMS 24 Pobladoras is a South American term used in relation to women (pobladores is for men) that live in poor neighbours.

./english/281.txt:56:to subvert academia by taking a radical position in the classroom and research. I agree with the criticisms friends made regarding the pessimism of this paper. Perhaps we have to look at the positive experiences being developed outside Academia. Although this article is not the space to enter into a deep analysis of that space, I like to mention it briefly. Research-militants from different disciplines are fighting against the commercialisation of knowledge and are producing shared-knowledge (e.g., the GNU Project, Copy left), organizing autonomous teams of research (e.g., Universidad Nomada, Laser, Facoltá di Fuga, Universidad de las Madres de Plaza de Mayo). And many people use shared-knowledge in their neighbourhoods or work places. Reappropriation of knowledge is a necessary tool for social transformation, nevertheless, I believe it is just as important we maintain a strong self-critical attitude. And finally what we should do as researcher-academics? …A bit less talking, a bit more doing!● Acknowledgment It would take an entire book to mention all the people that, in some way, have contributed to the formation of opinions expressed in this paper. For this reason I just make a collective acknowledgment. Firstly, to all the activists that shared with me their analyses especially friends from Italy, Catalonia, Chile, Britain, Spain and Argentina. Secondly, I owe a real debt of gratitude to autonomist feminists particularly to UEP and MPKbarna groups. At the same time I have to thanks all the people that without defining themselves as activists have a strong social commitment to everyday life. Moreover, thanks to Erica Burman and Ian Parker who introduced me to the most committed parts of critical psychology. Last but not least I would like to acknowledge Jordi Bonet-Martin, Ricard Moreno-Alegret and Laurence Cox, who commented on the first draft of the work. To all of you lots of hugs and cariños, grazie! 80

./english/282.txt:47:Consider a couple of examples. The first concerns two treatments of the question of 'revolutionary situation' - in Lenin and in Tilly. Lenin (1966) argues that it is vitally necessary to recognize what is and what is not a revolutionary situation. And he offers a famous generic proposition: revolutionary situations involve the simultaneous presence of two crucial elements, the ruling class's inability to rule in the old way and the people's refusal to be ruled in the old way. If either of these is absent, says Lenin, there isn't a revolutionary situation. Lenin's definition, suitably adapted and developed, can be taken as the basis for an academic disquisition on revolutionary situations (witness Tilly 1978, 1993).

./english/282.txt:67:Thus, activists' theorizing is not necessarily dominated by the theorization of activism, and is not restricted to an alternative 'social movements theory'. Rather, their specific theorizations of movements proceed from a broader theoretical context with relation to the social world as a whole, and changes in one understanding are usually reflected in changes in the other. Taking the example of Irish working-class community activism, Geoghegan and Cox (2001) note that activist theorizing starts from specific structural relationships - of class and poverty, gender and violence, ethnicity and exclusion - and attempts to change these relationships through agency (which necessarily involves an implicit or explicit theorizing element). This theorizing attempts to explain both how the structures that activists grapple with work and how 'best practice' activism can change it. The famous 'structure / agency' problematic of sociology does not operate in the same way for agents who are challenging structures.

./english/282.txt:77:This distinction is related to Gramsci's distinction between traditional and organic intellectual activity. The scholar acts as a traditional intellectual, carrying out directive and theoretical activity on behalf of already-existing, and already-powerful, social classes and groups. Their directive activity is entailed in the administration and development of an education system which is a central mechanism in reproducing class inequality and in legitimating the social order. The contemplative orientation of social movement scholars is thus that entailed by routine teaching, routine marking, and routine research - one essentially similar whatever the content of their specialization. Since the primary purpose is to reinforce the given, modes of description and explanation are quite sufficient in practice.

./english/282.txt:79:The activist, by contrast, qua organic intellectual, carries out directive and theoretical activity on behalf of subordinate classes and groups. These classes do not control institutions, resources and symbols in the same way as dominant groups. Though they are constantly creating such forms of self-expression and struggle, these forms are constantly being combated and colonized by the dominant. Organic intellectuals therefore find themselves constantly creating - not ex nihilo, but from social materials typically controlled or contested from above. Since the primary purpose is to create what is not yet in existence (hence, once again, movement), their modes of theorizing are those geared to engagement, conflict, and (importantly) discovery.

./english/282.txt:91:The making of an academic intellectual is a complex enterprise, involving the imbibing of formal education and a whole set of 'manners'. The academic must learn to write within a narrow range of literary styles, and to make plentiful reference to work by other academics (as well, in our field, as some reference to the work of movement actors). To become an academic is to adopt a middle-class professional hexis, a way of speaking, writing, a mode of dress etc., as well as a set of formal ideas. There is not much, in this respect, that differentiates 'social movement scholars' from academic intellectuals in other fields. (10)

./english/282.txt:105:Marx's observation that the means of intellectual production are normally in the hands of the ruling class has an important corollary: that social movements from below (as opposed to, say, 'class war from above') often need to conquer or produce their own means of intellectual production. Social movement actors, for their part, have to 'create a new language' (Marx 1852), another way of thinking which is more or less adequate to their new way of acting. Activist theorizing, then, is in important ways a process of cognitive liberation.

./english/282.txt:111:Gramsci (1997; 1999b: 118-264) can be read as presenting us with a model of common sense which is essentially historical: an 'archaeology of knowledge' which mixes both 'the most archaic forms of superstition' with 'the latest discoveries of scientific knowledge'. If so, then activism would simply be a case of the development of the individual - or the class - paralleling that of the species as a whole, and eventually winding up in possession of Marx's 'highpoint of philosophical development'.

./english/282.txt:119:It can also, however, find itself subject to a 'brain drain', in which people associated with movements 'migrate' to universities. This process is no doubt very different as between different movements and activists (class, for example, makes a major difference), and the nature of the migration varies: attempting to fit in to the new culture, making careers out of public critiques of ex-comrades, turning activist knowledge to academic uses, or (more positively) finding a 'day job' that enables particular kinds of activism to continue, or becoming a 'sympathetic expert'. We could then turn our initial question around and ask, 'What have activists brought to academia?'

./english/282.txt:208:It is at best forcing a point to equate interest in alternative technology, critique of the profit motive, and training in non-violent direct action as equally 'technological' - particularly when this is contrasted to e.g. the 'cosmological' dimension. Environmentalists' critiques of technology are often inextricably linked with their 'cosmological' analysis of what is wrong with the current industrial system and what an alternative society would be like (for a classic example, see Croall and Sempler 1978). Similarly, the 'cosmology' of the workers' movement and the critique of the profit motive can hardly be separated. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Geoghegan's (2000) research on Irish working-class community politics found it difficult to operationalize Eyerman and Jamison's 'technological' dimension on their own terms.

./english/282.txt:213:In other movements again, the relationship between ends and means is a matter for significant contention, and one which (in for example die Grünen, or the workers' movement in the early 20th century) may itself be a central structuring principle for movement divisions. To take a classic example, while the 'Kautskyite' line in German Social Democracy may have represented a divorce between a cosmological 'theory' and an organizational 'practice', both Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg sought, in very different ways, to create a more coherent unity.

./english/282.txt:226:There is perhaps also a deeper criticism to be made: that it is itself a historical and sociological question whether it makes sense to distinguish a separate dimension of the cognitive praxis of movements from the rest of life. Lichterman (1996), contrasting the largely white and middle-class US Greens with black and Latina anti-toxics campaigners, noted that the former in effect constituted and understood themselves as an intentional community', alienated from their own social background and in conflict with important aspects of its assumptions. By contrast, the latter understood themselves as part of broader ethnic (and class) communities: they did not, that is, necessarily separate the thought processes involved in 'being activists' from those involved in e.g. 'being black'.

./english/282.txt:228:Similarly, Irish working-class community organizers may refuse the term 'activist' as referring to something alien to the everyday life and culture of the communities they see themselves as part of - while nevertheless being involved in processes of discussion, disagreement, conflict and education within those communities. In these cases, people are involved in a struggle over the meaning of everyday culture, and may set limits on the extent to which movement discourses are allowed to develop independently.

./english/282.txt:238:In its production and distribution, then, it is activist theorizing rather than academic, and this also holds true for its reception: academic discussions of anarchism (including those by anarchist activists) tend to prefer to focus on 'dead classics' or the more abstract-minded activists such as Murray Bookchin or Hakim Bey; by contrast, the Anarchist FAQ is quoted in discussions on newsgroups and mailing lists unrelated to anarchism or academia (18), in the context of essentially political arguments about anarchism.

./english/282.txt:247:A second kind of purpose is evidently to distinguish anarchists from Marxists, in particular Trotskyists, who in Britain and Ireland at least are often the closest 'competitors' for anarchist activists - both sharing an orientation towards radical struggle, but competing for members and the attention of other activists, conflicting over the direction of campaigns (in e.g. arguments over the role of the state and violence), and so on. These, then, are conflicts which are in a sense internal to movements (and the FAQ argues that both Marxism and anarchism are to be understood in the context of working-class opposition to capitalism).

./english/283.txt:40:What’s the radical value of theory? How can theory be applied, giving currency to the notion of ‘performativity’, i.e. such that expressing something makes it actual. More to the point, how can theory be accessed and accessible - and thereby perhaps inspire and affirm radical practice - given that so many people feel alienated by the language used as well as by the styles of discussion and debate that permeate academia? Obviously this is a longstanding problem, the dynamics of which relate to things like: the divergence between an intellectual vanguard and ‘the proletariat’ in building ‘class consciousness’; the privileging of ‘expert’ knowledges in environment and development initiatives which acts to exclude and disempower local knowledges and experience; and the implications of what can been framed as a constructed gendered/masculinised style of debate in academia that has tended to valorise adversarial and interrogative practices.

./english/284.txt:18:Through this paper –as an open assignment- I have been driven by a desire to understand the development of the discipline in terms of its relationship with its “objects”. In that sense, this essay explores briefly the shifts in the practices of representation within the discipline. On another level, the readings and the discussions in class have had an inspirational impact, making me think about the anthropology that I want to take part in. In relation to this more reflexive part, I would like to suggest that the developing relationship of Anthropology with social movements opens possibilities of a new politics of representation.

./english/284.txt:34:New narrative practices and new terminology thus emerged, but what are the political consequences of this reflexive engagement with the text and this recognition of ethnography as a dialogical process? In our class discussions we left this question open- whether or not the epistemological shift was followed by changes in everyday and institutional practices in anthropology more generally. I would like to propose that it is possible to challenge “empire as a way of life” in Anthropology criticized bitterly by Said (1989: 216).

./english/284.txt:69:Spivak is skeptical of Foucault and Deleuze’s attractive proposal: “a post-representationalist vocabulary hides an essentialist agenda” (1989:80) that portrays subalterns as monolithic collectivities. Spivak argues that these “first-world radical intellectuals” are separating the two constitutive meanings of representation. By focusing on the political meaning, they are attacking the “speaking for” in a superficial way since they are forgetting the economic meaning. Without developing her analysis further, I want to present Spivak as a reference point in bringing political economy into the debate of representation. The micropolitics are not separated from the macropolitics, so “theories of ideologies” based on interests are necessary to complement notions of power based on desire (1989: 74). Spivak is addressing the economic and power privileges of ‘those who represent’. The non-acknowledgement of the political economy of representation has drastic consequences: “the subaltern cannot speak” (1989:104). Spivak, in a later work, points out that this expression “means that even when the subaltern makes an effort [to the death] to speak, she is not able to be heard, and both speaking and hearing, complete the act of speech,” (1996: 272). She is calling to practice a new ‘politics’ –not merely ‘poetics’- of representation. You can only talk about somebody if you have first acknowledged that he/she/they are speaking and then that you are listening. There is no possibility of ‘representation’ -and success in overcoming essentialization- if you have not attempted to engage that person/group as a conscientious protagonist with their own voice. This discourse is found among many activists. If there is no awareness of one’s class, racial, gender, sexual, first/third world ‘situatedness’, one is in dange of falling into supremacist thinking and condescending attitudes virulently condemned by the horizontal spirit of the movement.

./english/284.txt:71:Spivak’s call for a deep engagement with the subaltern leads to a strong epistemological shift. She insists on the persistence of the “epistemic violence” product of the colonial process where Europe is erected as the undetermined Subject holding the explanatory power, and the colonized are relegated to be the Others –the Objects waiting to be explained- whose voice and agency have been stolen. Through recognizing the international division of labor and power, one is able to perceive its impact on the current ‘epistemological world order’. She is offering an epistemology that takes the subaltern into account not only as a case study, but as a source of knowledge and ‘expert’ production-the subaltern must be heard. Among global resistance movements in North America and Europe there is a lot of internal discussion about this topic. Mainly due to the mass media, the ‘spearheading role of southern social movements has been obscured, portraying the ‘anti-globalization movement’ as a negligible affair of ‘white-US and European-middle class kids’. However, in much movement discourse there exists an explicit attempt to recognize the role of grassroots communities from ‘poor’ countries as referential examples of movement building –from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, to the unemployed/piqueteros in Argentina, to peasant women in India- showing a similar effort to revert the canons of expertise. In this process, civil society from Europe and the US become the ‘students’ of their southern ‘teachers’ challenging colonial patterns.

./english/284.txt:77:Unlike traditional folklore, Limón’s ethnography of the everyday live of a Mexican working-class community at the border is intensively reflexive. As a Mexican-American and a socially committed scholar, Limón’s presence in the text is very distinct. Since the beginning of the chapter he positioned himself at the heart of a barbeque scene. The fact that he is taking part in that intimate and exclusive activity –making tacos and laughing at chingaderas- on top of his continuous use of Spanish illustrates his intent to prove himself as not only an anthropologist but a member of that community as well. He emphasizes his sense of belonging to this subaltern class several times, presenting himself as part of it through stories and explicit terms. However, he is aware that he is not the same due to his educational and professional background as well as other opportunities which “his people” probably did not have. With the same intense feeling of belonging, he is emerged in the academic and intellectual debate showing us his knowledge about the authors and analysis of this particular topic. This tension is revealed throughout the chapter, for example:

./english/285.txt:11:To illustrate, but also to help you better understand (and possibly dismiss ;-) my point, I may be permitted to sketch briefly my rather long passage through the academic system. After high school - a very fine training in do's and don'ts in itself - I started my university career in 1972, 'reading Classics' as the nice English formula goes. I was not fresh from high school then, but had spent a year traveling in (West and South)Asia. Taking such a 'gap year' was not common in those days, nor was it very much appreciated by my professors, since it further diminished the,in their view, paltry command of Greek and Latin grammar imparted to us at the 'gymnasium'. Hence I was told that despite the Latin maxim inscribed on the frontispiece of my high school, life is for learning and not the reverse. I was also told, in no uncertain words, that the prime purpose of studying the classics at university was to become a certified secondary school teacher in the same, in order to "salvage the antique culture from the barbarian forces in society". Finally I was to discover that one

./english/285.txt:14:When I quit classics, like the majority of my fellow students (in Dutch, the appellation 'classicist' is usually followed by 'gesjeesd' - dropped-out), I had acquired the disabused cynicism that enabled me to become a passable, then average, and finally quite a brilliant geography student. I learned a few more 'tricks of the trade' along the way, most if not all related to the management of the remorseless but malleable power balances within the academic establishment. Whatever I did learn about geography, (and a host of other subjects, since I was always a multi-disciplinarian, again, not a popular position), I taught myself, not thanks, but despite the institutional environment. On completion of my thesis (which was the first to be published and accepted as such, without need for revisions, by the Royal (!) Dutch Geographic Society), I was offered a position at my institute, but due to budgetary constraints without pay. I made 'them' to regret this decision ever since as I always stuck to that status. My critical stance being not very popular, there is precious little I was made to contribute to the actual running of the institute, leading to the comical situation that when the outfit was rechristened after the umpteenth 'reorganisation' as "research institute on global issues and development studies", I was probably the only person to have an overall view of what 'global'(-isation) actually meant - never mind development...In the meanwhile I pursued my own research objectives, mostly liaising with innovative, usually self-organised ventures in the 'new social movements'. These had the uncanny knack of always propelling themselves at the forefront of current societal developments, and someway behind, of academic research, and also always turned out to have a clear geographic component, just as routinely ignored by the mainstream, but

./english/285.txt:20:But for the fact that there exist other parallel possible income streams apart from being born with a sliver spoon in the mouth, this would be a first class disqualifier - and finance remains all the same a grave obstacle in the way of autonomy. But now for the matter of activist research. What is activist research (in my view), and what are its relationships to the mainstream academic research environment?

./english/285.txt:30:universities and research institutes more business-like, if not completely market-conform, especially in the realm of management and of finance, has gone a long way to transform development studies into a (not so) dignified consultancy business in the service of various big aid outfits, while the culture of consensus, shared class affiliation, and subtle (or not-so

./english/290.txt:56:The history of sex and care as strata is ancient. Almost from the beginning of christianity, both were associated with a bipolar feminine model, which located on one (positive) side the Virgin Mary, virtuous woman, mother of god, and on the other, (negative) side Eve, the great sinner of the Apocalypse, the transgressor, the whore. Soon, the first of the these poles would unfold into two options, maternity and virginity, both associated with the Virgin Mary and with care, while the image of Eve and her followers (Mary Magdalene, Pelagia, Tais...) became the stereotype of the sexual active woman, devalued and stigmatized as such.[1] Evidently, this bipolarity, to endure in time and expand in space would present important variations and would appear declined in different ways in function to social classes, geographic areas, concrete cultural contexts, etc, but what is certain is that it would enter into perfect symbiosis with the bourgeois nuclear family that capitalism converted into the dominant reproductive ideal and would contribute to producing what Betty Friedan called the "feminine mystique": the whore would be the negative reflection in which the good woman (mother and wife or single virgin in submission to others) would see herself, in order to know in every moment whether or not she was following the good path.

./english/290.txt:73:Effectively, we note a diversification in the variants of that peculiar type of contract which is the "sexual contract."[10] To the traditional contracts of matrimony and prostitution (cut from the patriarchal heterosexual pattern), in an increasingly generalized manner there are being added other modalities, like the renting of mothers (on the part of couples that can not have children) or new types of matrimonial contract (that of the spouse for hire - frequenty from the countries of the South, homosexual matrimony, weddings as a form of solidarity among citizens and those without papers...), that break with the classic regulation between between sex, sexuality, and reproduction. As was to be expected, this transformation of the types of contracts has a material correlate: the crisis of the model of the fordist nuclear family and the proliferation of other modalities of unity and cohabitation: monoparental or plurinuclear homes, transnational families, groups constitued by non-blood bonds...

./english/290.txt:160:[13] It seems important to us to make this ethnic component of contracted domestic labor standout, a component which introduces the international division of labor and its tension into homes and which creates authentic global chains of affect (see Arlie Russel Hochschild), but without forgetting that there is still a high percentage of this work (above all domestic employees who are not live-in employees) that is frequently carried out by women citizens or interior migrants who frequently work without being legally recognized within the weak social security system that is supposed to regulate this activity. In these cases, the division between the contracting and contracted woman is not so much ethnic as class.

./english/291.txt:71:This typology has various problems: in first place, it lacks coherence, because don't immigrants sometimes work as chainworkers, in the services of public and private cleaning, in the large fast food chains, in the workshops and factories of flexible material production? Can't we also find them, even if with less frequency, in informatic firms? And later, doesn't it happen sometimes that those who work in McDonald's later dedicate their free time to writing music or study? Are the chainworkers or brainworkers? On the other hand, where do we place the telephone operators, frequently immigrants, whose work is repetitive yet has a high relational and communicative content? Are they chainworkers or brainworkers or immigrants or all or none at the same time? Secondly, this classification is totally blind (in the most literal sense of the term) to all those activities that develop, as some feminists have said, "in the corporeal mode": domestic work, care work, sexual work, relational and attention work... and which insert themselves inside that which we call the communicative continuum sex-attention-care. That is to say, it is blind to a whole set of labors traditionally assigned to women, marked by invisibility and/or stigmatization, low salaries, and a strong affective component that makes these labors central in the creation of social bonds.

./english/293.txt:33:We saw that many of these jobs in the margins: the invisible, unregulated, unmoored jobs were in no way interrupted or altered by a strike of this type, and that the precarization of the labor market had extended to such an extent that the majority of working people were not even effected by the new reforms against which the strike was directed. Therefore we tried to think of new forms of living this day of struggle by approaching and confronting these new realities. We decided to transform the classic shut-down picket into a survey-picket. Frankly, we didn’t feel up to upbraiding a precarious worker contracted by the hour in a supermarket or to closing down the little convenience store run by an immigrant because, in the end, despite the many reasons to shut down and protest, who had called this strike? Who were they thinking of? Was there even a minimal interest on the part of the unions for the situation of precarious workers, immigrants, housewives? Did the shut-down stop the productive process of domestic workers, translators, designers, programmers, all those autonomous workers for whom stopping this day would do nothing but duplicate their work the next day? It seemed more interesting to us, considering the gap between the experience of work and the practice of struggle, to open a space of exchange between some of the women who were working or consuming during that day and with those who were moving in the streets. This small, discreet sketch of an investigation was the starting point for what became the project of the ‘drifts’.

./english/293.txt:37:The exchange of that June 20th was fruitful. Not so much for what people told us here and there, or for what we made visible for ourselves and for others, as for the opening we glimpsed, the possibilities for unpredetermined encounters, the pleasure of an unclassifiable dialog, mediated by no apparatus besides the tape-recorder, camera and notepad.

./english/293.txt:129:and identified other equally important ones for a future phase of the project: prostitution, scholarships/research, advertising, communications, social work and education. The women working in these sectors whom we asked to guide us chose a series of relevant places: their houses, workplaces, supermarkets, the park, the cyber café, the yoga class… and we threaded these spaces together as points on an itinerary loaded with significance, the networks of chance and simultaneity which compose our daily lives. Thus, following an English teacher we were able to connect -through the fortuitous tour one of her students gave us in NCR (a multinational which installs and maintains automatic bank tellers) where she teaches- the reality of the flexible work of our companion within the new factory structure, recomposed according to the demands of the global market.

./english/293.txt:133:The drift permits us to take the quotidian as a dimension of the political and as a source of resistances, privileging experience as an epistemological category. Experience, in this sense, is not a preanalytic category but a central notion in understanding the warp of daily events, and, what is more, the ways in which we give meaning to our localized and incarnated quotidian. It is not exactly an observation technique; it does not aspire to ‘reproduce’ or approach daily experience as it habitually occurs (an ideal of classical anthropology which has proved difficult to realize) but rather to produce simultaneous movements of approaching and distancing, visualizing and defamiliarizing, transit and narration. We are interested in the point of view of those that guide us –how they define and experience precariousness, how they organize themselves on a daily basis and what are their vital strategies in the short and the long term, what they hope for- without dismissing, in this process, the dialog and complicity which is produced in our encounter. There is no going back; once you get home from a drift your head keeps buzzing until the next one.

./english/293.txt:297:Stress and physical exhaustion for some and tiredness, aches and pains and depression for others give form to the experiences of class, gender and migration which are impressed in the intimacy of different productive bodies.

./english/295.txt:13:DG: I had an official third-year review and I had no problems with that, they told me I was doing fine. Then, after that, I started writing essays defending anarchism, and getting involved in big mobilizations against the IMF and G8 as well organizing with the peace movement. When I got back from my sabbatical, everything had changed. Several of the senior profs wouldn't even say hello to me. I was assigned no committee work. When I came up for review in my sixth year for promotion to term associate - normally a rubber stamp - suddenly, several senior faculty virulently opposed my promotion on the grounds that I didn't do any committee work. Not surprising since they refused to give me any. They also produced a whole panoply of petty charges - "he comes late to class," that sort of thing - which, as usual, I was not allowed to know about much less respond to. Of course I was acting exactly as I'd acted for the first three years, too, but suddenly it was a terrible problem. The vote deadlocked so they took it to the Dean who told them they couldn't fire someone without a warning, so I was given a letter telling me I had to do something about my "unreliability" and do more service work. My contract was extended for just two years instead of the usual four, and I was told they would vote at the end of the next year to see if it would be extended (so that I would be able to come up for tenure.) So this year I've been running the colloquium series, doing all sorts of extra teaching - this term for instance, I effectively taught three courses instead of the required two because I had one weekly class with undergraduates who were all taking independent studies with me - taught one of the most popular courses in Yale (Myth and Ritual, with 137 students) ... But on Friday May 6, I was informed that they had voted not to renew my contract anyway and offered no explanation as to why.

./english/298.txt:32:MB: Anyway, it seems that the ivory tower myth persists because it has so many useful functions. For intellectuals, as well as many artists and activists, the idea of the university as a refuge often gives them the feeling of Archimedes – as if it offered a stable fulcrum from which they can move the earth itself. For others, the ivory tower image is a kind of smokescreen for the double-talk and structural transformations of neo-liberalism, a chastity belt as the Bush-Thatcher-Clinton-Blair bloc leads it to market: ‘the university is too much of an ivory tower – we have to make it practical’ on the one hand, and on the other hand: ‘because the university is so much of an ivory tower, we can trust that its profit-seeking will be benevolent.’ It signifies all the way around the political clock. Really, ‘ivory tower’ is the classic ideologeme – practically un-dislodgeable from any point of view.

./english/298.txt:41:MB: Tenured faculty schizophrenically experience themselves as both labour and management, a contradictory position reflected in US labour law. They also have another schizophrenia of seeking to produce or direct a cultural-material transformation while simultaneously serving capital (as reproductive labour) through the socialisation of a disciplined professional-managerial class.

./english/298.txt:64:On the student side, although stratified, the UK system is still in a turbulent phase of growth which means that ‘new’ and for many suspicious degrees (such as media studies) are over-recruiting, while older disciplines from mathematics to engineering are suffering. This lack of synchronicity between the degree market and the labour market is obviously a result of the interference of desire in what should be a ‘rational’ economic choice (thus undermining the notion of the rationality of the working class as an internal variable of capital, as Negri once put it). What seems to most concern the higher education managers, however, is not this lack of relation between the labour market and the degree market. They seem to be more concerned with preserving hierarchical differences between universities, degrees, and ultimately social classes.

./english/298.txt:67:TT: There is an attempt to restrain the turbulence and instability introduced by rising student numbers by engineering a differential system of value – one that would be able to clearly distinguish, for example, prestigious institutions (an Ivy League) from their less prestigious, but still reputable peers (red brick universities), from a bottom layer of vocationally-oriented, hands-on, working class not-quite-universities (ex-polytechnics). This is why we are going from the ‘star’ system of evaluation (where different departments get a number of stars depending on performance at the research assessment exercise) to a ‘league’ system. Apparently there were too many high ratings and not enough of a sense of ‘value-difference’. A league system will thus be introduced allowing a fine-graded hierarchisation of university degrees and research environments. The underlying idea is that ‘excellence’ can only be produced through a concentration of resources (including the best students) which goes against a great deal of what we know about ‘knowledge ecologies’ for example. An American colleague has suggested that here too the model is the United States where higher education has always been solidly stratified.

./english/298.txt:72:MB: That’s a great question. There’s at least two issues here – the ranking of campuses against each other, and the role of higher education as a system in reproducing the ‘ferocious hierarchies’ of class relations in the US and globally (which still remain largely invisible to the US population).

./english/298.txt:73:The increasingly fine-grained ranking of campuses against each other is most important to the upper fractions of the professional-managerial class, for whom the ideology of the US as a ‘classless meritocracy’ remains partly viable (a fraction that includes most higher education faculty themselves, as well as media professionals, many lawyers and physicians, etc.). With the intensification of the ranking, the percentage of persons who feel that the ‘meritocracy’ is working appears to shrink. That realisation is probably a good thing overall. For instance, the appearance of graduate employee union movements at Ivy League campuses over the past 20 years (Yale, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Cornell) reflects in part the collapsing viability of merit ideology even while the ‘rank’ of schools against each other gains ever greater ‘cultural capital.’ The problem is that the ‘cultural capital,’ while real, is relative. The rank of schools acquires more relative value because overall the ‘cultural capital’ disseminated by schooling has become scarcer in some way that it’s important for us to try to understand.

./english/298.txt:77:MB: Well, the classic strategy of creating a ‘surplus’ of workers that has finally hit the American and European professional-managerial class, and the expansion of higher ed – not just internally, but globally – is a big part of that, isn’t it? The US business papers have been full of panicky articles about the ‘new’ outsourcing ‘crisis’ of white-collar work (engineering, programming, design). It wasn’t a ‘crisis’ when outsourcing referred only to manufacturing. The outsourcing of professional and managerial labour (even the reading of CAT scans performed in the US or UK by Indian physicians) puts a lot of pressure on the (formerly) national frames of higher ed/cultural capitalism.

./english/298.txt:81:There is no doubt, that is, that the university is a site of reproduction of social knowledge and class stratifications. The range of courses and degrees now offered by higher education institutions means that today the university is producing nurses and doctors; managers and IT technicians; journalists, scientists, filmmakers, lawyers, artists, teachers and even waiters and the unemployed (yes a degree does not always guarantee a ‘middle class’ job).

./english/298.txt:82:On the other hand, it is not simply reproducing classes and professions but also participating in a larger process of qualitative recomposition at a moment of crisis for post-fordism in the mode of information of which the outsourcing of white collar work from the US is an example. Higher ed is not simply engaged in the production and reproduction of knowledges but also in that of an abstract social labour power which can be multiply deployed across a range of productive sites (from call centres to Reality TV shows).

./english/298.txt:93:The university’s extraction of surplus value needs to be seen as an under-regulated ‘semi-formal’ economy. For-profit universities accumulate investment capital. But ‘non-profit’ universities also accumulate in the form of buildings, grounds, libraries (fixed capital), and as investment capital in endowments. Accumulated resources such as campus sports facilities have to be understood, to a degree, as the collective property of the ruling class (as opposed to, say, the property of students). For instance, at my public research university few students can afford to go to basketball games – local elites occupy all the seats.

./english/298.txt:103:The question is also that of a direct and active engagement with specific student populations and their relation to this socialised labour power at large. This is why I have problems with a common counter-hegemonic argument against tuition fees (the hegemonic arguments being that ‘we cannot afford mass higher education’ or the ‘many should not pay for the few’ and that ‘a degree is a financial investment for the future’). The counter-hegemonic argument, by contrast, says that by making financial costs between different institutions variable, poorer students are kept away from the ‘best’ institutions. The argument is that tuition fees make social mobility across classes more difficult.

./english/298.txt:108:TT: In a way. In another way, this notion of equality still identifies knowledge too much with access to a limited cultural capital – rather than the huge, diverse and mutating flux of specialised knowledges and transversal connections which is a trademark of social production in network societies. It is not only a matter that the best lecturers will tend to flow towards the institutions where working conditions are better (less students and admin; more money for research; access to international academic networks etc.). It is mainly about how a large part of the living labour within the higher education system will be impeded by higher workloads, scarce resources and tighter managerial control from actively engaging and experimenting with the massification of socialised labour power. Such power does not express itself simply as a unified or even fragmented class, but also as a constellation of singularities connected by communication machines and informational dynamics. All of this at a moment when organised labour is lagging behind (or is being easily accommodated by) the huge transformations induced by post-fordism and globalisation.

./english/298.txt:121:Anyway, what I really like about the questions you’re posing is the way it insists that we return to the question of the relationship of mental labour to other forms of labour. Are knowledge workers a ‘class’ unto themselves? Or are they a class fraction? If the latter, are they à la Bourdieu, the ‘dominated fraction of the dominant class’? Or à la Gramsci, are they the fraction of the working class that tends toward a traitorous alliance with the ruling class?

./english/298.txt:124:TT: This is a really interesting question. Gramsci was a keen observer of ‘civil society’ – and he was very aware that the complex relation between social classes was a historical and dynamic relation of shifting alliances, with hegemony constituting a kind of ‘moving equilibrium’. The space of civil society, however, is relatively solid, stratified and bounded. Classes enter relationships of alliance but are clearly distinguishable within the overall boundary of the nation state and the dialectic opposition between the dominant and the dominated.

./english/298.txt:128:TT: Autonomist work started with trade-union sponsored social research into the reasons for declining union membership. The result of that theoretical, empirical and political inquiry was a foregrounding of the alchemical dynamics of class composition. Union membership was declining because neither the structure of the union nor its culture could cope with a shifting class composition (such as an increasing number of young, male, unskilled immigrant workers and their refusal of the unionist work ethic). This was not simply a new contingent coming to join the old generation, but also implied a new set of social needs and desires which not only the union but factory work as such could not satisfy. The figure of this first transformation was the ‘mass worker’ – unskilled, mass factory work that challenged the industrial production machine through the rigidity of its escalating demands and its simultaneous social mobility. The mass worker demanded and caused a reinvention of politics, rather than simply joining the class struggle as a new contingent would – it gave new impetus to the struggle for life time against the ‘time-measure’ of the wage/work relation. An implication is that class is not simply about the reproduction of dialectical domination, but it is also endowed with its own historicity – a kind of dynamic potential, a surplus of value that antagonistically produces new forms of life and demands new modes of political and cultural expression.

./english/298.txt:129:Which brings us to today’s question. Should we read the expansion of higher education as, primarily, a desire of capital (for better trained, more manageable, stratified and hegemonised workers)? Or should we read in this transformation also the recomposition of class dynamics – a new production of values and forms of life which produce the basis for the reinvention of politics?

./english/298.txt:133:TT: Sure. And as usual, we must be careful about not repeating the old mistake of thinking of the working class as existing in a state of ‘unrealised consciousness’ which needs to be awoken by an external agency. If we keep this in mind, the main question becomes then not so much to map different fractions of the dominant and dominated classes and their relation to each other within the overall war of position, but to understand the shifting mode of class composition, its dynamics and the values that it produces (taking into account for example the heterogeneous axes of subjectivation linked to ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, sexuality and so on). The shift from the ‘mass worker’ to ‘socialised labour power’ (or a multi-skilled, fully socialised and abstract labour power), was for the early Negri a matter of achieving a new working class identity – one that was adequate to the increasing levels of abstraction and socialisation of labour. The old transcendent dialectic was replaced with an immanent one: class composition, capitalist restructuration, class recomposition.5 In other authors, such as Franco Berardi or Felix Guattari, however, the break with the dialectic is more radical. The emphasis is more on the heterogeneous production of subjectivity, which takes place at the level of material connections (crucially including desiring and technical machines, from the assembly line to media and computer networks).

./english/298.txt:134:Subjectivity and class are not simply modes of reproduction but also alchemical, microbiological and machinic factories of social transformation.

./english/299.txt:33:In January of 2003 we participated in the conference Pensar en Precario (≥Thinking Precariously≤) organized by the CGT[3] and we once again encountered other persons and collectives that, like us, had been thinking this question over for some time: how to think about and organize that which some had begun to call the precarious class (precariat?) or social precariousness.[4]

./english/299.txt:205:But let us go bit by bit. By hegemonic reproductive scheme we understand the nuclear patriarchal family with a strong sexual division of work which determines the division between the public and the private, production and reproduction; it is indubitably a white, middle class family, legitimate heir to the bourgeois family of the 19th century, and extended as a model (attention, as a model, not necessarily as an experience) to almost all other layers of society throughout the first half of the 20th century. This scheme maximizes biological and social reproduction, in Bourdieuπs sense, both that which has to do with the transmission of inheritance and that which has to do with the care of offspring in intimate collaboration with the State and with the maintenance of the moral order. In Francoist Spain, this model was colored by the special hue of an authoritarian welfare State[32], the moral and institutional predominance of the Catholic religion and the propaganda about women as ≥angels of the home≤. The crisis of this model began in the PostFrancoist period and has become more acute in the last decades.[33] åCrisisπ here does not suggest that sexual division does not continue to be produced, that previously women of the lower class were not subjected to an intensive model of work outside and inside the home, that this model is deployed in the same ways in different contexts (for example in the rural context) or that the same things happen everywhere at the same time. The nuances are important, nevertheless it seems pertinent to us to speak of a hegemonic model and to clarify that when we talk about the sexual division of work we do not assume that women do not work outside of the house but we do see that reproduction ceases to take place primarily in the bosom of the extended family and that, from the 18th century onwards in Europe a series of collective services are established that, leaning upon the family and upon women, are oriented towards educating, pacifying and integrating the population and quiet the danger that in that period, and in others thereafter, the popular classes have represented.[34] We neednπt mention that this model has been object of successive crises and readaptations; for example, after the two World Wars.

./english/299.txt:233:The buying power of middle class households is dropping, and with it the salaries of those who pick up the kid from school, look after the baby, clean and cook, fix up the house, the office or the lobby, take grandma for a stroll or do the babysitting. Those who have more resources or want special services ≠ upper class families, companies, institutions ≠ take advantage of the general conditions of a sector at the margin of legality, or what is worse, with a legal structure that nurtures abuses. The demand for live-in and day workers, as L. Oso explains, depends upon whether the family has small children; for the middle class sector the live-in worker costs almost the same and does so much more. Single family homes in the periphery of the big city have space enough to lodge a live-in, the architects have designed them that way. Professional couples without children, in the interest of intimacy and affective peace, opt for an åassistantπ.[38]

./english/299.txt:249:The other day a colleague at my job, I work in a place where, well, people are hard-working and have had a period of more or less decent salaries and a certain status, basically middle class, anyway this woman has two children and a husband who works in a company traveling, and the kids are fourteen and eighteen and theyπre driving her crazy, and now her mother is alone and since she fell down the other day she canπt be left alone. A woman who was widowed young and so she has been very independent since she was quite youngäso my friend said to me, ≥I just donπt know what to do≤ and I said, ≥But this is appalling, nobody can live like this.≤ So she was thinking about taking a vacation to be with her mother in July and then her mother would go with the other sister in August, but this is too much, no? So then she thought about tele-assistance, but tele-assistance is no good because what her mother really needs is company. That is, the problem isnπt just taking care of an elderly person who in a given moment might hurt herself and then the ambulance would have to come, its that what she is suffering, and to some extent what she is looking for is company and affection. So she looks at the problem and in the end she will make a contract in which she pays a shit salary ≠ because thatπs the way it is - to another woman. There is this whole sector of working people who find themselves in this juncture when the kids are still not grown, the parents are already old, and they are stuck in between with men who donπt collaborate and as I see it, even if they do collaborate the pressure that exists in the labor market is such that that wouldnπt solve the problem either, so when there is not a collective resolution of ≥we are going to do this for whatever≤ then everyone fends for themselves however they can, and one of the alternatives is to contract another woman. (Feminist activist and working mother, Globalized Care Workshop III)

./english/300.txt:34:The methodology employed (or at least attempted) seemed to have been undertaken with the express goal of breaking down the wall between academy and activism mentioned earlier and creating a new political/educational beast in its wake. Different criteria were used to attempt to put these ideas into effect. For one, an Expedition had to set up a ‘base camp’/headquarters in the same neighborhood that was being ‘explored’ (Stephenson 1974; p. 98). The setting up of free classes with open access and no tuition for community members within a defined area was another important aspect. The class material was ideally to take into account the experience and knowledge of the community which made up the students, and also could count for college credit (Merrifield 1995; p. 55 and Horvath 1971).

./english/302.txt:19:Precarias a la Deriva has been, until now, a research project on precariousness which aspired to take ourselves, our own precarious realities, as a point of departure, and to interpolate others in search of new forms of resistance and new spaces of encounter and cooperation built out of multiplicity. In our wanderings we have arrived at three certainties. We have determined that particular precarious positions - understood in the classic sense such as instability of employment ­ are inscribed in a general tendency towards the Œprecarization¹ of life as a whole. This tendency which threads through all social strata as a threat (³If you don¹t hew to the norm you¹ll fall into permanent instability²) and effects all spheres of life (employment, unpaid activities, urban spaces, domestic environmentsŠ) as a force of uncertainty and social atomization. We have also realized that, though the processes of precarization effect all of us, they do not effect us in the same way: society is stratified along lines of class, sex, sexual orientation or identity, age, national origin, ethnicity, level of educationŠ which place us in positions which are asymmetrical and sometimes in conflict. Any project which aspires to produce something shared must deal with these forms of stratification: genuine Œborders¹ which impede social bonds and sow fear of the Œother¹. Lastly, we have intuited that the territory in which precarious women might come together is not necessarily the ³workplace²: how could it be when this so frequently coincides with one¹s own house, or someone else¹s? When the workplace changes every few months or when the odds of coinciding with a group of fellow workers for long enough to get to know them is one in a thousand? Often the strongest alliances, the networks of cooperation which diminish fear, lend courage and generate the capacity for transformation are constructed outside the workplace, in other spaces far from the boss¹s gaze, the isolation of the household or the bureaucratic discipline of the residency, the hospital, the school. For this reason our efforts are now dedicated to creating a space of encounter and empowerment in the center of Madrid in which we and other precarious women (of other national and social origins, with more or less lines in their CVs, more or less money in their pockets, more or less persons dependent upon them) might find counsel and tools for self-defense against the thousand and one daily injustices we face. But also where we might find spaces for expression and analysis of our precarious realities which permit us to mutually enrich ourselves and to imagine practices of cooperation and resistance against the precarization of our lives and against the borders which each of us face.

./english/303.txt:10:This paper explores militant ethnography as research method and political praxis based on my experience as activist and researcher among anti-corporate globalization movements in Barcelona. What is the relationship between ethnography and political action? How can we make our work relevant to those with whom we study? Militant ethnography is a politically engaged and collaborative form of participant observation carried out from within rather than outside of grassroots movements. Traditional objectivist perspectives fail to grasp the concrete logic of activist practice, leading to inadequate accounts and theoretical models of little use to activists themselves. Meanwhile, the classic figure of the organic intellectual has become increasingly undermined, as contemporary activists produce and circulate their own analyses through global communication networks in real time.

./english/303.txt:54:Part of the issue has to do with how we understand the figure of the intellectual. Barker and Cox (2002) have recently explored differences between academic and movement theorizing. These authors present a critique of traditional objectivist theories that are about rather than for movements, partly explaining the differences in terms of the distinction between “academic” and “movement” intellectuals, which corresponds to Gramsci’s “traditional” and “organic” varieties: the former operate according to the interests of dominant classes, while the latter both emerge from within and work on behalf of subordinate groups. However, not only does this distinction often break down in practice, which the authors recognize; beyond that, it seems to me that the relationship between activists and intellectuals within contemporary anti-corporate globalization movements is more complex. Indeed, when nearly everyone engages in theorizing, self-publishing, and instant distribution through global networks, the traditional function of the organic intellectual- providing strategic analysis and political direction- is undermined. In this sense, militant ethnography does not offer programmatic directives about what activists should or should not do. Rather, by providing critically engaged and theoretically informed analyses generated through collective practice, militant ethnography can provide tools for ongoing activist (self-) reflection and decision-making, while remaining relevant for broader academic audiences.

./english/306.txt:25:Existing norms and classifications again and again provide raw materials for capitalism. What is really obscene these days is to be queer and poor, woman and restless, others and uncontrolled...

./english/306.txt:27:The image of the queers, the freaks, the wild ones, the cyborgs, the hysterics, the truck-drivers, the frigid ones and the loose ones, the ones in broken high-heels and the barefoot ones assaulting the supermarket of the world, the privatized garden and the wedding ceremony is our most cherished dream. To be divine is to always push the limits, experiment with the loss of composure which exposes the sexual discipline of Home and Crust; it is to disorganize anew all classifications.

./english/306.txt:51:La Eskalera Karakola is a women’s occupied house in a multiethnic working class neighborhood in the center of Madrid. For almost seven years, la Karakola has served as a convergeance point and a point of departure for feminist thought and political action both in the neighborhood and in the far-flung feminist networks in which we participate. An open and changing collective of women --mostly young, some not so young, of various sexualities, nationalities, class and educational backgrounds-- maintain the house as a public space for feminism, and from this space we generate projects which extend beyond the house itself.

./english/306.txt:107:urban and economic characteristics. Its population comes in large part from different countries such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Nigeria, Senegal, Pakistan, India, China, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, etc. This social composition is in part new and in part established: among the Moroccans there are two and even three generations here. Lavapiés has historically been a working-class area, poor, but with a great folkloric tradition which is starting to give way to multi-ethnic cohabitation. It is a privileged enclave because of its social composition and because of its tradition of neighbourhood organizing and social movements in general (social centres, squatted houses, support networks, solidarity shops, fair commerce, self-employment cooperatives, women’s groups, distributors, media projects such as ‘Madrid wireless’, ‘Tele pies’, or ‘Deyaví’, and a diversity of other powerful initiatives). On the other hand, it is one of the poorest areas of Madrid, marked by exclusion, precariousness, marginality, lack of social resources, infrastructure, equipment, green areas, meeting points, pavement for pedestrians, car parks, schools,

./english/306.txt:247:For us, this is a bid to make a political project of each life, a project of transformation of relationships that can only be carried out within a collective. With all its limits and its clumsiness, this is a bid for social centres in general and the Karakola in particular: a women’s project arising from the need to experience ourselves, to relate and to invent ourselves, to communicate and break the mechanisms of production of a heterosexual normalizing state, and of rigid marking of the imposed gender roles. A women’s collective that tries to constantly question the world and ourselves from a feminist stance, which means to confront the world from an analysis crossed by a complexity of structures, the very ones that comprise us, never innocent and always complex, the very ones that strain us and call us to understand ourselves as rooted in a certain sex-gender-desire system, in a certain socioeconomic class, in a certain age, in a certain ethnic group... in a certain space and time.

./english/307.txt:15:methodology could be the one developed by the Institute of Liberation Philosophy (Brazil) after Paulo Freire’s pedagogy). Activities for Diffusion of Translation Capabilities and Tools These activities consist in the divulgation of the translation or capability value of all the items of inter-knowledge and articulation developed by the other two activities: knowledges, designations, concepts, principles and methodos of collective action, etc. For example, the concepts of democracy, direct action, social emancipation, socialism, nonviolence, sagacity, Satyagraha, swaraj, multiculturalism, strike, hunger, revolution, and so on, and so forth. Every one of these items is less global than alternative globalization. Some are of current usage within a given regional or thematic ambit, but totally unknown within others. Some are valorized positively by given movements or ONGs, but rejected by others. Different items are adequate in different ways for different scales of action (local, national, global). Based on the analysis of the final reports of the workshops, the Translation Coordination will propose criteria to assess the limits and potentialities of each item for inter-thematic, international, and intercultural usage. Such proposals will be organized according to two large groups: the Lexicons and the Manifestos. The Lexicons concern items that are mainly discursive: designations, concepts, knowledges, classifications, etc. The Manifestos concern items that are predominantly performative: principles and methodologies of action, instances of successful articulations among practices, etc.

./english/316.txt:43:Many identify the new protest movement with the turn of the century, with the North (Seattle 1999, Prague 2000, Genoa 2001, Gothenburg 2001, Barcelona 2002, Evian 2003). They also associate it with the middle-classes, students and youth – who have indeed been prominent within it. But so have women, forming around 50 percent at the World Social Forums, though this is little commented on.

./english/316.txt:49:Initially appearing as a classical armed guerilla movement, based on the discriminated and land-hungry Mayan ethnic communities of Chiapas, the Zapatistas rapidly revealed entirely novel characteristics: an address to Mexican ‘civil society’, a high-profile internationalism, a sophisticated understanding and use of both the mass media and alternative electronic communications. All can be found in the speeches and writings of its primary spokesperson, Sub-Commander Marcos (Rafael Guillén), a university-educated non-indigene, trained in guerilla warfare in Cuba. Activities of the Zapatistas, particularly two international encuentros, one in Chiapas, 1996, one in Spain, 1997, gave rise, or shape, to a new wave of internationalism. The powerful, poetic and playful words of Marcos, who switches between, or combines, popular Mayan and Mexican idiom with the language of cosmopolitan intellectuals, enchanted a dulled world. It also had dramatic appeal to an international left, battered, bruised and disoriented by: the downscaling of the welfare state; the downsizing of the working class; by the halting of the forward march of labour; by the collapse of Eastern Communist and Southern Populist states; by the crisis of the international movements identified with such. Zapatista encounters also inspired at least two significant emanations of the movement, People’s Global Action(PGA) and the WSF itself. (de la Grange and Rico 1997, Holloway and Peláez 1998, Olesen Forthcoming, PGA website, Wahl 2002)

./english/316.txt:98:Their has been a dramatic wave of varied social protest across South Africa in the last few years. This is largely popular (meaning non-white as well as poor) in composition. However, it has also been cross-class and multi-ethnic, as in the effective AIDS campaign, directed against local and international hegemons. These movements can be seen, or presented, as local, and/or national, and/or regional (Southern African), and/or global. In much of the commentary, this kind of cross-scale referencing is quite spontaneous. To what extent such awareness exists amongst participants (or what significance a more-than-national/ist consciousness might have amongst them) remains to be investigated. But the very existence of such a multi-scale awareness amongst organisers and commentators suggests a ‘world of difference’ from that of 1968, or, of course, 1917. Its importance is, indeed, also witnessed in the South African case by those ‘left’ politicians in power, and/or profoundly compromised with the neo-liberal regime, who appeal to old internationalisms against the new global movements! (Bond 2003, Cock 2003, Desai 2002, Kingsnorth 2003, Ngwane 2003, Nzimande 2003, Weekes 2002)!

./english/320.txt:29:This perspective in turn leads to a significant element of the theoretical framework, namely that I conceive of social movements not only as the collective agency of subaltern social groups, but also the collective agency of dominant social groups. Ahmad has argued about the tendency towards one-sided understandings of class struggle:

./english/320.txt:31:We tend to think of class struggle only in relation to the proletariat, as revolutionary struggle. Marx’s point is that the possessing class itself wages a brutal and permanent struggle in defence of its own class interests, through violence and threats of violence, through exploitations both extensive and intensive, by maintaining a permanent army of the unemployed, and through thousand other means in the social, political, ideological and cultural arena. Class struggle has, in other words, not one side but two (1998: 34). Hence I propose a logical analytical distinction between social movements from above and social movements from below. In what follows, I shall elaborate briefly on the specific forms of movements from above and below respectively, and then chart their dialectical interrelationship in the making and unmaking of social organizations of human practice2.

./english/320.txt:52:In this context the difficulty for activists is often not to get locked into a purely defensive response, which often means defending institutions whose value is often very ambiguous. The crisis situation represents a moment of possibility, during which movements from below can not only attempt to hold onto what is valuable in existing institutions, but also to open up new spaces of conflict. At the core of their opponents’ strategy is a situation of uncertainty and doubt about previous approaches, and this is important to understand, whether or not it is possible for movements from below to take independent initiatives. Practical activist choices necessarily depend on seeing the different ways in which these movements from above affect different social groups. There is always a need for two faces of power: one turned towards those whose practices and ideas are effectively organised and incorporated, in whatever form, and one turned towards those whose consent is not needed or sought within a particular regime. These two faces target different groups: within capitalism, the consent of large capital and those controlling the means of state coercion is needed almost by definition. At the other end of the spectrum, the “lumpenproletariat” and the least organised parts of the working class will almost always be targeted with coercive measures to some degree. Other groups, such as trade unionists or liberal professionals, may find themselves within the sphere of consent or within that of coercion.

./english/320.txt:95:In each of these periods, global upheavals were spontaneously generated. In achain reaction of insurrections and revolts, new forms of power emerged in oppositionto the established order, and new visions of the meaning of freedom were formulatedin the actions of millions of people. Even when these movements were unsuccessful inseizing power, immense adjustments were necessitated both within and between nation states, and the defeated movements offered revealing glimpses of the newly developed nature of society and the new kinds of class struggles which were to follow (ibid.: 6).

./english/320.txt:105:The current conjuncture, I submit, is one of a nascent organic crisis and contention between emergent world historical movements from above and below. From above, there is the project of neoliberal restructuring. From below a ‘movement of movements’ for global social justice is in the process of crystallizing. In what follows, I offer a brief and broad-brushed sketch of this scenario. The Crisis of Organized Capitalism and the Emergence of Neoliberal Restructuring The late 1960s and early 1970s marked the onset of a profound crisis in the social structure of accumulation commonly referred to as ‘organized capitalism’ (see, e.g., Lash and Urry 1987). The golden age of capitalism that had lasted since the end of WWII crumbled: By the end of the 1960s [organized capitalism] experienced cracks in its foundations and began to fall apart under conditions of stagnant production, declining productivity, and intensified class conflict over higher wages, greater social benefits and better working conditions. These conditions created a profit-crunch on invested capital’ (Petras and Veltmeyer 2001: 14; see also Armstrong, Glyn and Harrison 1984 and Harvey 1990). Simultaneously, the advanced capitalist state and the social compact that underpinned it faced a loss of legitimacy. From below, this was evident in the global uprisings of 1968 (Katsiaficas 1987; Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein 1989; Wainwright 1994).

./english/320.txt:117:The liberation of transnational capital from the constraints and commitmentsplaced on it by the social forces in the nation-state phase of capitalism has dramaticallyaltered the balance of forces among classes and social groups in each nation of the worldand at a global level towards a transnational capitalist class and its agents (Robinson2003: 37).

./english/320.txt:126:The recent cycle of protests against the summit meetings of the transnational capitalist class and the transnational state – Seattle, Quebec, Prague, Gothenburg, Genoa – and the creation of spaces and networks of communication between the many movements that animate these protests – the WSF and its regional progenies, People’s Global Action, Via Campesina – has signalled to the world that neoliberalism will not proceed uncontested. A

./english/320.txt:130:Whereas the transnational capitalist class was able to implement and consolidate neoliberal restructuring as a hegemonic project of global reach from the late 1970s to the 1990s, this does not mean that subaltern social groups merely acquiesced to this process. Throughout much of the postcolonial world, structural adjustment programmes were met by protests since their very inception in the mid-1970s: During the decade or so from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, a veritable wave of more-or- less spontaneous popular protests engulfed those countries, mainly in the Second and Third Worlds, in which austerity measures had been adopted as part of structural adjustment and economic reform programmes – often under pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – which forced rapid economic liberalisation and the dismantling of many forms of state control, state intervention and state subsidy. The characteristic form of protest was the ‘bread riot’, although this combined in many instances with other forms of protest and struggle (Seddon and Dwyer 2002: 1).

./english/323.txt:65:often subsequently developed through feminist theory texts and discussions in the classrooms.

./english/323.txt:197:of oppression, along lines of race, gender and class, as well as the importance of the criticism

./english/325.txt:12:Two years ago in an article about the Dutch conference ‘Feminism and Multiculturalism’, I criticized the restricted meaning multiculturalism and feminism most of the time has in western countries (Poldervaart 2002). In dominant western debates multiculturalism is limited to the integration of non-white and Islamic people into the dominant male, white, heterosexual and middle class culture, as if multiculturalism isn’t more than differences in colour and religion. In this way the cultures of gay/queer and of protest groups criticizing dominant culture, disappear from the picture of multiculturalism. Feminism was defined by the conference-organisation as ‘striving for recognition of equality, of equal opportunities and equal rights’. This is, however, a very limited definition: most feminists want more! Moreover, such ‘equal-rights’-feminism stimulate in practice the idea that only non-white people have to struggle for feminism because ‘we, women in the west’ have equal rights already. Both restricted meanings (of feminism and multiculturalism) strengthen the difference between ‘we’ (white, supposed to be progressive) people against the ‘other’ (coloured or Islamic), make affiliation-politics between both groups very difficult, forget all other diversities between people and don’t criticize the dominance of neo-liberal politics.

./english/325.txt:14:In this paper I will elaborate the contemporary connections between different protest movements that criticize dominant western culture. I want to show that, just because these movements are influenced by postmodern notions (like rejecting uniformity and essentialistic identities and taking ‘responsibility for “otherness”’(White 1991))i, their members really try to bring multiculturalism into practice. Multiculturalism means simply: different cultures within a society. Physical characteristics or nationality have nothing to do with it (Nottelman 1996: 3). Every society has to be considered as multicultural, because within all societies there are different cultures (between classes, hetero-homo’s, rural and urban cultures, different –interpretations of- religions etc.). Also without coloured people a discussion about multiculturalism is important.ii Because this conference is about ‘new social movements and sexuality’, I restrict myself to three contemporary movements that criticize dominant culture: the squatters, queers and alterglobalists. I will start with the squatters’ movement, because for a part this movement is the oldest one.

./english/325.txt:47:In the past few years years queer culture has become a global phenomenon. ‘The globalization of capitalism and the economic forces that sustain it have necessarily led to globalization of queer culture’ (Kirsch 2000: 77). Since 1998 in this international movement ‘Queeruption’ is organized, an annual festival of queer culture. While some queeruption gatherings have been more communal and others more spread out, some held in the city and others rurally, the overall effect is one of building radical queer community, both within the local scene and internationally. Ongoing discussions within the community include topics of race, class and cultural exclusivity, ableism [discrimination in favour of the able-bodied], gender binarism/transphobia and the reproduction of oppressive sexual norms within radical communities (http://www.queeruption.nl/index2.htm).

./english/325.txt:49:In 2004 Queeruption festival happened in Amsterdam and in their announcement the organisers state: ‘queeruption is for expression and exploration of identity, climbing over the artificial boundaries of sexuality, gender, nation, class, against racism, capitalism, patriarchy and binary gender repression’. And in line with ‘the’ (squatters) movement they add: ‘Queeruption is non-commercial! Queeruption is Do-it-Yourself! We draw no line between organisers and participants. We seek to provide a framework (space, co-ordination) which you can fill with your ideas’ (ibid).

./english/325.txt:91:-The concept of revolution has got a different meaning. The DiY-part of the movement don’t strive for ‘unity’ and rejects power in its traditional meaning. ‘Revolution is not a moment in the future in which the power is taken from the ruling class, but is a social process that is lived daily in the here and now’ (Longo Mai 2002). Or, as the Dutch-Belgian Journal Mba-Kajera used as their slogan: ‘Revolution is not to overthrow the existing system, but the creation of something new’. ‘The starting point is not how to oppose capital, but how to build a better life beyond it’ (Jordan 2002). These ideals are expressed and brought into practice in ‘free places’ in many squatted buildings, more legalised ‘social centre’ (in Italy), in the communities organized by the Piquetero-movement in Argentine, by the Zapatistas in Mexico etc.

./english/325.txt:105:In the publications of the DiY-part of the alterglobalization movement only recently much attention is given to the queer movement. Yet in their criticizing collective identities, in their emphasis of imagination, their struggle to reclaim public places for fun, the deepening of relationships between people, their pink and silver clothes during actions, their tactical frivolity and emphasis on personal politics, the alterglobalization movement shows all kinds of connections with the aims of the queer movement. And also the other way around, like the queer slogan: ‘Queer, the privilege to imagine more’ and the description of Jackson (2003: 70): ‘Queer are those who knowingly occupy a marginal location’. The close connection is also expressed in the announcement of the international Queeruption festivals: queeruption is climbing over the artificial boundaries of sexuality, gender, nation, class, against racism, capitalism, patriarchy and binary gender repression; queeruption is non-commercial, is Do-it-Yourself!

./english/331.txt:155:I suggest that the balanced and stated commitment approaches are more suitable to teaching issues involving universal moral values. The Neutral Chair seems to be simply Values Clarification in different clothing, and I would be inclined to use it only in very specific circumstances. It would be appropriate at the later stages of key stage 4 and in key stage 5 for example, or in a formal debate at the end of an extended unit of work. I would be inclined to use a stated commitment approach in relation to the development of ethical principles, but a balanced approach in relation to the development of abstract reasoning skills. Clearly as the two are so often combined, both strategies will be used. Which is chosen will depend on the nature and specific learning objectives of the activity and the level of prior knowledge. The strategy may well be changed during an activity in response to the understanding and reasoning of individuals in the class.

./english/331.txt:174:b)Development of abstract reasoning skills and increasing critical evaluation of personally constructed rules through introduction of moral reasoning dilemmas as a teaching strategy. These will be based on interpersonal situations at first, still emphasising the use of empathy. Opportunities to create conflict and discussion in the classroom through increasing use of a balanced, stated commitment, or neutral chair approach should be used whenever possible.

./english/331.txt:175:c)Once the majority of pupils in a class have achieved a) and b) above, it is appropriate to introduce more abstract issues for discussion; at first in the form of carefully constructed moral dilemmas, and gradually through open discussion of ethical issues. Those pupils who have not demonstrated an ability to apply principles should benefit from discussion with their peers. It will still be important however to ensure that opportunities for this type of learning are prepared for effectively, so that discussion follows on naturally from a conceptual understanding of the issue as outlined in a) above.

./english/331.txt:192:Majority of the class failed to reach the learning objectives

./english/331.txt:218:The year 11 class I taught was mixed ability. Anecdotally I could see a gender difference in approaches to the content of lessons – the girls tended to make value judgements on the nature of information presented; the boys were less likely to; however this is likely to be confounded by prior and average attainment levels.

./english/331.txt:219:The department’s assessment policy created difficulty in making any objective judgement on this: pupils are recorded simply as having met the lesson objective or not, with an occasional higher level assigned for exceptional work. Almost without exception pupils achieved the objectives for the first three lessons. While I would hypothesise the majority of the class to be capable of simple abstract reasoning and application of ethical principles to the issues, I was unable to test the hypothesis.

./english/331.txt:231:Ideally, I would have liked to address an area in depth in the way I have proposed. However, the realities of teaching the short course GCSE (particularly in its first year) constrained this considerably. The time allocated to cover the topic was, I felt, insufficient, particularly when taking into account this class’s lack of prior knowledge. Only one lesson was allocated to each specific issue; and by the time key terms and concepts have been addressed there is little time for informed discussion. Due to coursework demands I could not set homework to build on understanding achieved in class, and I felt that this significantly reduced the effectiveness of pupils’ learning; as of course did the timing issues discussed above.

./english/331.txt:256:4.The use of peer transactions and specifically conflicting discussion in the classroom.

./english/331.txt:263:I have only touched on the tensions between the statutory guidelines and recommendations, theories of moral development, and approaches to moral education. There is as yet little in the way of literature relating moral education and the treatment of controversial issues in the classroom to economic globalisation. As a contentious topical issue with relevance to several aspects of the new Citizenship curriculum, it is a useful area to study in this way.

./english/332.txt:3:The EPA takes place in the midst of an important period of sharpening class struggle. The forces of resistance to the coalition waging the “war on terror” have inflicted significant defeats on it. The effectiveness of resistance in Lebanon forced withdrawal of the Israeli invaders, the occupation in Iraq has entered its final stage – where withdrawal is being openly debated and the Afghan occupation has become a major war.

./english/332.txt:24:The Fourth International hoped that they could “regroup” with the left reformists, who could be cajoled into an electoral block (the European Anticapitalist Left) with diplomatic phrases, plus their services as grassroots organisers and campaigners. This block, they believed, would win substantial numbers of seats in the European and national parliaments. Alas the ELP sections wanted the spoils of office not the duties of opposition. Now the Fourth International’s hopes lie in ruins – even in France. The left reformists of the RC have entered a bourgeois government, continuing the occupation and butchering of the Iraqi and Afghan people, disarming Hezbollah and pressing on with a neo-liberal cuts budget against the working class at home. The PCF will do exactly the same, if it can form a government with the Socialist Party.

./english/332.txt:28:But this means that those organisations who want to win the thousands who have been attending the ESFs, the working class militants and youth of the trade unions and the reformist parties too, must demand that the ESF changes its structure and its objectives NOW and at the same time that they start their own anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist initiatives to co-ordinate resistance.

./english/332.txt:33:Against imperialist war, occupation, boycotts and blockades against the countries of the so-called “Third World”. Immediate withdrawal of all imperialist troops and their allies. For coordinated action by the working class and youth – strikes, blockades, general strikes – and active support for the resistance.

./english/332.txt:35:No to the European neoliberal offensive on the working class. For co-ordinated action against the implementation of the Lisbon agenda. For a European wide campaign and working class action to raise workers rights to the highest standard ensure a 35-hour week throughout the continent. For co-ordinated strike action against closures and neo-liberal attacks by the EU and the bosses.

./english/343.txt:20:Such violence affects all aspects of social life. People who reject the privatisation of natural resources, which only benefits multinationals, are likened to terrorists. By questioning the sovereignty of the people, the use and division of their natural resources and products, the very foundations of democracy are being undermined. Dictatorships and corruption thrive in this environment. Basic rights are denied to the victims, the producing classes, small holders, etc. The poorest people are in an even more precarious position both in the global North and the global South. Billions of people are deprived of basic public goods such as education, health and the right to housing. Farmer and fishermen organisations, as well as the population as a whole, demand food sovereignty in order to satisfy their needs independently of the world market.

./english/343.txt:26:Our direct enemies are clearly identified. First of all the G8, but also the World Bank and the IMF, who impose their policies and are the motors behind this recolonisation. The debt imposed by these institutions not only allows the privatisation of the world's wealth but also the transfer of wealth produced in the South to the dominant classes, based for the most part in the North.

./english/344.txt:57:[W]hat is the politics of the new International supposed to be? No one knows...but I fear it might be a divorce from any sort of explicit ideology, although I guess they won't be able to escape from the subliminal, immanent ideology of the trade union movement which is obliged to wage the class struggle whether it wants it or not, or even knows it or not. It will probably be couched in human rights terms.

./english/344.txt:62:This proposed merger has turned its back on the great founding principles of proletarian internationalism, based on the understanding that society is divided into social classes with opposed and contradictory interests - that is, on the one hand, the exploiters of wage labour and, on the other hand, the exploited who are forced to sell their labour to survive [] All the sectors involved in this trade union unification project would be well[] advised to reflect before heading down a road that could lead to a dead-end with totalitarian implications. (Sandri 2005)

./english/344.txt:69:A serious dialogue might be sparked by the translation and distribution, even after the unification, of the Latin American compilation I have both referred to and made use of. Without this kind of institutional initiative, we will have to look elsewhere for sources of a meaningful renewal and unification (definitely in this order) of the international labour movement. But it seems to me that this is likely to come, if at all, from new sectors of the working class, out of their increasingly common militancy, and to be inspired less by the new union organisation than by the global justice and solidarity movement (Waterman and Timms 2004-5, Waterman 2006). It is likely to also take the form less of a new union institution based on a 19th century model, more of effective global networks.

./english/344.txt:88:Majumdar, Chittabrata. 2006. ‘Problems of International TU Unity’, Working Class (New Delhi), June. http://citu.org.in/wclass_june06_a3.htm

./english/347.txt:12:There was a general agreement, that Athens was a very vibrant, lively event and had a very large participation from youth and radical working class activists. Also the number of trade unions sending delegations had increased. It had drawn in large numbers from Turkey and increased the participation from Eastern Europe

./english/347.txt:45:The ESF (and the World Social Forum -WSF) too came into being as a result of capitalist globalisation and as a result of the emergence of a movement fighting against it. But this movement not only combined resistance from different classes and strata – workers, peasants, youth, petit bourgeois and middle classes.

./english/347.txt:47:It also included different political trajectories – a large part representing petit-bourgeois forces (the NGOs, populists and libertarians) or reformist forces, i.e. bourgeois politics, but from organisations socially rooted in the working class (like trade unions and reformist parties. The latter were impelled towards the anti-capitalist youth after Seattle in 1999 by the resolute march rightwards to full-blown neoliberalism by the big reformist parties – the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, the German Special Democrats.

./english/347.txt:52:This is particularly so in period of intensifying class struggle.

./english/347.txt:54:The problem is that as the crisis for European imperialist project, in part caused by the anti-globalist and anticapitalist movement, deepens the call has gone out from sections of the European ruling class to co-opt some of the “left” reformist parties that have played a big role in the ESF. The capitalists support new versions of the popular front – like L’Unione in Italy - and use them to derail, contain or split the resistance and radicalisation of the masses. Obviously, one cannot have a “united” movement, with one part in government attacking the other part on the street resisting.

./english/359.txt:50:The real WSF leadership, I think, makes many key decisions. Will the event have Lula present, and in what capacity? What about Castro, or Chavez? Will there be exclusions, and if so on what grounds? The Zapatistas? Will being in a party, advocating violent tactics, or even just being from some group that the inner circle finds too radical or otherwise dislikes (such as the Disobedienti from Italy, or the international People's Global Action) preclude prominent participation? What content will be part of the core of the events (more on this below) and what content will be left as periphery? Who will have their way paid--and who will not? Will there be a march, and who will be the key speakers? Will there be a collective statement, with what content? What efforts will or won’t be made to achieve gender balance, race balance, geographic balance? How will class differences be addressed, if at all, within the process and more broadly? How will press be handled, both mainstream and alternative? Will the WSF start to discuss facilitating an international movement of movements, or will it persist only as a forum? What will be the accommodation between advocating reform of capitalism and advocating a new system entirely?

./english/359.txt:78:Without attention, layering of participants’ material circumstances abets as well even less warranted differences -- due to gender, race, class, place of origin, and fame -- in how people are regarded in general, in the media attention they are accorded, and in the visibility and promotion they receive. Often attention afforded rises in nearly inverse proportion to the activism people do, to the extent they are anti-hierarchical in their own lives, and to the lessons and insights they have to offer and to share with other people at the WSF's events. It isn't surprising that in the youth camp there is sharing and equity dwarfing what prevails in the hotels. So while it would probably be impossible to do without the hotels, it is the logic and culture at the hotels that needs examination. Of course we need presentations, sometimes even to very large audiences, but it ought to be possible to reduce or even eliminate relative passivity and subordination of those who come to the WSF mainly to listen, and of those who present but have less known names.

./english/360.txt:50:The real WSF leadership, I think, makes many key decisions. Will the event have Lula present, and in what capacity? What about Castro, or Chavez? Will there be exclusions, and if so on what grounds? The Zapatistas? Will being in a party, advocating violent tactics, or even just being from some group that the inner circle finds too radical or otherwise dislikes (such as the Disobedienti from Italy, or the international People's Global Action) preclude prominent participation? What content will be part of the core of the events (more on this below) and what content will be left as periphery? Who will have their way paid--and who will not? Will there be a march, and who will be the key speakers? Will there be a collective statement, with what content? What efforts will or won�t be made to achieve gender balance, race balance, geographic balance? How will class differences be addressed, if at all, within the process and more broadly? How will press be handled, both mainstream and alternative? Will the WSF start to discuss facilitating an international movement of movements, or will it persist only as a forum? What will be the accommodation between advocating reform of capitalism and advocating a new system entirely?

./english/360.txt:78:Without attention, layering of participants� material circumstances abets as well even less warranted differences -- due to gender, race, class, place of origin, and fame -- in how people are regarded in general, in the media attention they are accorded, and in the visibility and promotion they receive. Often attention afforded rises in nearly inverse proportion to the activism people do, to the extent they are anti-hierarchical in their own lives, and to the lessons and insights they have to offer and to share with other people at the WSF's events. It isn't surprising that in the youth camp there is sharing and equity dwarfing what prevails in the hotels. So while it would probably be impossible to do without the hotels, it is the logic and culture at the hotels that needs examination. Of course we need presentations, sometimes even to very large audiences, but it ought to be possible to reduce or even eliminate relative passivity and subordination of those who come to the WSF mainly to listen, and of those who present but have less known names.

./english/362.txt:35:I consider these events important. I do not mean that there are no problems with them. There are many, and growing, social movements around the world. They are very different in nature, struggling either on social fronts, for the defence of labour and of the rights of the popular classes, or on political fronts for basic political rights. There are the feminist movements, ecological movements and many more. What is characteristic of the present time is that these movements are fragmented, in the sense that they are mostly national-based, or, in many cases, local-based. Most of them deal with a single issue or with a single dimension of the problem, without articulating it into an overall alternative political project.

./english/362.txt:51:After the Second World War there was a gigantic movement of the peoples of Asia and Africa for national liberation. They had one target: independence. This was correct, because it was the first step. But the forces that united around this demand represented different classes. In countries such as China, Vietnam, and Cuba, the leadership was with the radical Left. But in countries like India the leadership was with the middle classes during the fight against British imperialism. In Africa and in the Arab countries, a variety of forces led the movement. The leadership in these countries understood that they not only needed to support one another but also build a common front after independence, based on their common demands vis-a-vis the global system. That is how Bandung happened in 1955.

./english/362.txt:65:There was some room for development because colonialism resulted in low levels of industrialisation in a few countries, and none at all in many others. So, there was room for industrialisation after national liberation. But as they moved along, it became costlier, in terms of cost of investment and technology. These countries also inherited social systems with very low levels of education, which offered enormous room for upward mobility for people, through education. As long as the children of the popular classes (the lower middle class and the peasantry) could move up through education - and this happened in a huge scale in India, Egypt and many other countries - the system benefited from legitimacy. Even if they were not democratic, they were seen as delivering something. Countries that had high rates of economic growth, accompanied by not-increasing levels of inequality (I do not mean socially just), and those that offered upward mobility for large sections of society, enjoyed credibility and legitimacy. Some of these countries were semi-democratic, like India. Others, like Nasserite Egypt, were not democratic at all. But they were equally legitimate and credible because they delivered. Once the system reached a point where it could not progress within the same logic and on the same basis, the political system became more corrupt and lost legitimacy. This created a vacuum, which reactionary forces started to occupy.

./english/362.txt:85:But these monopolies also need a global system to operate. The change in the nature of imperialism does not negate the importance of changes in the processes of labour and other dimensions, which need to be taken into account so that the popular classes can reinvent efficient forms of organisations. But in order to be efficient at the global political level, and in North-South relations, we have to take into account the basic fact that imperialism now operates collectively as a triad, represented by the U.S., the E.U. and Japan.

./english/362.txt:91:I would like to think I am right, without appearing to be arrogant. But yes, the centre of gravity has moved from inside nations to somewhere else. This has happened to all the nations - to the U.S., the European nations, and to the big and small nations of the Third World. This change is related to the size of dominant capital, which is global in scale. Since these are major decision makers, they cannot be submitted to a national logic. That creates problems. The issue was discussed at the European Social Forum, in Florence. Many people felt that a new Europe should be built. They said that a political Europe was needed, not necessarily with a unified state because, for historical reasons, there are nations with a long history of a common language and culture. Some suggested a kind of confederation. The point is that such a Europe cannot be based only on a common market; it also has to have a common political reality. Another Europe, like another Asia, is possible. This new Europe ought to be based on a social compromise between capital (because we cannot imagine the end of capital immediately) and labour and other popular classes. But I also believe we cannot achieve this other Europe without changing its relationship to the South. Europe cannot change if it continues to be a partner in the collective imperialist system.

./english/362.txt:105:I shall summarise the principles that could possibly govern another kind of global system. The first is the logic of the transition to socialism. This will combine the criterion of capitalism, that is, efficiency as measured by profitability; and, the criterion of social justice. Although the term social justice is very elastic, certain elements can be defined in concrete terms. I am sure any Indian citizen from the popular classes can tell you what he/she means by social justice. It would necessarily mean jobs, reasonable and decent wages, schools for his/her children and decent health care. That is social justice, not socialism. These are not going to be produced by the market, but these will be imposed on the market by a social policy of the state. This kind of system associates capitalistic criteria with social criteria, which will be in conflict. But the system recognises that they are conflicting and therefore must be managed without allowing the market to dominate society unilaterally. It also recognises the fact that the free play of markets creates problems for society. Therefore, society will solve the problem through the exercise of political power. If such a system obtains in several countries, then we can create the conditions for regional arrangements among them, and of changes in the global system.

./english/362.txt:107:The second condition that is needed for substantial change is genuine democracy. Social change in the past - whether of the Soviet or Maoist type or of the national populist types in the Third World - had very little democracy or no democracy at all. But whatever their achievements, very little was left to the initiative of the popular classes. They were controlled and directed in many ways, with varying degrees of the negation of democracy. The fact that the people want progress but that they also want liberty is also progress from the earlier situation. We cannot have a remake of the Soviet Union or a remake of Nehru's India. There are no remakes in history. Democracy in the dominant discourse is based on delinking it from the issue of social justice. That does not work, because if democracy does not result in social progress, people no longer find it credible. The main reason for the move backwards towards religious fundamentalism, ethnic solidarities and so on is the failure of democracy.

./english/362.txt:111:Imperialism and cultural fundamentalism go together. Market fundamentalism needs religious fundamentalism. Why is this so? Market fundamentalism says: Subvert the state and leave it to the market at the global level to run the system. How can such a system be run? It can be done only when states are disempowered completely; and, within states, if the popular classes (the victims) are disempowered by the negation of their class identity. Moreover, the system can be run politically if the South is completely divided, with nations and nationalities hating one another. Religious fundamentalism and ethnic fundamentalism - they are similar - are perfect instruments for ruling the political system. This is the reason why they are supported - ideologically, politically, even financially - by imperialism. The U.S. has always supported Islamic fundamentalism. It has always supported the Saudi Arabian regime, just as it has always supported Pakistan and the Taliban. It continues to support such regimes even today, though they are now compelled to do this in a covert manner. In Europe it uses ethnic movements to achieve its goals, as in Yugoslavia.

./english/363.txt:8:"Working-class revolutions ? constantly criticise themselves, they continually interrupt their own course, return to what has apparently already been achieved to start it from scratch again. Cruelly and thoroughly they mock the shortcomings, weaknesses and pitiful nature of their first attempts; they seem to throw their opponent down, only for him to draw new strength from the earth and rise up once more against them, yet more gigantic than ever. They shrink back again and again in the face of the undetermined vastness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes any turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: "Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, dance here!" (Marx, 18th Brumaire (n.d.): 272-3)

./english/363.txt:11:It looks like there could be something big happening "out there" - not in the sense of "somewhere far away, in other countries", but close to hand, within processes of globalisation and resistance which are just as real here in Ireland as anywhere else: "out there" where working-class communities are struggling to take back control of their everyday contexts, where Irish activists are working in solidarity with the Zapatistas, where trade unionists are pushing partnership to the limits, where women are demanding childcare provision, where Netslaves are realising that ?35,000 a year really means three and a half hours travel a day and a house in nowhere, New Suburbia.

./english/363.txt:22:1. Historicising the "political economy of the working class": what's happening?

./english/363.txt:29:Lebowitz and the political economy of the working class

./english/363.txt:32:This "political economy of the working class" is not simply a history of resistance to an overpowering, and increasingly out of control (Giddens 1990), juggernaut. We are not in the world of Terminator II. For that juggernaut to continue rolling, we have to continue doing things. It is, after all, made up of our actions: capitalism, patriarchy, racism are things people do as they reproduce their everyday lives. When we think this as activists, it presents simply one more challenge: not just large-scale structures, but also everyday routines need to be resisted (Lichterman 1996). But when we think this from an understanding of ourselves as being the ordinary people who do this stuff, it gives us a remarkable potential.

./english/363.txt:36:I attempted a more historical reading of this problem when I was trying to make sense of how people lived their lives within the Dublin counter-culture (Cox 1999a). In essence, it seems that the challenge to organised capitalism comes first from below: it is, in fact, that event called for simplicity "1968" (see Fink et al. (1998) for a recent overview). Disorganisation from above, whose key dates are those of the oil crisis of the early 1970s, is then The Empire Strikes Back: ordinary people, in other words, are already actors, not simply victims, in the creation of the current situation. The Return of the Jedi, if that is what we are experiencing, is not a miraculous appearance of agency from nowhere, but an ordinary part of the political economy of the working class.

./english/363.txt:75:Taking the three dimensions of interaction with state structures, relations to dominant cultural orientations and self-construction in terms of class and power, I had a look at how these dimensions work in everyday movement practice, how they've operated in different movement contexts (to get away from the conventional assumption that the way things are is somehow written into the DNA of the universe), and a range of different attempts at defining and organising the movement, showing that activists do in fact ask themselves these kinds of questions more or less explicitly. Reasonable criteria for adequate strategies seemed to be comprehensiveness (taking as many different aspects of the movement as possible into consideration), scope (taking the potential of the movement for significant change seriously), and emancipatory compatability (rather than particularist exclusion).

./english/363.txt:82:Let's look at the situation from the other side for a minute. What defines the "ordinary state of affairs" is that most ordinary people are fulfilling the roles set for them, are experiencing themselves as objects rather than subjects of the social world. (This doesn't exclude insisting on "being an individual", once people treat basic things like their class situation, gender relations and ethnicity as given structures of reality that they simply have to accept). What makes a revolution is when large numbers of ordinary people come to experience themselves as subjects.

./english/363.txt:87:As Michael Vester (1975) wrote of EP Thompson's Making of the English working class (1963), movements are learning processes. We could add: movements in revolutionary periods are exceptional learning processes. Movements in "ordinary periods" are still hamstrung by the subject-object dilemma: they tend to take much of the social world as given; activists often talk about "ordinary people" as being simply passive objects (of the media, their jobs, peer pressure etc.); and activists tend towards an abstract voluntarism which is missing out the people who do in fact reproduce - and are hence also capable of transforming - the structures they experience.

./english/363.txt:127:In terms of the perspective I developed at the start of this paper, "capacity-building", a key element of community politics in contemporary Ireland, is part of the "political economy of the working class" - ordinary people developing their own ability to act as subjects rather than objects through processes which are becoming part of ordinary life in working class Ireland. In particular, the valorisation of everyday skills, and the stress placed on starting from where people are, are important means of embodying this changed situation within the routines of everyday life.

./english/363.txt:129:This is quite a remarkable process, and one which is far outside the experience not only of many activists from other countries, but of a good few activists and left intellectuals here in Ireland. Martin Geoghegan (2000) has explored the reasons why community activists tend to speak (and act) in public in ways which have the effect that leftists with a more traditional version of "politics" do not recognise the significance of what is happening. Despite this, the existence of widespread, popular working-class modes of organisation which are in working-class hands and organised in non-authoritarian ways is rare in contemporary Europe.

./english/363.txt:131:That would not of course be a universal perception of what is happening among community activists (not all of whom see themselves as activists), and of course there are widespread forms of "consensual" community development in other parts of Irish society which are much less radical. But the fact remains that across working-class Ireland something remarkable is happening, not just in Irish terms but in European and perhaps global terms. If "the new movement" is to have an effect in Ireland it will need to make links here; but it is hard to envisage what that might mean in practice.

./english/363.txt:133:To concretise this briefly: the community activists I know, in Dublin or Waterford, would have no difficulty in making the mental connection between their own situation and practice and the new movement, at least in some of its aspects. The reverse is likely to be more problematic: I know many Irish leftists and eco-activists who find it anything other than easy to fit community development into their view of the world. What is hard to imagine, though, is a situation which might see effective practical alliances developing between working-class community groups and the "new movement". This failure of the imagination, if it isn't just my own, is a historical one: as we move towards the possibility of such an alliance, its outline is likely to take shape, perhaps in discussions like this, or in joint solidarity campaigns on the ground (in anti-racist work? against incinerators?) Until this kind of link can be made, though, "the new movement" will suffer the critical weakness in Ireland of being divorced from one of the two largest movements in the country (after the labour movement, where some links do exist). From Ballymun to the World Social Forum is perhaps not such a great step, but it still has to be made.

./english/363.txt:138:This relationship is particularly important in terms of relationships with the state, in particular the structures of partnership with the "voluntary and community sector". It is not in itself remarkable that a small state like the Irish seeks a level of partnership which allows it to play Standortpolitik much like a big city might on the continent, nor that a particular kind of organisational elite finds the proposal attractive. It is remarkable, though, that (despite widespread cynicism about the motives involved and the actual gains to be made) there is so little support or interest in the kind of anti-partnership struggles we have seen in the unions. One part of the explanation must surely be the sense that the state is, or should be, or could be, in some way "ours" - a sense which working-class activists in Britain or Germany, for example, would find it hard to swallow.

./english/363.txt:172:One important reason for this is that the relevant knowledge - of where the movement is going - is not held by individuals on the basis of a scholastic appropriation of information. That elitist model, rooted in the culture of the service class and a fixation on the state as the instrument of change, is flawed at its root. What is important is what Lukács described as the bearer of orthodoxy in Marxism (1971): the principle of totality, the attempt to grasp the whole, and the sense - grounded in both our own practice and that of previous movements - of where we might be able to find contributions that we do not yet have names for: how to reach beyond ourselves.

./english/363.txt:174:This kind of communication is best developed in co-operative processes geared towards practical action, of course; but the practical action itself then needs to be "at the level of the (potential) movement" - we need to set ourselves tasks which enable, to use a horrible metaphor, a "highest common factor" rather than a "lowest common denominator" to emerge. This is of course part of that learning process which Marx described as characteristic of working-class revolutions: because they do not come "from above", they are not simply the headbirths of intellectuals, there is a constant process of grasping for the skies, falling back, and trying again, perhaps in another place.

./english/363.txt:176:Working-class revolutions are not the headbirths of intellectuals; and yet intellectuals have an important role to play in them. If not as schoolteachers, then perhaps as community organisers; if not as planners, then perhaps as activists; if not as the conservative guardians of "correct strategy", then perhaps as the creative agents who help develop situations in which people can work out strategies of their own. But what does this mean in practice? Why is it worth our while being here, and talking to each other, in the first place?

./english/363.txt:190:His ideal models here are the kinds of worker intellectuals he knew from the PCd'I, from the Ordine Nuovo days and from prison: working-class activists in the party and the unions. Other examples of "organic intellectuals" that he offers include managers and engineers; the "traditional intellectuals" belonging to earlier strata are primarily village notables - the priest and the doctor. To miss this foundation in practice, as Laclau and Mouffe (1985) do, is to fall into the silliest kind of "anything goes". Not anything does go, because (as we know in daily life) we cannot simply impose ourselves on the world "just as we like".

./english/363.txt:204:A second difficulty is that - true to its elitist origins - it assumes that people's participation and consent is down to simple stupidity or gullibility; it fails to recognise the (limited) rationality involved. Hegemony works, to the extent that it works, precisely insofar as people find (some of) their needs met and (some of) their responses developed in it. To oppose hegemony, then, is to develop new forms of proto-hegemony: new ways of living together which are closer to these needs and responses and less partial in selecting which find a space in the world we share with others. The responsibility for forgetting this is not only that of the movement entrepreneurs of "identity politics"; it is also, and crucially, that of an authoritarian left which forgot that historical working-class movements had always created "unity" from a very wide "diversity" (see Rowbotham et al. 1979 for an account of this failure).

./english/363.txt:246:One definition of a revolutionary moment (see especially Barker n.d. and Barker and Mooers 1997) is as one when the ruling class is no longer capable of governing and the people are no longer willing to be governed. Arguably, this situation is starting to develop across the globe, as the "leaders of the free world" can no longer meet in public in any city in that free world and the range of interests represented in the protests grows. The pensée unique of neo-liberalism is not what you might call a wonderful tool for organising hegemony; historically, it has usually depended on a populist authoritarianism or the support of religion to develop mass support. In this respect at least Ireland is not particularly unique, as both elements appear significantly less well-grounded in everyday practice than even two decades ago.

./english/365.txt:32:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 8 patterns of network organization. Indeed, one of the classic accounts of such movement network organization is the SPIN model developed by Gerlach and Hine (1970). SPIN stands for Segmented, Polycephalous, Integrated, Networks. However, when Gerlach (2001) applied the SPIN model to contemporary global protest networks, he made two interesting conceptual adjustments which he passed over without the fanfare that I believe they deserve. First, he replaced the idea of polycephalous organization with polycentric order, indicating that, like earlier SPIN movements, global activist networks have many centers or hubs, but unlike their predecessors, those hubs are less likely to be defined around prominent leaders. In addition, he noted that the primary basis of movement integration and growth has shifted from ideology to more personal and fluid forms of association. In my view, these changes in the SPIN model reflect the identity processes of fragmented social systems that make electronically managed affinity networks such essential forms of political organization.

./english/365.txt:41:The features of global activism outlined above raise interesting challenges for thinking about movements and protest politics. One of the best known models of contentious politics refers to the diffusion of protest networks and the accompanying transformation of collective identities as “scale shift” (McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001; Tarrow, 2002a). According to this view, scale shift depends on the existence of several mechanisms of human agency: brokerage (creating social links among disconnected sites of protest), diffusion (transfer of information across those links), and attribution of similarity (mutual identification) (McAdam, Tarrow & Tilly, 2001, pp. 331-339). As I understand it, this process generally involves face-to-face agency (brokerage) in the recruitment of protesters and in the negotiation of new identity frames to accommodate the expanding coalitions of groups. A now classic formulation of the identity framing process at the core of this theory of scale shift is Snow and Bensford’s (1992) account of

./english/366.txt:42:Zack Exley, a former SEIU organizer and MoveOn's organizing director, says that the group reaches deep into politically disaffected middle-class constituencies--what he calls America's "silenced majority." Unlike the traditional left, he says, "we trust people. We don't think Americans are crazy or stupid or brainwashed or apathetic. We're not trying to drag them kicking and screaming over to our view. We know that there are millions of Americans in every community and walk of life who already know that something is terribly wrong with our country and who are as angry as we are and who are mostly just looking for a meaningful way to do something about it."

./english/367.txt:17:A combination of several factors ensured that none of these could become well entrenched as alternatives to the CPI. In the first two parliaments of independent India [independence having been won in 1947], the CPI emerged as the major left-wing opposition. But this success also deepened an electoralist orientation. The supposedly deep theoretical dispute over whether the stage of revolution in India was to be “national democratic” or “people’s democratic,” and whether the section of the “progressive” bourgeoisie with which the working class was to ally itself was of one or the other kind, ultimately could be reduced to a question of which kind of opportunist alliance was to be forged — with so-called left Congress forces (the Indian National Congress being the historic bourgeois party) or with opposition bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties. This resulted in a split [during the 1960s]. However, one component of the split was disagreement over international issues.

./english/367.txt:23:The Congress Socialist Party (CSP) had been a left-wing formation inside the Congress Party, including some Marxists as well as various other currents. When a successful entry into the CSP by the CPI caused a severe decline in the strength and popularity of the CSP, anti-Communism was added to the ideological mix of the CSP. Eventually, some of its leading lights switched to Gandhism or liberalism, while others developed a concept of “social justice” that strongly emphasized caste issues, partly as a counterpoint to class, and partly in genuine recognition of the specificity of the Indian social formation. Stalinist ideology tended to view caste as an element of “feudalism” and to argue that capitalist development would automatically abolish caste discrimination. The socialists therefore saw in caste oppression both a genuine point whereby common, exploited people could be mobilized, and a point from which the socialists could claim their Indianness and superiority over “Moscow-trained” Communists. However, despite substantial western Social Democratic funding and other forms of help, the Socialists proved to be ineffectual in advancing electorally. This, together with a previous anarchist influence, led to an anti-statist, anti-party tendency among them, which, however, was surprisingly able to remain within CSP structures. After independence, the CSP merged with another party, the KMPP. But they also had a record of splits, forming the SSP (united socialist party) and the PSP.

./english/367.txt:27:These Maoists boycotted not only elections, but mass organizations, and called for immediate revolution. Charu Majumdar, the main cult leader of the CPI(ML), even “predicted” that the Indian revolution would be accomplished in the year 1975. Cadres were trained in the politics of annihilating the class enemy. The state hit back with utmost brutality. Thousands were murdered, in fake encounters, in jail killings, in killings organized by the bourgeois and Stalinist parties. For example, in Barranagore-Cossipore, in the suburbs of Calcutta, Congress-backed thugs systematically hunted out Maoists and murdered them while a major escape route was kept blocked by CPI(M) cadres. The arrest and death of Majumdar broke up the CPI(ML).

./english/367.txt:31:When the CPI(ML) Liberation tried to spread to other provinces, it realized that more sophisticated politics were needed in places where the ruling class was not obliging it by blatant caste violence, etc. In particular, it also realized, after years of denouncing others, that elections could not be simply ignored, nor was it always useful to call for a boycott of elections. But when it made the turn, it took over many of the typical habits of Stalinism in India. Thus, instead of fighting within existing unions for class struggle orientations, it quickly floated its own “Central” Union, the All India Coordinating Committee of Trade Unions (AICCTU). This of course provides certain advantages — e.g., getting invited to meetings at the all-India level, getting access to ILO contacts, and so on, in a way that radical forces inside a different central union might not get.

./english/367.txt:37:Another major Maoist pole that developed was the threesome — CPI(ML) People’s War Group, or PWG; CPI(ML) Party Unity, or PU; and the Maoist Communist Center (MCC). These are the three main forces still insisting on the original armed struggle line, annihilation of the class enemy, and so on. Despite internecine turf wars among themselves, two of them, the PWG and the PU, united to form the CPI(ML) PW. These forces are extremely opportunistic. Since, according to their analysis, all other parties are bourgeois parties in the service of one or another fraction of a comprador bourgeoisie, they feel free to make any short-term alliance with any party against any other. So they make short-term alliances with various bourgeois parties in order to get footholds in different areas. In West Bengal, for example, where the CPI(M) is in power, at one stage they allied with the CPI(M), and at another stage with the right-wing regional party, the Trinamool Congress, which is a part of the BJP-led central government regime. They also use murderous violence in order to establish their control over different areas. The fact that there are extensive areas in India where even the twentieth century has hardly penetrated till now, however, gives their line of armed resistance and “protection” a seeming attraction to oppressed poor peasants and ethnic groups.

./english/367.txt:44:New movements called forth new organizations, or breathed life into old ones. And there were inevitable conflicts, some common the world over, some specific to the Indian situation, between old mass organizations and parties, on the one hand, and the new organizations. This was to result in the formation of a new type of radical milieu. The movements stressed autonomy, identity, and participatory democracy. By autonomy they meant that the movement must be independent of state control as well as control by any other external force — including political parties. The stress on identity was a response to all overarching claims that sought to subsume distinct struggles under a hegemonic banner. This included nationalism as well as the claim that the resolution of the class struggle would solve all other issues in passing.

./english/367.txt:46:At the same time, since many of the activists were members of the radical parties, this created a contradiction. They seemed to be living in two worlds. As a leading Trotskyist and feminist activist of the 1970s and 1980s, Vibhuti Patel, once told me, “I spend time telling my comrades in the party that feminism cannot be treated as a separatist movement and that the struggle for women’s liberation cannot be postponed till the socialist revolution is achieved; and I keep telling my friends in the women’s movement that the struggle for women’s liberation cannot be won unless we link it to the class struggle.” This was from a Trotskyist, a member of an organization that had more than a formal commitment to women’s liberation.

./english/367.txt:50:Every new form of struggle of the oppressed faced this problem. In some cases there were breakaway parties, like the Satya Shodhak Communist Party, a breakaway group from the CPI(M) which stressed that there was a need to link caste and class struggles in India. In many more cases, however, individual cadres of left parties, whether the mainstream or more often the Maoist left, as well as youth influenced by Lohiaite views about caste oppression [that is, those who followed the views of the late Ram Manohar Lohia, a socialist leader who stressed caste struggles], plus Jay Prakash Narayan’s ideas about partyless democracy, turned to forming new types of organizations, either after dropping their party memberships, or retaining that membership, but keeping two distinct identities.

./english/367.txt:52:A whole series of voluntary organizations were formed at that time. Initially, these were formed by radicals who thought they would be carrying on the class struggle, the caste liberation struggle, the women’s liberation struggle, etc., through these means. So these were open and democratic organizations. However, many of these groups soon found that there was a need to organize services, to work in such a manner within civil society that some self-help could be arranged, and so on. This meant the transformation of the structure of the organization. Willy-nilly, it was now working within civil society while accepting the existing social and political framework, especially the state. It was now making demands upon the state for reforms. This did not make the movement, or those sectors of the movement, automatically reformist. But this did pose serious questions before the Marxists working within those organizations or in those movements about what they should do in order to raise within every partial movement the historic, long-term goals of struggle, and what the appropriate ways of doing that should be.

./english/367.txt:58:International agencies like the United Nations and its various organizations played an important role in this process. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a dramatic change. The small voluntary organization which was linked to the mass movement still existed, but it was increasingly elbowed out by a chain, which ran from international donor agencies to large donor organizations in India with headquarters in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, etc., on to local offices or smaller NGOs in big cities, and through them to lesser NGOs in small towns, rural areas, or in working class or pauperized sectors of the big cities. And the entire language of the bulk of the NGOs had shifted. They tended to view the masses whom their activities served as “beneficiaries.” A clear hierarchy had sprung up. Behind the continuing veneer of participatory democracy, the reality was one of a steadily growing bureaucratization. In addition, NGOs, even when totally honest and dedicated, fostered relations of dependency.

./english/367.txt:83:In hospitals, free services have been drastically cut, and the quality of the remaining free services have become such that they can lead to the demise of the recipient. Though the population of Calcutta has grown massively, in 25 years of Left Front rule no new government hospital has been opened. The government has also been moving slowly but definitely toward curbing dissent. It has freely used the terrorist tag against its opponents. And it has displayed its commitment to globalization by turning against even reformist trade union struggles for concessions for the workers, even while at the all-India level the CPI(M) continues to mouth platitudes about the rights of workers. Government efforts on environmental protection show the same upper class orientation. Several thousand people were driven out of their “illegal” shantytown dwellings, and in one case the entire massive shantytown was “accidentally” set on fire. Activists of the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, as well as other organizations like those fighting for the ousted residents, were arrested. In rural West Bengal, in the name of combating Maoism and “separatism,” a horrifying level of violence has been unleashed, justified before the bourgeois media, and thereby substantially hushed up.

./english/367.txt:85:Nonetheless, the CPI(M) despite its rightward-moving trajectory, cannot simply turn its back on the working class. Its main electoral and social base remains the working class and the rural poor. So it has adapted to the anti-globalization struggles. It was one of the key players in organizing the Asian Social Forum at Hyderabad. Formally the party was absent. But with a plethora of party-controlled mass fronts packing the arrangements, there was no problem with CPI(M) leaders getting ample space at the Forum. At the same time, by taking a stand supporting the exclusion of parties, they made sure that smaller left parties did not get much space.

./english/367.txt:121:The attack on the PT is also a sleight of hand. It is particularly easy in India, where few have any idea about the kind of party the PT is, or of the tendency struggles in it. For Indian readers mainly, let me therefore summarize briefly the complexities of the PT, as well as the meaning of its participation in the WSF. The PT is a new working class party. By new, I mean it was founded in 1980. It was the result of class struggle proletarian currents deciding in Brazil that the old left was not good enough, and that they needed a new party of the working class, looking neither to the Moscow bureaucrats nor the Peking bureaucrats, nor to national capitalism. Radical forces, particularly Trotskyists, played an important role inside the PT. They included the Brazilian section of the Fourth International, the current known as the Socialist Democracy Tendency (SDT). There were also others, like the International Workers League, whose comrades are no longer inside the PT, but have a fairly strong radical left party named PSTU outside the PT. The SDT, by contrast, decided to continue working within the PT and played an important role in shaping the structure of the PT, including its internal democracy, the right of organized tendencies to exist, their right to be represented in leadership bodies in accordance with the proportion of votes received at the national Congresses of the PT, and so on.

./english/367.txt:147:As Lula, the historic leader of the PT, came closer to victory by 2002, this contradiction became evident. And Lula chose adjustment with capitalism. For the left wing, it was a difficult choice. They could not give up the PT before the masses supporting the PT could be convinced. So they fought for an alternative line within the PT. As several SDT leaders explained in articles and speeches, including at a conference where this author was present, it was an agonizing choice, which they made because they had been in the PT from the beginning, they had contributed hugely to the building of this party, and they could not afford to turn their backs on it until a significant part of the working class also decided that there was a need to fight Lula. In other words, it was the choice that radicals inside mass parties have often faced. They could not afford to look sectarian in the eyes of the very masses they were trying to convince.

./english/367.txt:149:This left wing is very underrepresented inside parliament — which is once again historically the usual case. In the first critical vote, when a right-winger was appointed governor of the Brazilian Central Bank, Senator Heloisa Helena (of the SDT) did not vote for him. By the time Lula moved in for gutting the pension funds, a few more MPs had joined her in opposing the PT leadership’s rightward drift. And instead of walking out of the PT, Helena is systematically criticizing Lula, forcing the PT right into expelling her, thereby showing in an exemplary manner to the Brazilian working class that the PT leaders have moved away from their origins.

./english/367.txt:151:By flattening out the differences in the PT, by pretending that the authors of the participatory budget and the authors of the current course of the Brazilian regime are one and the same, the RUPE article does not provide a really serious basis for understanding the PT experience. To recapitulate, the key positive aspects of the PT experience are: the rise of the PT on the basis of class struggle [at a time of mass strikes, led by Lula’s union, against the Brazilian military dictatorship in the late 1970s]; the construction of the PT as a democratic working class party, clearly committed, at least in its early period, to socialism; and the important role of the radical left within it. That radical left might prove to be a hybrid left-centrist current, if we use a now not very much understood jargon, which means forces straddling revolutionary socialist and reformist politics, taking one step left and the next one right. The PT participation in the WSF, till Lula’s election, did not represent a reformist attempt at cooptation of radicalizing tendencies, but a democratic attempt at creating space for radicalism beyond Brazilian boundaries as well.

./english/367.txt:157:The leaflet of the Baroda ICS is different. It represents the kind of flag-waving sectarianism that has no positive content. The PW, while opposing the WSF, has been trying to mobilize forces. The leaflet under discussion simply lectures activists about how central to social change a revolutionary party is. This kind of sterile and abstract lecture is useless. Unless radical parties or would-be radical parties can play serious roles as builders of mass struggles, of feminist struggles, of environmentalist struggles, in the Indian context of anti-communalist and dalit-liberation struggles, and unless they can rework their concepts of class struggle and revolutionary party to ensure that these dimensions are properly represented, they will remain armchair revolutionaries. The Baroda group that has issued the leaflet has been doing its best to push out the most important trade union activists, environmental activists, feminist activists, etc., from its fold because these activists refuse to allow “Marxist” experts who have no experience of the actual struggles to dictate to them how they should function in the mass movements.

./english/368.txt:26:On the other side of the symbiosis, the cyberspace world of computer communication networks was itself already the terrain of manifold struggles and thus open to appropriation by those whose own forms of organization were pre-disposed to building strength through linkages with others. While this is not the place to delve too deeply into the antagonisms and class conflicts of the computer industry, it is important to recognize and remember that, like all other capitalist industries, it has developed as an integral part of the changing international division of labor power. Its workers --from semiconductor engineers through hardware assemblers to programmers-- can be found in both North and South. Within this context there has been a complex set of ongoing struggles between those who do the work and those who make the profits.

./english/368.txt:36:What has been true in the computer industry of the struggle between free activity and the subordination of that activity to profit-producing work, has also been true in the sub-space of computer networks. The same dynamics of struggle between self-activity and work for outside authority have multiplied through both public and private sectors of cyberspace. The state and private corporations are constantly chasing after the new electronic frontiers being created by imaginative pioneers. They seek to enclose the frontiers for purposes of power and profit, e.g., restricting access to "classified" information or industrial secrets, commercializing as much of the informational and communicative flow as possible as well as the infrastructure through which it flows.(8)

./english/368.txt:64:The result of such processes interweaving cyberspace and other zones of human space is a new composition of social relationships increasingly difficult for capitalists and the state to manage. Precisely to the degree that its self-elaboration has been outstripping the ability of managers of capitalist society to repress or co-opt, this growing "social" composition has moved beyond a "class" composition. It is not merely the self-reconfigured structure of power by workers against their exploiters; with new threads and new weaves the social fabric is being rewoven into textures with less and less of a "class" character. This self-activity, of course, continues to be constrained by the oppressions of class but it increasingly weaves according to it's own innovative designs.(20)

./english/368.txt:92:The result for business, the state and the ruling class generally is a continuing crisis of "governability" wherein virtually every historical mechanism of domination is being challenged and ruptured from below. The old combinations of repression and co-optation have not been working and the traditional elite coalitions are splitting apart. The PRI has had to accept electoral reforms, cede state governments to the opposition Partido Accion Nacional (PAN), tolerate public denunciations from its own human rights commission, suffer repeated exposures of massive state corruption, while watching the center of gravity of public political debate and action shift toward radical groups like the EZLN or moderate groups like Alianza Civica. Desperate in the face of so many crises, the fragmenting ruling alliance has struck back with its usual violence --military repression in Chiapas, police state repression all over the place. At the same time, unfortunately, it has not collapsed and is hardly without resources --both financial and human-- even in extremis. As a result we have begun to see some new efforts to fight back on various fronts, including that of cyberspace.

./english/369.txt:33:This episode crowns a twenty-year cycle during which social democracy systematically fought to impose neo-liberal policies on the working class. This social regression, unprecedented in the past half-century, has hit the working class terribly hard and plunged millions of workers and young people into insecurity, misery and despair. Hence xenophobia and racism were able to win over not only middle-class layers but also sectors of the working class and youth.

./english/369.txt:35:Fascist and far right demagogues are exploiting this reactionary terrain. Traditional bourgeois parties are using it as well for their political manoeuvres. For the moment, it is not the advent of fascism which is on the agenda but "class struggle" bourgeois governments, whose main difference with "left" governments is that they will have their hands free to launch a new "European neo-liberal" offensive: ongoing privatisations and antisocial measures; EU involvement in the international arena ("the war on terrorism" and eastwards enlargement); and putting in place the coherent, efficient core of a European proto-state apparatus.

./english/369.txt:37:But for the first time in twenty years, the ruling classes' political offensive is running up against a significant new social movement, borne by a new generation of youth, which is global, offensive, internationalist and against the system from the start. Defensive social battles, which have never ceased, are losing their "rearguard" aspect, because the movement against capitalist globalisation has provided them with a new political framework, an offensive spirit, a perspective and an alternative. The centre of gravity for political initiatives and mass mobilisation is located at the moment outside the traditional labour movement. Although weakened, the European trade union movement still brings together, according to national statistics, millions of workers and thousands of activists. As long as the wage-earning class, which is a majority social force, does not become active, as long as it does not struggle massively for its own immediate demands and broad aspirations, as long as it does not organise itself on an ever widening scale, neither the ongoing globalisation of the market nor neo-liberal and pro-war policies will be stopped. The general strikes and gigantic citizens' mobilisations in Italy, the Spanish general strike, the recurrent social struggles in Greece and the renewal of sectoral strikes in Germany (particularly among metal and construction workers) clearly herald a stronger resistance to the bosses and governments' ongoing offensive.

./english/369.txt:45:The EU has chosen to line up behind the policy of the Bush government. It aspires to join in US hegemony on a world scale, while putting itself forward as a rival. The EU accepts the US's general orientation ("the global fight against international terrorism"), its organisation (full commitment to and consistent reform of NATO) and its means (increasing military budgets and militarisation). But at the moment the EU does not share the rhetoric, the will to take the offensive or the announced key objectives of US policy (war against Iraq—or Iran). This reflects both divisions within the EU and the private interests of the big European financial-industrial conglomerates, at a time when trans-Atlantic conflicts are multiplying and intensifying on the economic level. The mythology of a "peaceful "and "generous" EU is breaking down. What the ruling classes want is a European great power.

./english/369.txt:61:b) The EU "is not full"! It has never been so rich! What "prevents" the equal social and democratic integration of the immigrant population is the shameless enrichment of a tiny minority of big capitalists—at the expense of the EU's native populations (working classes)—which refuses to organise society on the basis of the social needs of the great majority of the population here and abroad. This is a compelling reason to struggle together, unite the working class and eliminate this double injustice.

./english/369.txt:83:The EU's structure was despotic from the very beginning. The bulk of the executive, legislative and constituent power is now more than ever in the hands of the EU governments (especially those of the biggest countries), meeting in the European Councils of Ministers, the European Council of heads of state and government and the Intergovernmental Conference. The EU thus does not even reach the level of bourgeois parliamentary democracy that is left in its member states. This is how neo-liberal Europe escapes from the pressure of the working classes, who are being put in competition with each other, country by country, through unequal working conditions and social legislation. This is how it is trying to settle the multiple material conflicts of interest amongst its ruling classes, behind and on the people's backs.

./english/369.txt:115:The traditional labour movement and its dominant currents are in a historical crisis. Social democracy above all is hard hit. Having abandoned their traditional Keynesian program, the social-democratic parties in government have systematically applied the neo-liberal program and are accordingly profoundly discredited. This goes as well for other left parties that have been associated with it (notably in France and Germany). It is not likely that social democracy can return to its classical reformist roots. Today in opposition, it is preparing for its next period in government. It is not breaking with the social-liberal framework.

./english/369.txt:123:Facing the EU, its structures and policies, facing the advanced Europeanisation of the instruments at the disposal of the ruling classes, and the pitiful incapacity of the social-liberal leaderships of the labour and trade union movements, this anti-capitalist left must urgently adopt and propose a European-wide perspective. For it is at this level that the anti-capitalist battles, demands, perspectives and solutions are increasingly posed.

./english/370.txt:29:Thus, machines went from being hardware-driven, to being software-driven, then data-driven and finally event-driven. Your typical Macintosh computer is indeed an event-driven machine even if the class of real world events that it is responsive to is very limited, including only events happening to the mouse (such as position changes and clicking) as well as to other input devices. But regardless of the narrow class of events that personal computers are responsive to, it is in these events that much of the control of the processes now resides. Hence, behind the innovative use of windows, icons, menus and the other familiar elements of graphical interfaces, there is this deep conceptual shift in the location of control which is embodied in object-oriented languages. Even the new interface designs based on semi-autonomous agents were made possible by this decentralization of control. Indeed, simplifying a little, we may say that the new worlds of agents, whether those that inhabit computer screens or more generally, those that inhabit any kind of virtual environment (such as those used in Artificial Life), have been the result of pushing the trend away from software command hierarchies ever further.

./english/370.txt:38:Herbert Simon's distinction between command hierarchies and markets may turn out to be a special case of a more general dichotomy. In the view of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this more abstract classes, which they call strata and self-consistent aggregates (or trees and rhizomes), are defined not so much by the locus of control, as by the nature of elements that are connected together. Strata are composed of homogenous elements, whereas self-consistent aggregates articulate heterogeneous elements as such. {6} For example, a military hierarchy sorts people into internally homogenous ranks before joining them together through a chain of command. Markets, on the other hand, allow for a set of heterogeneous needs and offers to become articulated through the price mechanism, without reducing this diversity. In biology, species are an example of strata, particularly if selection pressures have operated unobstructedly for long periods of time allowing the homogenization of the species gene pool. On the other hand, ecosystems are examples of self-consistent aggregates, since they link together into complex food webs a wide variety of animals and plants, without reducing their heterogeneity. I have developed this theory in more detail elsewhere, but for our purposes here let's simply keep the idea that besides centralization and decentralization of control, what defines these two types of structure is the homogeneity or heterogeneity of its composing elements.

./english/370.txt:56:In terms of the location of control, there is very little difference between the agents that would result, and in this sense, both approaches are equally decentralized. The rules that Symbolic AI would put in the agents head, most likely derived from interviews of users and programmers by a Knowledge Engineer, are independent software objects. Indeed, in one of the most widely used programming languages in this kind of approach (called a "production system") the individual rules have even more of a meshwork structure that many object-oriented systems, which still cling to a hierarchy of objects. But in terms of the overall human-machine system, the approach of Symbolic AI is much more hierarchical. In particular, by assuming the existence of an ideal user, with homogenous and unchanging habits, and of a workplace where all users are similar, agents created by this approach are not only less adaptive and more commanding, they themselves promote homogeneity in their environment. The second class of agents, on the other hand, are not only sensitive to heterogeneities, since they adapt to individual users and change as the habits of this users change, they promote heterogeneity in the work place by not subordinating every user to the demands of an idealized model.

./english/371.txt:52:Revolutionary groups in Europe and the US should know that we the women (and men) of the so-called “Third World” are not backward, not in need of their leadership. We can lead ourselves. We do not need leaders from abroad to show us the way. We appreciate the ability of these revolutionary groups to transcend their nationality, religion, gender, colour, class, creed, language and other divisions inherited from the slave period. We appreciate their socialist leanings in the struggle against capitalist globalisation. But they must overcome their remaining prejudices. We refuse to submit to their domination under the guise of freeing us from local or global oppressors. We can fight our own battles just as they fought theirs. We want to cooperate, but on equal grounds. We want an equal exchange of ideas and experiences.

./english/371.txt:60:In Porto Alegre I met a few participants from Egypt and other Arab countries. Most came from Europe and the US. However the Palestinian flag dominated the demonstrations, and the protesters against the war in Iraq were visible, though all the other flags were drowned in the red of the flags carried by the Brazilian peasants and workers. The forum in its totality condemned American unilateralism, militarism and lack of global responsibility in spite of its claims as a global superpower. Power without responsibility is a political disease inherited from the patriarchal class system that was born with slavery. This is one of the dichotomies forced on us by religion and philosophy. We must resist this idea of an irrevocable split between a good, divine power and the devil’s responsibility for evil. We must un-mask and strip away the language of George W. Bush the father, son, and holy ghost, and his axis of evil.

./english/372.txt:13:The depth of the problem first really struck me when I first became acquainted with the consensus modes of decision-making employed in North American anarchist and anarchist-inspired political movements, which, in turn, bore a lot of similarities to the style of political decision-making current where I had done my anthropological fieldwork in rural Madagascar. There's enormous variation among different styles and forms of consensus but one thing almost all the North American variants have in common is that they are organized in conscious opposition to the style of organization and, especially, of debate typical of the classical sectarian Marxist group. Where the latter are invariably organized around some Master Theoretician, who offers a comprehensive analysis of the world situation and, often, of human history as a whole, but very little theoretical reflection on more immediate questions of organization and practice, anarchist-inspired groups tend to operate on the assumption that no one could, or probably should, ever convert another person completely to one's own point of view, that decision-making structures are ways of managing diversity, and therefore, that one should concentrate instead on maintaining egalitarian process and considering immediate questions of action in the present. One of the fundamental principles of political debate, for instance, is that one is obliged to give other participants the benefit of the doubt for honesty and good intentions, whatever else one might think of their arguments. In part too this emerges from the style of debate consensus decision-making encourages: where voting encourages one to reduce one's opponents positions to a hostile caricature, or whatever it takes to defeat them, a consensus process is built on a principle of compromise and creativity where one is constantly changing proposals around until one can come up with something everyone can at least live with; therefore, the incentive is always to put the best possible construction on other's arguments.

./english/372.txt:23:I don't think this is just because the academy is behind the times. Marxism has always had an affinity with the academy that anarchism never will. It was, after all was invented by a Ph.D.; and there's always been something about its spirit which fits that of the academy. Anarchism on the other hand was never really invented by anyone. True, historians usually treat it as if it were, constructing the history of anarchism as if it's basically a creature identical in its nature to Marxism: it was created by specific 19th century thinkers, perhaps Godwin or Stirner, but definitely Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, it inspired working-class organizations, became enmeshed in political struggles... But in fact the analogy is rather strained. First of all, the 19th century generally credited with inventing anarchism didn't think of themselves as having invented anything particularly new. The basic principles of anarchism--self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid--are as old as humanity Similarly, the rejection of the state and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination (anarchism literally means "without rulers"), even the assumption that all these forms are somehow related and reinforce each other, was hardly some startlingly new 19th century doctrine. One can find evidence of people making similar arguments throughout history, despite the fact there is every reason to believe that such opinions were the ones least likely to be written down. We are talking less about a body of theory than about an attitude, or perhaps a faith: a rejection of certain types of social relation, a confidence that certain others are a much better ones on which to build a decent or humane society, a faith that it would be possible to do so.

./english/372.txt:25:One need only compare the historical schools of Marxism, and anarchism, then, to see we are dealing with a fundamentally different sort of thing. Marxist schools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists, Trotksyites, Gramscians, Althusserians... Note how the list starts with heads of state and grades almost seamlessly into French professors. Pierre Bourdieu once noted that, if the academic field is a game in which scholars strive for dominance, then you know you have won when other scholars start wondering how to make an adjective out of your name. It is, presumably, to preserve the possibility of winning the game that intellectuals insist, in discussing each other, on continuing to employ just the sort of Great Man theories of history they would scoff at in discussing just about anything else: Foucault's ideas, like Trotsky's, are never treated as primarily the products of a certain intellectual milieu, as something that emerging from endless conversations and arguments in cafes, classrooms, bedrooms, barber shops involving thousands of people inside and outside the academy (or Party), but always, as if they emerged from a single man's genius. It's not quite either that Marxist politics organized itself like an academic discipline or become a model for how radical intellectuals, or increasingly, all intellectuals, treated one another; rather, the two developed somewhat in tandem.

./english/372.txt:27:Schools of anarchism, in contrast, emerge from some kind of organizational principle or form of practice: Anarcho-Syndicalists and Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists and Platformists, Cooperativists, Individualists, and so on. (Significantly, those few Marxist tendencies which are not named after individuals, like Autonomism or Council Communism, are themselves the closest to anarchism.) Anarchists are distinguished by what they do, and how they organize themselves to go about doing it. And indeed this has always been what anarchists have spent most of their time thinking and arguing about. They have never been much interested in the kinds of broad strategic or philosophical questions that preoccupy Marxists such as Are the peasants a potentially revolutionary class? (anarchists consider this something for the peasants to decide) or what is the nature of the commodity form? Rather, they tend to argue about what is the truly democratic way to go about a meeting, at what point organization stops being empowering people and starts squelching individual freedom. Is "leadership" necessarily a bad thing? Or, alternately, about the ethics of opposing power: What is direct action? Should one condemn someone who assassinates a head of state? When is it okay to break a window?

./english/372.txt:49:At any rate the Saint Simonians at any rate actively sought to recruit artists for their various ventures, salons, and utopian communities; though they quickly ran into difficulties because so many within "avant garde" artistic circles preferred the more anarchistic Fourierists, and later, one or another branch of outright anarchists. Actually, the number of 19th century artists with anarchist sympathies is quite staggering, ranging from Pissaro to Tolstoy or Oscar Wilde, not to mention almost all early 20th century artists who later became Communists, from Malevich to Picasso. Rather than a political vanguard leading the way to a future society, radical artists almost invariably saw themselves as exploring new and less alienated modes of life. The really significant development in the 19th century was less to idea of a vanguard than that of Bohemia (a term first coined by Balzac in 1838): marginal communities living in more or less voluntary poverty, seeing themselves as dedicated to the pursuit of creative, unalienated forms of experience, united by a profound hatred of bourgeois life and everything it stood for. Ideologically, they were about equally likely to be proponents of "art for art's sake" or social revolutionaries. Contemporary theorists are actually quite divided over how to evaluate their larger significance. Pierre Bourdieu for example insisted that the promulgation of the idea of "art for art's sake", far from being depoliticizing, should be considered a significant accomplishment, as was any which managed to establish the autonomy of one particular field of human endeavor from the logic of the market. Colin Campbell on the other hand argues that insofar as bohemians actually were an avant garde, they were really the vanguard of the market itself, or more precisely, of consumerism: their actual social function, much though they would have loathed to admit it, was to explore new forms of pleasure or aesthetic territory which could be commoditized in the next generation. (One might call this the Tom Franks version of history.) Campbell also echoes common wisdom that bohemia was almost exclusively inhabited by the children of the bourgeoisie, who had--temporarily, at least--rejecting their families' money and privilege; and who, if they did not die young of dissipation, were likely to end up back on the board of father's company. This is a claim that has been repeated so often about activists and revolutionaries over the years that it makes me, at least, immediately wary: in fact, I strongly suspect that bohemian circles emerged from the same sort of social conjuncture as most current activist circles, and historically, most vanguardist revolutionary parties as well: a kind of meeting between certain elements of (intentionally) downwardly mobile professional classes, in broad rejection of bourgeois values, and upwardly mobile children of the working class. Though such suspicions can only be confirmed by historical investigation.

./english/372.txt:51:In the 19th century idea of the political vanguard was used very widely and very loosely for anyone seen as exploring the path to a future, free society. Radical newspapers for example often called themselves "the Avant Garde". It was Marx though who began to significantly change the idea by introducing the notion that the proletariat were the true revolutionary class--he didn't actually use the term "vanguard" in his own writing--because they were the one that was the most oppressed, or as he put it "negated" by capitalism, and therefore had the least to lose by its abolition. In doing so, he ruled out the possibilities that less alienated enclaves, whether of artists or the sort of artisans and independent producers who tended to form the backbone of anarchism, had anything significant to offer. The results we all know. The idea of a vanguard party to dedicated to both organizing and providing an intellectual project for that most-oppressed class chosen as the agent of history, but also, actually sparking the revolution through their willingness to employ violence, was first outlined by Lenin in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?; it has echoed endlessly, to the point where the SDS in the late '60s could end up locked in furious debates over whether the Black Panther Party should be considered the vanguard of The Movement as the leaders of its most oppressed element. All this in turn had a curious effect on the artistic avant garde who increasingly started to organize themselves like vanguard parties, beginning with the Dadaists, Futurists, publishing their own manifestos, communiquŽs, purging one another, and otherwise making themselves (sometimes quite intentional) parodies of revolutionary sects. (Note however that these groups always defined themselves, like anarchists, by a certain form of practice rather than after some heroic founder.) The ultimate fusion came with the Surrealists and then finally the Situationist International, which on the one hand was the most systematic in trying to develop a theory of revolutionary action according to the spirit of Bohemia, thinking about what it might actually mean to destroy the boundaries between art and life, but at the same time, in its own internal organization, displayed a kind of insane sectarianism full of so many splits, purges, and bitter denunciations that Guy Debord finally remarked that the only logical conclusion was for the International to be finally reduced to two members, one of whom would purge the other and then commit suicide. (Which is actually not too far from what actually ended up happening.)

./english/373.txt:28:HUB and Intergalactica have promoted an interesting model of an area organizing itself, a laboratory and experiment on social disobedience, organized in the spirit of complete horizontality and breaking of classical "conference" model of political debating. The reproaches directed to HUB, during ESF in Florence, related to the lack of organisation, the neglect of theory and thinking about vision. The new radical activism should not become a permanent global party. Life After Capitalism was envisaged as a forum within the forum that focuses on strategy and political and economic vision and on many dimensions of daily life. The whole occurrence included into the programme the very successful Peoples Global Action conference. The reproaches directed to LAC related to insisting on the classical form of discussion.The new radical activism should not become a permanent global conference.

./english/374.txt:52:And what great people these are! What stoicism and courage! And what a lesson for the world is contained in this struggle! Not for a long time shall we be able to know if President Johnson ever seriously thought of bringing about some of the reforms needed by his people - to iron out the barbed class contradictions that grow each day with explosive power. The truth is that the improvements announced under the pompous title of the "Great Society" have dropped into the cesspool of Vietnam.

./english/374.txt:106:In this continent practically only one tongue is spoken (with the exception of Brazil, with whose people, those who speak Spanish can easily make themselves understood, owing to the great similarity of both languages). There is also such a great similarity between the classes in these countries, that they have attained identification among themselves of an international americano type, much more complete than in the other continents. Language, habits, religion, a common foreign master, unite them. The degree and the form of exploitation are similar for both the exploiters and the men they exploit in the majority of the countries of Our America. And rebellion is ripening swiftly in it.

./english/374.txt:154:There, the imperialist soldiers endure the discomforts [sic] of those who, used to enjoying the U.S. standard of living, have to live in a hostile land with the insecurity of being unable to move without being aware of walking on enemy territory: death to those who dare take a step out of their fortified encampment. The permanent hostility of the entire population. All this has internal repercussion in the United States; propitiates the resurgence of an element which is being minimized in spite of its vigor by all imperialist forces: class struggle even within its own territory.

./english/375.txt:1:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 1 Harman-Hardt Debate: The working class or the multitude

./english/375.txt:9:I only want to focus one element – how Marx placed at the centre of the debate the understanding that capitalism itself creates a force that can potentially grow up in opposition to it and overthrow it. This force is the working class.

./english/375.txt:10:Underlying this conception of the working class are four elements.

./english/375.txt:16:Here they differ from the oppressed classes of previous class societies. The medieval peasants could imagine that the peasant family could individually get more land and improve its conditions. In the world today there are still many hundreds of millions of peasants and of small proprietors, each of whom imagines that their family could grab more land or more of the market that they could improve their positions individually. Marx’s central notion is that workers are forced to fight collectively, whether they fight in the factory or at the level of the whole society. They do not fight collectively all the time. Marx described how they are driven to fight collectively, they suffer defeats, they fragment and then are forced again to fight collectively.

./english/375.txt:17:The last element in Marx’s conception is that because capitalism is based upon competition between rival capitals, so that each of them has all the time to try to raise the productivity of labour, this mean the capitalist class needs an exploited class that has much more culture than any oppressed class previously in history. It needs to be able to read and write, to have some basic knowledge of the world, in the modern world they need a working class increasingly that has some limited notion of IT, of computers, and so forth.

./english/375.txt:19:Against this, whenever we have been through periods of defeats of struggles, theorists have arisen who have said it is not the working class that is at the centre, but some other force. In the late 1970s and the 1980s world wide we went through a defeat for the working class struggles – the defeat in Chile, the formation in Europe of various social democratic governments that brought back the market, that began to break up welfare systems, the bloody dictatorship in Argentina, a whole period of defeats for the working class movement. In any period of defeats the workers’ organisations fragment, workers turn upon each other, people see individual solutions, in that situation theories arise which say the working class is no longer central and that there is some other agency we can turn to.

./english/375.txt:21:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 3So a man called Andre Gorz wrote a book some 20 years ago called ‘Farewell to the working class’ which put across these ideas.

./english/375.txt:23:One set of ideas put forward are in the book produced by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri called Empire. One of the central ideas is that we can no longer look to the working class as an agency of change, we have to talk about something else.

./english/375.txt:25:But the central argument in the Hardt and Negri book is that the working class is beginning to disappear, that the old notion of Marx of people concentrated together in large workplaces, where their time is measured against the clock, where their lives are fragmented between the time in which they work, when they are effectively prisoners inside the factory of the office, and the free time have to recuperate from their work, Hardt and Negri want to argue this is no longer the case.

./english/375.txt:27:‘In a previous era the category of the proletariat centred on and at times was effectively subsumed under the industrial working class. Today that working class has all but disappeared from view. It has not ceased to exist but it has been displaced from its central position in the capitalism economy’

./english/375.txt:29:I would argue empirically there is no empirical evidence whatsoever for this notion of the disappearing working class.

./english/375.txt:33:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 4If we talk about the disappearance of the traditional working class in manufacturing, mining, and so forth. The reality is that this is not a class that is disappearing. I just want to give a few figures from what is still the world’s biggest economy, the United States. At the end of the 1970s there was a panic in the United States with people talking about ‘deindustrialisation’. But in 1998 the number of people working in industry in the United States was 20 per cent higher than in 1974, roughly; 50 per cent higher than in 1950 and it was four times the level of 1900. There was this continual growth in the number of workers in old style industries – mining, manufacturing and so forth. It is true that the total number employed in the economy as a whole grew more rapidly than that. But the absolute size of the traditional industrial working class – if you want to use the Spanish term, the obreros as opposed to the trabajadores – continued to grow right up until the beginning of the recession that began two years ago.

./english/375.txt:34:If you talk about the Japanese industrial working class, you are talking about a working class that grew massively in the last half century. I don’t know the figures for last three or four years, but in 1998 it was bigger than in 1970 and in 1970 it was much, much bigger than in 1950.

./english/375.txt:41:Far from the working class disappearing, you put together 42 million of these jobs and the 30 million in old style manufacturing jobs and so forth you come to a figures that indicates that the majority of the population of the United States are still workers.

./english/375.txt:48:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 6But if you analyse the categories further, you find that in most third world countries today about half the people working the land for themselves are to some extent also dependent on waged labour. So about a third of the world’s workforce are involved in classic capitalist relations of production, dependent completely on waged labour to survive, about a third remain self employed, mainly peasants in the countryside, and third who spend part of their time working for capital, part of the time working for themselves – and increasingly under the control of multinational trading corporations, supermarket chains, and so on.

./english/375.txt:53:But this exception of parts of Africa, the employed section of the workforce is not disappearing. |It is growing larger. And the classic methods of capitalist control are still in existence. Even if you talk about Brazil you find in the 1980s there was a small growth in the permanent workforce. In the early 1990s its stagnated. In the mid 1990s it began to grow again, it is probably stagnating at the moment. There is an interaction between the growth of the casual workforce and the growth of the permanent workforce. The permanent workforce is not disappearing.

./english/375.txt:66:I’ll give another example. Argentina. Thirteen months ago we saw the fantastic eruption of the population of Buenos Aires on the streets. We saw the multitude bring down the government. What the multitude was not capable of doing was framing some sort of alternative that was capable of stopping Argentine capitalism continuing to go into crisis. The central focus in Argentina, the working class organised in the workplaces was held back from entering into the struggle by the trade union bureaucracy. But unless you talk about the organised working class, those in workplaces with traditions of collective struggle, coming onto the stage in Argentina, you are talking about continuing paralysis of the struggle.

./english/375.txt:75:The point which Chris quoted did not say that the industrial working class had disappeared. What Chris read out was that ‘the industrial working class has been displaced from its privileged position’. \Let me explain what I mean by this so that we can clarify things. I agree with the wonderful quantity of data. The question is rather: what is the hegemonic position within labour? In other words in a capitalist economy there is one kind of labour, one form of labour, one sector of labour that acts in a hegemonic way over the others.

./english/375.txt:76:Now remember, in Marx’s time, what Marx said was that the industrial working class exercised hegemony over the other forms of labour, not in quantitative terms. When Marx was writing the industrial working class was very small in England. In the world generally it was miniscule. Most of the workers were in agriculture, in mining, in primary production. The industrial working class exerted a hegemony over the others. What did that mean? It meant it had the power to transform other forms of labour. Other forms of labour had to become more like it. Agricultural work had to industrialised, mining had to industrialise, society itself had to industrialise. And that was the hegemony of industrial labour over other forms of labour.

./english/375.txt:80:What Toni and I say, in a perfectly Marxist fashion, is that today we have passed form the hegemony of industrial labour to the hegemony of what we call immaterial labour under which we include a variety of activities all of which produce an immaterial product. The labour itself is material but it produces an immaterial product, like an affect or a feeling. We can say fast food workers not only produce something material but that also produce an affect, service with a smile, they create a sense of well being. That’s a kind of immaterial labour, we say. Also the production of images, the production of ideas, the production of knowledges, happens throughout the economy at high and low levels. But it’s not, as Chris aptly said, it’s not the quantity that predominates in the world economy. Absolutely not. It’s quantitatively minor. An yet it exerts a hegemony over the field of labour. So in exactly the passage Chris quoted – I’m grateful for that – we talk not about the disappearance of the working class, but of the working class being displaced from its privileged position.

./english/375.txt:82:Now let me talk about the working class. Chris is insistent about the priority of the industrial working class as an organisational force and the need for it to exercise political hegemony over other forms of labour.

./english/375.txt:83:It seems to me that the concept of working class has come to be – it does not have to be but it has come to be in our language – and exclusionary and corporatist concept. Let me talk abbot some of the exclusion that we have come to understand in our common usage the concept of working class. Chris has underlined this at great length that the concept of working class has come to mean for us the industrial working class.

./english/375.txt:84:Who’s excluded by that? Certainly unwaged labour is excluded from that. Unwaged domestic labour carried out by women is not part of the working class under this definition. They are excluded. According to what Chris says, there struggles are not important, or rather there struggles are unrecognisable, they cannot be used, they have to unite under the industrial working class.

./english/375.txt:85:There is also an exclusion of the poor, of unemployed. They are not part of the working class. They can be threat to the working class. They have to kept out of the political movement. Marx’s own writings about the lumpenproletariat – at what I consider unfortunate moments in Marx’s writings – do coincide with Chris’s point.

./english/375.txt:87:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 10So unpaid domestic labour is excluded, the poor are excluded. The peasantry also is excluded. There is long tradition of this in Marxist and socialist thought. It is in many senses an unfortunate tradition. The claim was in the 19th century among Marx and Engels that the peasantry and the industrial working class did not have common conditions of labour and that they could not unite politically. The peasantry, he said, because of their incommunicability, their dispersion, could not unite politically, could not act politically. At best – this is the very bad tradition on our shoulders – at best the peasantry can act under the guidance of the industrial working class.

./english/375.txt:88:The notion of the working class excludes agricultural workers. That’s another exclusion I want to point to.

./english/375.txt:89:What Chris said, and there is a tradition of this, but it is a tradition I want to argue against, is that the struggles of those who are excluded from the working class must be subordinated to the struggles of the working class. There is a long tradition of this.

./english/375.txt:90:But we see many movements today that are very properly challenging this. The best examples for me being the Zapatistas, the Sin Tierra and the piqueteros, which are not only objecting to that tradition, the political division, but also demonstrating the utility of organising across that division, of ignoring that division in a way of expanding the notion. The notion of the multitude is an attempt to reconceive for today the concept of the proletariat rather than that of the working class. Because the working class has become an exclusionary concept, whereas proletariat means, at least in its original formulation, all of those whose labour is employed by capital, those who are waged and those who are unwaged, those who work in the fields and those who work in the factories. So this expansion of the notion of the proletariat is what we try to capture with the notion of the multitude.

./english/375.txt:91:It implies, and I can come back to this later, a radical critique of the way most labour unions are organised today, in a corporatist way. Our critique is an attack on the corporatist practices of the unions and an expansion of the political mobilisation of those outside those privileged sectors of the working class, privileged in a series of senses.

./english/375.txt:93:Like I say, Toni and I see multitude as a class concept, as a way of seeing class and its political uses. Generally, people accept the notion there are two conceptions of class. There is one which is usually associated with Marx’s own work which we think of as the unitary model of class. This is grounded in Marx’s work when he continually talked in his work about the tendency in capitalist society for a reduction of class differences so as to tend to a two class model of capitalism, the class of those with nothing to sell but their labour power, the proletariat, and the capitalist class. So Marx talks about the reduction to the two class, or unitary model, with one class of labour.

./english/375.txt:95:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 11We traditionally have as an alternative to that in the various academic and intellectual notions of class what is thought of as a liberal model in which is about a pluralism of classes. This liberal model says there is not just one category of labour but rather there is a variety of classes in society, none of which has priority over the other. This is the liberal pluralistic model as opposed to Marx’s unitary model.

./english/375.txt:96:It seems to me that both of these concepts of class are correct. We should both think of labour by this unitary model and simultaneously by the plurality of classes model.

./english/375.txt:97:If we look at Marx’s work we find, especially in historical writings, he talks about a great variety of classes. In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx talks about numerous classes of capital. He does not just talk about a unitary class of labour and a unitary class of capital.

./english/375.txt:98:What is going on here is that Marx’s unitary model of labour can either be seen as a tendency – that there are many classes, but that the tendency is towards a single class of labour. Or another way of seeing it is that he sees the single class as a political project. It’s not that today there is a single class of labour, but that it could be our political project to create a commonality of labour and to recognise that commonality in political terms. That I think is the way we understand this term the multitude.

./english/375.txt:99:It is not that there are two ways of thinking about it: either there is one class of labour or there is a plurality in a liberal sense. It is not that there is one struggle or there are many struggles. Rather, and this is what the term multitude is trying to deal with, we have to understand the potential commonality of various classes of labour and also the potential commonality of struggles. They remain different, but they recognise their commonality.

./english/375.txt:122:I have a question principally for Michael Hardt. It is about the notion that there is a new class of immaterial workers who occupy a hegemonic position within the working class. As I understand it, for Marx industrial workers were hegemonic for two reasons.

./english/375.txt:123:First , all struggles of the working class were related around struggles of industrial workers.

./english/375.txt:124:Second the industrial working class had the capacity to inaugurate a new mode of production, and in doing so to draw other sections around it.

./english/375.txt:125:I want to know if the immaterial working class is hegemonic in the same sense. Do the struggles of the multiplicity articulate themselves around the struggles of the immaterial working class? Does the immaterial working class and the multiplicity gathered around it have the capacity to inaugurate a new mode of production?

./english/375.txt:130:Firstly, I’d like to bring out the point that there is not necessarily this broad commonality of interest among the working class when you look at variations in income or working conditions among the working class, like for example, the longshoremen in the United States earn a lot while the working class people and NGOs will not make a lot of money and working conditions vary. The general point is that there are plurality of interests among the working class.

./english/375.txt:132:The other point I wanted to bring up was about Argentina. When Chris Harman spoke about Argentina I really didn’t understand what was going on, because right now in Argentina factories are being seized by the workers. So if the working class is supposedly not engaged in the struggle, I don’t see how that can be.

./english/375.txt:133:The fact of the matter is that things are going wrong in Argentina because there’s a military imperialistic dictatorship. It’s a military struggle rather than the fact that the working class is not involved. All classes are involved, well maybe not the elites, but all segments of society are participating, and the problem is how to overcome the repression, not whether or not we have the banner of the working class flying. Everyone taking part, that is what is so amazing about Argentina.

./english/375.txt:135:I am from Mexico, and Zapatismo ensures that this no longer a theoretical question but a practical one. We are not in Seattle any more but we are in Porto Alegre and on the threshold of a war which may have terrible consequence for humanity as a whole. If we are going to turn this global movement into a movement against the war and if we are asking that it should be led by the working class, we cannot organise it. We need to build the widest movement so that the vast majority of humanity can express its resistance to war. As the Zapatistas have shown we can win a new world.

./english/375.txt:140:It is a misreading of Marx to see it as class trumps raise, class trumps gender, that the working class stands over your raise or your gender. What he is talking about is the question of strategy. Where are the forces that can critically attack the system at its roots. It’s not a value judgement about class being primarily and standing over the other things. It is a question of who can actually shut the system down. This is the vital question for the movement today. We have a world wide movement against capitalism and imperialism We saw it on the streets here in Porto Alegre. It was fantastic. It is important not just to celebrate what is happening in Argentina, we celebrate it, but we know that the hidden fangs of imperialism and capitalism are there trying to get back on top of Argentina. We see what is going on in Venezuela. It is a crucial question: What are the forces, and what fight does there have to be in our cities and our countries to make sure this system does not recover from the blows this movement wants to inflict on it so that we can have a better world.

./english/375.txt:142:I am Josefina and I come from Argentina. I want to give an opinion and also ask a question about two issues. The first relates to the question of the hegemony of the working class. I raise not a quantitative but a qualitative one, although quantity if of course as important foundation.

./english/375.txt:143:I see the concept of hegemony as being about whether the working class is capable of gathering about it the other forces to address the socialist solution to the capitalist crisis. In relation in Argentina in this sense there is a movement for the occupation of factories and taking production under workers’ control. And I am personally working with these comrades in the factories.

./english/375.txt:144:An important example is the case of Zanon, whether the workers are occupying the factory creating new jobs for unemployed workers. In creating their ceramic goods they’ve used land given to them by the Mapuche Indian communities, and they’ve used it to make goods named in honour of the Mapuche. All this is a form of production without bosses and it has been going on now for a year and more. It is a little example of what we mean by working class hegemony in which the working class, not in any corporatist way, addresses the problems of other groups in developing and seeking out solutions to the crisis. So that is the sense in which I see there is still a need for working class hegemony, not in the sense of imposing itself, but in the sense of gathering around it these other forces for a socialist solution.

./english/375.txt:145:As regards the movement against the war, raised by one the previous comrades as to whether it should be limited to the working class, categorically not. But would it not be wonderful if the unions in Brazil and in Italy and the other countries gathered around

./english/375.txt:149:I see that the Marxist way involves going through the state. All the Communist Parties have based their work through the state. Negri, Hardt and Holloway dismiss the notion of the state. I feel that you are Communists but at the same time are resisting the notion of the state. I want to know how decision making will take place with this multitude that is not the working class alone because we do want to reach communism. I read in an interview with Toni Negri he’s talking about the red zone and I don’t see how you get from there to the conquest of the state

./english/375.txt:151:I am from the Greek social forum. I feel that this opposition between the multitude and the working class is false. These terms do not mutually exclude each other. In the Marxist tradition the working class is a set of persons. In this society we can identify a number of people as being the working class, with the rest another class. For Poulatzas and other French writers from the 1970s we have a notion of a set of class positions. I think it is more correct to say the Marxist view is a way of functioning. Every twenty years we have this talk that the working class does not exist any more, and then we find it again.

./english/375.txt:153:So the question has nothing to do with statistics. So it would be absurd to say we have one thousand in a multitude. It is not a question of numbers, it’s a mode of functioning which does not necessarily exclude the existence of the working class.

./english/375.txt:158:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 17precisely because there is a great desire to respect the differences and autonomy of each actor and this requires a tremendous time and effort to agree a common agenda for all the actions. We can agree what we against – against the war, against globalisation – but we have a great difficulty in agreeing strategies and visions of where we want to go. In terms of that getting more numbers, certainly the mobilisation of the working class, but in terms of sustaining adhesion to an agenda, I think there are great differences. The people we are fighting against are producing changes at great speed, and we have these difficulties in arriving at what we want to do.. I would like to hear from both speakers what you think about these factors

./english/375.txt:166:But first I need to clear up a misunderstanding. One of the earlier contributors asked whether the immaterial labour force, those who produce primarily aspects and deal with information etc, if they are going to be the vanguard of the working classes. That is not what I meant. I should have clarified that.

./english/375.txt:171:I don’t mean when I am talking about the working class, the comrade who was talking about labour struggles, industrial struggles in Argentina, said the working class does struggle and does lead certain sorts of struggles. I think that is true and I support them. I don’t ignore the fact that certain groups in certain times take a hegemonic position, and when they do people listen to them more. And there are certain groups that people listen to more. Think of the effect that the Zapatistas have had across the world. In a way they have had a hegemonic position. But this is a variable, not a permanent situation.

./english/375.txt:175:I have not been arguing at all that we have to despise, ignore or spit on any struggle other than that of the working class. I have written a history of the world in terms of a history of struggle for the last 5000 years of class society.

./english/375.txt:183:What is our weakness? The reality is that we have not mobilised the force that capitalism itself creates. It is alright for Michael Hardt to say the working class exists. But he is ambiguous on this question. I wonder why his book is so difficult to read. I feel like asking sometimes how many people have read it from first to last page. It is difficult because of its ambiguities. The problem is not in the language, but in the thought. At one point it can say the working class is ‘close to invisible’, it can say in one passage the working class in the United States is getting smaller absolutely. When I show it is getting bigger absolutely, we are told the figures are irrelevant. They are relevant. And let’s be clear, when I speak of the working class I talk about people’s whose labour adds to the accumulation of capital. This is not just manual workers – operaios, obreros – it is also wider sections who have been drawn in. But they have been drawn into the global fordist society, into forms of exploitation that used to characterise manual workers. This is what is happening in the schools in Britain, even in the universities, among office workers on a massive scale.

./english/375.txt:188:When 'Empire' says the informational workers are now the ‘hegemonic layer’ I interpret that as meaning we have a movement that has come from people who have slightly less hard work than most people, have more time to think, more time to get together at meetings, more time to demonstrate, to organise and so forth and do the things we do, which is all right. But then we say ‘we are the elite’ and we can ignore the rest of people. And when people say the working class approach ingress the question of women, the fact is that women are being drawn into paid labour at the same time as they have to carry the burden of child care. The contradictory feature of capitalism is that by drawing them into waged labour it makes them more amenable to forms of collective organisation than ever before. And we have to confront this question.

./english/375.txt:189:It is not good saying we cannot talk in old fashioned terms and so forth. We have to say: What is the reality? The reality is a bigger than ever working class, a third of the world’s population, a third of the world’s population are seem-proletarian in this sense, and there are very large numbers of people who are unemployed, who have been driven to the margins of society, who can be drawn into the movement, but being marginal to society means they do not have the power to change it. How do we mobilise the force that can change it? And when people talk about mobilising against the war, there is one small example from Britain. I think the whole of the anti-war movement in Britain recognises this: when 15 traindrivers refused to transport weapons for the war, everyone in this is the way forward. How do we transform that into a mass movement of people refusing to use their labour for the war. It is not easy. There are not automatic answers. But unless we approach it in those terms, we are ducking the issue. And Empire ducks the issue.

./english/375.txt:194:There have been discussions on what are the definitions of the oppressed classes, the working class, and whatnot. I believe there are not several classes. There is only one class – the oppressed. I believe the struggle must be for the freedom of all peoples, I do not think we must restrict that struggle. When you see people with hunger, you do not ask what class they are. You want to help those people.

./english/375.txt:198:I want to respond to one of the earlier speakers when he talked about how agreed with the concept of multitude because it reflected a desire for autonomy against centralisation.. But when you look at the world toady, you look at George Bush, the US ruling class, and you look at how authoritarian they are, we do not want to have anything to do with the system they run. But I think you have to look how they run a system, George Bush is not acting on his own, he has a class behind him, the United States ruling class, he has tremendous power, he has military power, a state that can go anywhere in the world, tremendous economic power, with the big corporate links that his government has, therefore they have control over ideas, and mass media and education, and I think that he concept of multitude recognises that power. If you recognise that power, we cannot just run away from it or hide from it or be autonomous from it.

./english/375.txt:199:Some people have referred to workers taking over their factories in Argentina. There are fantastic actions there. But you can’t just sit there. You can’t just take over one factory. You still have to deal with the question of repression in Argentina, you still have to deal with the question of the United States's ability to wage war on whoever they want to get whatever they want, their ability to squeeze people economically. We do need to be able to organised, to engage in collective organising. The concept of multitude rejects that collective organising. That’s why I think we have to have a class analysis.

./english/375.txt:201:IN relation to the movements and the working class, it is not either one or the other, they are both important. Chris Harman mentioned the case of the railway workers in Scotland

./english/375.txt:203:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 22who refused to move munitions for the war. This is a very important development among workers in Britain. And why did they take this action. They did so because of the massive protest movement in Britain against the war. Without that protest movement, workers would not have had the confidence to stop those trains. It is not the working class or the movements, but both. The movements can give the working class that confidence, that inspiration it needs to attack the ideology of the ruling class.

./english/375.txt:206:The revolutionary subject is a combination of the exploited classes. The hegemonic role of the working class in that alliance is determined by its role in production. Its centrality is related to the centrality of that class in the reproduction of society itself. When Marxists talk about strategy, they are talking about a process that takes us from where we are towards an objective in the future. When we talk about the self organisation of workers today it is directly linked to how we see the organisation of workers in society in the future. So when we talk about the soviet style of organisation of workers with leaders who are subject to immediate recall we a looking towards a future society built around that form of origination with the great mass organisation sovereign. The party in this situation play the role of an intermediary, carrying the historical experiences. We have to centralise just as the bourgeoisie is centralised.

./english/375.txt:208:I have a question to Chris Harman. You said that there need to be more train drivers and more truck drivers that will not deliver the weapons, because that they have the power to stop the war, they are the revolutionary class. The only thing I want to say is that it is not only the driver who can stop the trucks, I think that the piqueteros movement in Argentina has provided it can do it.

./english/375.txt:210:I am from South Africa. I would like to express disappointment about the way this discussion has been conducted. A sharp contrast has been drawn between something called class struggle and something called the multitude. I think both Michael and Chris are to blame for that dichotomy being created. In South Africa what we called the class struggle was a political struggle that involved the race question, the question of nationality, of gender, of land,. of every conceivable kind of issue. What united us was a common sense of what oppressed us.

./english/375.txt:213:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 23And may therein lies something to be reflected on in this false dichotomy between class struggle and the multitude.

./english/375.txt:214:If you take the word hegemonic that has been used over and over again, I think the word has a useful genealogy within Marxism. It was about how the ruling class rules by having everybody in society conceiving themselves as individuals , as not part of a collective that constitutes the majority and therefore can overthrow the rulers. On the other hand, the other part of the classical understanding of hegemony was how the working class acts as a unify of all other forms of struggles. And that was not an organisational question be instruction – and the legacy of Stalinism over the last 70 years meant that was precisely was did happen. I think that Marxism cannot be used for such an understanding by decree, that you can make people follow the working class, whatever that might mean. That is why I am making some critique of Michael’s position. One the other hand if we have the understanding that all forms of opposed groupings and struggles, if we do not se

./english/377.txt:30:Was there sufficient attention to the post-September 11 reassembled world? Since some of the language was from the old categories of capitalist, imperialist, the analysis also came from the classical mode which divided the global landscape on those lines. The reconfiguration of the world powers, the new hegemony, where location and religion superceded the ownership of capital; where political leaders were unselfconscious in using the language of hate, where the sovereignty of nations was crumbling, and where conservatism in political leadership was being supported by citizens, did not challenge the intellectual speakers to redefine globalisation. It was not moved from its simplistic characteristics of privatisation and liberalisation to its new face of militarisation and unipolarity. Not enough attention was paid to the design of a response, the importance of a comity of sovereign, independent even in economic terms, nations who could challenge this new monolith; thus the importance of building strong states, but with a political leadership which was different from what was in existence. Politicians were denigrated, but the strategy for political alternatives not developed. The potential within the people’s movements for entering the campaigns for electoral reform, for strengthening grass roots democracy, for releasing new energies into formal politics, through campaigns to fill the elected bodies with women, excluded groups, leaders of movements for social justice, what Gandhi called constructive workers was not central to the agenda as the mood was anti-state and therefore anti-politics.

./english/379.txt:28:As to whether globalization renders revolution in the classical Marxian tradition obsolete, I would argue that much significant political struggle today, especially resistance to globalization, is mediated by technopolitics. The use of computer and information technology is becoming a normalized aspect of politics, just as the broadcasting media were some decades ago. Deploying computer-mediated technology for technopolitics, however, opens new terrains of political struggle for voices and groups excluded from the mainstream media and thus increases potential for resistance and intervention by oppositional groups. Hence, if revolution is to have a future in the contemporary era it must incorporate technopolitics as part of its strategy, conceiving of technopolitics, however, as an arm of struggle and not an end in and of itself.

./english/379.txt:54:Obviously, much of the world does not even have telephone service, much less computers, and there are vast discrepancies in terms of who has access to computers and who participates in the technological revolution and cyberdemocracy today. As a result, there have been passionate debates over the extent and nature of the ådigital divideπ between the information haves and have-nots. Critics of new technologies and cyberspace repeat incessantly that it is by and large young, white, middle- or upper-class males who are the dominant players in the cyberspaces of the present. While this is true, statistics and surveys indicate that many more women, people of colour, seniors and individuals from marginalized groups are becoming increasingly active.[3] In addition, computers may become part of the standard household consumer package in the overdeveloped world, although studies are emerging that indicate that large numbers of individuals claim that they have no intention of purchasing computers and using the internet. Yet in the light of the importance of computers for work, social life, entertainment and education, no doubt growing amounts of people will continue to go on-line. Further, there are plans afoot to wire the entire world with satellites that would make the internet and new communication technologies accessible to people who do not now even have a telephone, TV or even electricity, and wireless, interactive technologies are touted as the next stage of networked communication.[4]

./english/379.txt:58:However widespread and common computers and new technologies become, it is clear that they are of essential importance already for labour, politics, education and social life, and that people who want to participate in the public and cultural life of the future will need to have computer access and literacy. Although there is a real threat that the computerization of society will intensify the current inequalities in relations of class, race and gender power, there is also the possibility that a democratized and computerized public sphere might provide opportunities to overcome these injustices. Cyberdemocracy and the internet should be seen therefore as a contested terrain. Radical democratic activists should look to its possibilities for resistance and the advancement of political education, action and organization, while engaging in struggles over the digital divide. Dominant corporate and state powers, as well as conservative and rightist groups, have been making sustained use of new technologies to advance their agendas. If forces struggling for democratization and social justice want to become players in the cultural and political battles of the future, they must devise ways to use new technologies to advance a radical democratic and ecological agenda and the interests of the oppressed.

./english/379.txt:116:The movement against capitalist globalization used the internet to organize mass demonstrations and to disseminate information to the world concerning the policies of the institutions of capitalist globalization. The events made clear that the protestors were not against globalization per se, but were against neoliberal globalization, opposing specific policies and institutions that produce intensified exploitation of labour, environmental devastation, growing divisions among social classes and the undermining of democracy. The emerging anti-globalization from above movements are locating these problems in the context of opposition to a restructuring of a neoliberal market capitalism on a worldwide basis for maximum profit with zero accountability. The anti-capitalist movements, by contrast, have made clear the need for democratization, regulation, rules and globalization in the interests of people and not profit.

./english/379.txt:138:Clearly, right-wing and reactionary forces can and have used the internet to promote their political agendas as well. In a short time, one can easily access an exotic witch's brew of websites maintained by the Ku Klux Klan and myriad neo-Nazi assemblages, including the Aryan Nation and various militia groups. internet discussion lists also disperse these views and right-wing extremists are aggressively active on many computer forums, as well as radio programmes and stations, public access television programmes, fax campaigns, video and even rock music productions. These organizations are hardly harmless, having carried out terrorism of various sorts extending from church burnings to the bombings of public buildings. Adopting quasi-Leninist discourse and tactics for ultraright causes, these groups have been successful in recruiting working-class members devastated by the developments of global capitalism which has resulted in widespread unemployment for traditional forms of industrial, agricultural and unskilled labour. Moreover, extremist websites have influenced alienated middle-class youth as well (a 1999 HBO documentary on Hate on the Internet provides a disturbing number of examples of how extremist websites influenced disaffected youth to commit hate crimes).

./english/379.txt:160:I have not discussed the ways that technopolitics could be used to struggle not only against capitalism, but for socialism. I would argue that socialist ideas are still relevant to the politics of the contemporary era and that in particular Karl Marx's ideas, for from being obsolete, are still essential in developing critical theories of globalization, technology and capitalism in the current conjuncture (see Kellner 1995). It could be that only a socialist politics could overcome the digital divide, making accessible to all the benefits of the technological revolution. A socialist government could provide wireless communications in underdeveloped societies making possible access to the internet and use of new communications and information technology even to societies that are not yet wired, or whose telephone systems extend only to the privileged. Interestingly, societies like Korea, Japan and the Philippines make more extensive use of wireless communications than the US, with wireless messaging systems and internet access made use of by the working classes as forms of popular communication.

./english/379.txt:176:[3] In August 1999, a widely-publicized US Department of Commerce report contended that the ådigital divideπ between the information haves and have-nots was growing; by November, there were critiques that the survey data was severely out of date and that more reliable statistics indicated that the divide was lessening, that more women, people of color, and seniors were connected to the internet, and that more than half of the United States was connected by late 1999. In 2000, several surveys indicated that the digital divide was mainly structured by class and education, and not by race. One should, however, be suspicious of statistics concerning internet access and use, as powerful interests are involved who manipulate figures for their own purposes. Yet there is no doubt that a ådigital divideπ exists and various politicians, groups and corporations are exploiting this problem for their own interests.

./english/379.txt:194:In addition, while the organizers demanded that the protesters agree not to engage in violent action, there was one web site that urged WTO protesters to help tie up the WTO's web servers, and another group produced an anti-WTO website that replicated the look of the official site (see RTMark's website, http://gatt.org/; the same group had produced a replica of George W. Bush's site with satirical and critical material, winning the wrath of the Bush campaign). For compelling accounts of the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle and an acute analysis of the issues involved, see the documents collected in Danaher and Burbach 2000 and Cockburn, St. Clair and Sekula 2000. See Smith and Smythe 2001 for detailed analysis of the use of the internet in the anti-WTO demonstrations; they located 4089 websites with material specific to the Seattle WTO meetings and selected 513 to examine and classify.

./english/380.txt:81:The emergence of new and original forms of technology, politics, culture, and economy marks a situation parallel to that confronted by the Frankfurt school in the 1930s. These German theorists who left Nazi Germany were forced to theorize the new configurations brought about by the transition from market to state monopoly capitalism (Kellner 1989a and Bronner and Kellner 1989). In their now classical texts, the Frankfurt school analyzed the emergent forms of social and economic organization, technology, and culture; the rise of giant corporations and cartels and the capitalist state in "organized capitalism," in both its fascist or "democratic" state capitalist forms; and the culture industries and mass culture which served as new modes of social control, new forms of ideology and domination, and novel configurations of culture and everyday life.

./english/380.txt:197: In particular, the movement against capitalist globalization used the Internet to organize mass demonstrations and to disseminate information to the world concerning the policies of the institutions of capitalist globalization. The events made clear that protestors were not against globalization per se, but were against neo-liberal and capitalist globalization, opposing specific policies and institutions that produce intensified exploitation of labor, environmental devastation, growing divisions among the social classes, and the undermining of democracy. The emerging anti-globalization-from-above movements are contextualizing these problems in the framework of a restructuring of capitalism on a worldwide basis for maximum profit with zero accountability and have made clear the need for democratization, regulation, rules, and globalization in the interests of people and not profit.

./english/380.txt:209: Of course, rightwing and reactionary forces can and have used the Internet to promote their political agendas as well. In a short time, one can easily access an exotic witch's brew of Web-sites maintained by the Ku Klux Klan, myriad neo-Nazi assemblages, including the Aryan Nation and various militia groups. Internet discussion lists also disperse these views and rightwing extremists are aggressively active on many computer forums, as well as radio programs and stations, public access television programs, fax campaigns, video and even rock music productions. These organizations are hardly harmless, having carried out terrorism of various sorts extending from church burnings to the bombings of public buildings. Adopting quasi-Leninist discourse and tactics for ultraright causes, these groups have been successful in recruiting working-class members devastated by the developments of global capitalism, which has resulted in widespread unemployment for traditional forms of industrial, agricultural, and unskilled labor. Moreover, extremist Web-sites have influenced alienated middle-class youth as well (a 1999 HBO documentary on Hate on the Internet provides a disturbing number of examples of how extremist Web-sites influenced disaffected youth to commit hate crimes).

./english/380.txt:244: On a global terrain, Hardt and Negri (2000) have stressed the openings and possibilities for democratic transformative struggle within globalization, or what they call Empire. I am arguing that similar arguments can be made in which globalization is not conceived merely as the triumph of capitalism and democracy working together as it was in the classical theories of Milton Friedman or more recently in Francis Fukuyama. Nor should globalization be depicted solely as the triumph of capital as in many despairing anti-globalization theories. Rather, one should see that globalization unleashes conflicts between capitalism and democracy and in its restructuring processes creates new openings for struggle, resistance, and democratic transformation.

./english/380.txt:248: I would also suggest that the model of Marx and Engels as deployed in the "Communist Manifesto" could also be usefully employed to analyze the contradictions of globalization (Marx and Engels 1978: 469ff). From the historical materialist optic, capitalism was interpreted as the greatest, most progressive force in history for Marx and Engels, destroying a backward feudalism, authoritarian patriarchy, backwardness and provincialism in favor a market society, global cosmopolitanism, and constant revolutionizing of the forces of production. Yet in the Marxian theory, so too was capitalism presented as a major disaster for the human race, condemning a large part to alienated labor, regions of the world to colonialist exploitation, and generating conflicts between classes and nations, the consequences of which the contemporary era continues to suffer.

./english/380.txt:268: Globalization should thus be seen as a contested terrain with opposing forces attempting to use its institutions, technologies, media, and forms for their own purposes. There are certainly negative aspects to globalization which strengthen elite economic and political forces over and against the underlying population, but, as I suggested above, there are also positive possibilities. Other beneficial openings include the opportunity for greater democratization, increased education and health care, and new opportunities within the global economy that open entry to members of races, regions, and classes previously excluded from mainstream economics, politics, and culture within the modern corporate order.

./english/380.txt:280: A progressive reconstruction of education that is done in the interests of democratization would demand access to new technologies for all, helping to overcome the so-called digital divide and divisions of the “haves” and “have nots” (see Kellner 2000). Expanding democratic and multicultural reconstruction of education forces educators and citizens to confront the challenge of the digital divide, in which there are divisions between information and technology “haves” and “have nots,” just as there are class, gender, and race divisions in every sphere of the existing constellations of society and culture. Although the latest surveys of the digital divide indicate that the key indicators are class and education and not race and gender, nonetheless making computers a significant force of democratization of education and society will require significant investment and programs to assure that everyone receives the training, literacies, and tools necessary to properly function in a high-tech global economy and culture.[15]

./english/383.txt:62:the 14th to the 18th Century, as a prelude to the creation of a wage-labouring class.

./english/383.txt:134:Van der Pijl, K. 1998. Transnational Classes and International Relations. London:

./english/383.txt:156:achieving mutual objectives and international cooperation. Beyond the traditional class of global

./english/383.txt:157:public goods, e.g. space and the oceans, there now is a new, different class of global public

./english/385.txt:39:One of the problems Coumba said she encountered in doing this was "a legacy of distrust of middle-class white activists that has emerged from experiences of 'being used.' Or not having our issues taken seriously. Involving people of color must be done in a way that gives them real space. Whites must understand a whole new approach is needed that includes respect (if you go to people of color thinking you know more, it creates a barrier). Also, you cannot approach people simply in terms of numbers, like 'let's give 2 scholarships.' People of color must be central to the project."

./english/385.txt:60:WTO policies encourage privatization of health care, education, welfare, and other crucial public services, as well as cutbacks in those services, so private industry can take them over and run them at a profit. This, along with sub-livable wages, leads to jeopardizing the lives of working-class people and criminalizing youth in particular.

./english/386.txt:47:The New Economic Policy has already shown spectacular results. Foreign investment is increasing by leaps and bonds. Multinational corporations are entering almost every sector of the economy. Share markets, of course with the usual ups and downs, are showing a great activity and vibrancy. Availability of consumer goods - essentially luxurious - has increased. The choice of the consumer has multiplied. At the higher levels salaries have shot up. A new affluence is in evidence all over. Economic principles and policies are oriented to meet the demands of the 250 million middle class while neglecting the survival demands of the poor through employment generation. This process is basically the inversion of the Keynesian principle.

./english/386.txt:88:At one level globalisation can be seen as compounding the class differentiated and gender-specific character of the failures of the post-independence period. Failures in agrarian reforms, egalitarian distribution of resources, development of infrastructure and provision of health and child-care facilities have taken gender-specific forms.

./english/386.txt:105:The institutions will be further eroded once whatever little welfare orientation there was in the Indian State is discarded or considerably reduced. Already one notices that several of the IMF World Bank conditionalities are forcing the government towards anti-labour, anti-rural and anti-poor positions which may be to the liking of the business class or even the professional middle classes but will certainly not produce a more democratic ethos.

./english/387.txt:28:The contemporary peasant movements are not comparable to past movements, nor do they fit the stereotype of local, traditional, illiterate peasants struggling for “land to the tiller.” Most of the peasant and Indian delegates at the CLOC Congress were educated (both self-taught and with at least six years of formal schooling) and aware of national and international issues. The new peasant movements have a national agenda: they are not solely concerned with rural issues. More specifically they are aware that land distribution policies can only succeed with credit, technical assistance, and protected markets. They recognize that political alliances with urban classes and organizations is necessary in order to transform the regime. They are not simply “economic organizations.” They are socio-political movements, struggling against the free market policies of privatization, de-regulation, and export promotion. The rural movements have formed political alliances with trade unions and have contributed to the organization of urban slum dwellers. The general strikes that rocked Ecuador in February 1997, Brazil in June 1996, Bolivia in December 1996 for example, were based on peasant-Indian-trade union alliances.

./english/387.txt:86:Winning the cities is not an open road. There are obstacles: the urban middle class and even the trade unions still have a patronizing view of the peasantry. Today it is the rural workers who are challenging the traditional belief that the urban working class leaders are the designated vanguard of historical change. Today’s peasant leaders are looking for an alliance with urban workers, as well as the urban poor in the giant slums, but only on terms of a common program in which agrarian issues share center stage. The old style internationalism tied to a socialist fatherland has been replaced by a new voluntary, decentralized, consultative internationalism in which diverse cultures flourish and common struggles are being forged not by charismatic leaders but by the steady organizing and everyday heroism of peasant women and men traveling all day and all night to the villages of Guatemala, the highlands of Ecuador, the wide expanses of Brazil, teaching, learning and creating a new revolutionary politics of social liberation and spiritual fulfillment. Z

./english/388.txt:43:In the 1960s and 1970s, the themes of class and anti-colonialism were important to social movements. In the 1980s and 1990s, the focus shifted to the theme of identity. Now I think that the [key issue] for movements is the question of democracy, but democracy in its most radical sense, not just political, but economic, ecological and cultural democracy.

./english/389.txt:28:• In each of the thematic areas, an approach be adopted that addresses the diverse realities of culture and language, class, gender, ethnicity, racial discrimination, geographic location, age and sexual orientation.

./english/392.txt:82:1 As Ignacy Sachs has said, Brazil and India ’are today regional powers, belonging to a class of large

./english/395.txt:372:therefore doing is the classic ‘conflation’ in human rights discourse: in its opposition to “the use of

./english/395.txt:431:middle class, middle and upper caste, and male leadership of the ‘civil’, ‘present’ world.31 Insofar as

./english/395.txt:507:divided into two broad categories: organisational representatives, who have been classified when

./english/395.txt:508:registering as ‘delegates’, and individuals, who have been classified as ‘Observers’ (or ‘Hearers’).

./english/395.txt:512:Committees and the WSF International Council are made up exclusively of the first ‘class.’(I am, of

./english/395.txt:513:course, using the term ‘class’ a little loosely and figuratively.)

./english/395.txt:526:insofar as we today live in an age where classical ‘organisations’ are increasingly being replaced by

./english/395.txt:544:created two ‘classes’ for access to and use of the space. There are some who have the legitimacy to

./english/395.txt:552:The proportions between the two ‘classes’ at the Forums also reflect the classic condition of

./english/395.txt:553:social division: the privileged are always the (small) minority and the other class always the (large)

./english/395.txt:622:developing and articulating both individual and collective social identities (class, caste, ethnicity,

./english/396.txt:26:The Asociación de Comunicaciones Feminist Interactive Radio Endeavor (AC FIRE) was re-born on the 8th of March 1998, as a non-governmental, non-profit organization based in Costa Rica but came into existence much earlier. AC FIRE began broadcasting originally on shortwave in 1991 and in 1998 began its innovative Internet Radio initiative. Today AC FIRE can be heard around the world on local radio programs and stations, in magazines, on the Internet and in workshops and classrooms internationally.

./english/396.txt:152:By combining multiple sources of oral language including local radio, Internet radio, and shortwave, we were inspired to produce this magazine. We hope it will form part of libraries, documentation centers, desktops, classrooms, buses, kitchens, and homes, but primarily will reach the hands of those of you who have allowed us to accompany you, who have inspired us, whom we miss and whom we continue to learn from.

./english/396.txt:455:· The expansion of the digital divide worldwide that widens because of discriminations on the basis of race, class, gender, ethnicity and others, and between North and South.

./english/399.txt:40:The enterprising Special Branch sergeant found that the word Spectacle was a popular slogan, used by a Paris based group known as Situationists, to describe capitalism, the state, the whole shooting match. Owing as much to the Surrealists and Dada as Marx and Bakunin, the Situationists starting point was that the original working class movement had been crushed, by the Bourgeoisie in the West and by the Bolsheviks in the East; Working class organizations, such as Trade Unions and Leftist political parties had sold out to World Capitalism; And furthermore, capitalism could now appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely, in the form of harmless ideologies to be used against the working class which they were supposed to represent.

./english/399.txt:54:Spectacular Society is made complete by the recuperation of the environment in which all this must be experienced: The Recouperators realized that people would no longer accept the damage the growth of the Spectacle: heavy industry: was doing to their physical surroundings: the world. Hence environmental recuperation or "Urbanism." This consists of replacing disordered urban-sprawl with more manageable structures; factory-towns, new-towns, shopping-malls, super-markets. Huge areas designed solely for the purpose of work and the creation of profit, with total disregard for the needs or the people forced to service it. The workers kept apart in 'new architecture, traditionally reserved to satisfy the ruling class...for the first time, directly aimed at the poor: 'Dwelling Unit, Sweet Dwelling Unit.' Rabbit hutches designed soullessly to isolate and instill formal misery.

./english/399.txt:70:The pamphlet went on to dismiss the university as "The Society for the propagation of ignorance...high culture with the rhythm of the production line...With out exception the lecturers are cretins...bourgeois culture is dead...all the university does is make production-line specialists. But on the positive side, it pointed out that away from student life, in the Real World, working class kids were already rebelling against the boredom of everyday life;

./english/399.txt:115:This was just what Les Enrages were waiting for. Within an hour 4 truck loads of armed police were let into the University by the Dean. Les Enrages threw everything they could lay their hands on at them, luring them into the University so everybody could see exactly what was going on. The Police were no longer a rumour, they were very much fact. Moderate students duly joined in to drive the police out of the University. Provocation had drawn repression, which in turn had rallied mass support. It was a classic Situationist victory.

./english/399.txt:171:"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal or constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth."

./english/400.txt:152:MacShane, D., (1992) The New International Working Class and Its Organizations, New Politics, pp134-148, Summer 1992

./english/401.txt:8:(from the C20th working class, unions and socialism)

./english/401.txt:26:The secular trinity of c19th socialism was Labour-Internationalism-Emancipation. As early-industrial capitalism developed into a national-industrial-colonial capitalism, the internationalism of labour became literally international, and simultaneously lost its emancipatory aspiration and capacity. The dramatic – and labour-devastating – development of a globalised-networked-informatised capitalism is raising the necessity and possibility of a new kind of labour internationalism, capable not only of defence against neo-liberal globalisation but also of an emancipatory challenge to such. This implies self-liberation from the traditional (understanding of the) working-class, the trade-union form and socialist ideology. Such an emancipation can be assisted by a recognition of the actually-existing work and workers produced by a globalized-networked-informatised capitalism. Positively it requires a close articulation of labour with the global justice movement (a.k.a. 'anti-corporate' and 'anti-capitalist'), and serious address to processes, discontents, movements and alternatives previously considered marginal or irrelevant. It also requires reconsideration of the relationship between labour, internationalism, socialism and utopia. The paper responds to the 'New Labour Internationalisms' theme of an international research project on 'Rethinking Social Emancipation'.

./english/401.txt:39:[T]he dissolution of old identities does not always foreshadow movement. Far from it. The unraveling of working-class identity among…workers leaves them tripping in many directions…Unitary subjects splinter and then recombine in hybrid forms. They congeal into movements when cemented by an imagination of an alternative, better world […] Every step in the direction of flexible accumulation, global-local mutuality, and new identities, calls forth a reaction, the reassertion of Fordism, the state and old essentialist subjects. The dinosaurs of Fordism are still around…Welfare states have not disappeared…The economy still requires and receives ample regulation…Old identities have not dissolved in a welter of hybridity…Blue collar workers still organize themselves in unions and in some countries they even have parties […] Western global hegemonies cannot be overthrown through violence. Instead, we turn to wars of position in which different groups with multiple identities have to be woven together around universalistic interests such as human rights or environmental justice…It is not so much a matter of creating movements outside the hegemonic order but rather on its terrain, radicalizing the meaning of democracy, appropriating the market, democratizing sovereignty, and expanding human rights. (Michael Burawoy 2000:347-9)

./english/401.txt:74:The aspiration for multiculturalism and self-determination often takes the social form of a struggle for justice and citizenship. It involves the claims for alternative forms of law and justice and for new regimes of citizenship. The plurality of legal orders, which has become more visible with the crisis of the nation-state, carries with itself, either implicitly or explicitly, the idea of multiple citizenships coexisting in the same geopolitical field and, often, the idea of the existence of first, second, and third class citizens. However, non-state legal orders may also be the embryo of non-state public spheres and the institutional base for self-determination, as in the case of indigenous justice.

./english/401.txt:94:· Self-privileging in a traditional socialist, laborist or workerist sense (wage-workers as the strategically-sited class under capitalism, labor as the vanguard of human emancipation, unions as the most-democratic movement worldwide, the proletariat as naturally, structurally or in 'the last instance' internationalist);

./english/401.txt:126:Mello e Silva/Brazil and Mercosur. MeS focuses on the possibility of a new working-class internationalism in relation to the cross-national union activities within the developing common market in the Southern Cone of Latin America, the Mercosur. Here he focuses primarily upon the case of Brazil and the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT, or United Workers Center). He considers the role played by unions there, as an agent of democratization, and of the conflicts that arose as their institutional practices became more radical and general. These national union practices, he argues, actually undermine the classical labor movement dichotomies - defensive/offensive, reformist/ revolutionary, negotiation-oriented/mobilization-oriented (as well, he suggests, as national/international). MeS extends his argument to the regional and then to the hemispheric level, suggesting that the globalization of union contacts between Northern and Southern regional blocks could prove more an opportunity for, than an obstacle to, internationalism by helping to overcome the corporatist and authoritarian culture deeply rooted in Latin American labor movements. Combined with such internationalism is the possibility of a new relationship between the union movement and social movements, this reinforcing the emancipatory potential within the world of work.

./english/401.txt:128:MeS suggests that after a long march through the period of monopoly capitalism, the classical demand and expectation that workers of the world will unite, is reviving under globalization:

./english/401.txt:130:The conditions for solidarity among labor movements of various countries around the world based on their class situation, however 'universal' or great the expansion of capitalist relationships around the globe might be, changed noticeably since their most famous formulation. The reasons for such a dramatic change are varied, though well articulated: the crisis of super-accumulation and dysfunction among the sectors, the search for new levels of productivity and innovation in the way in which work is organized, the shift from a competitive model to a monopolistic model, etc. Historically, this has usually taken place during the transition from deregulated capitalism to regulated capitalism. However, the extension of capitalistic relationships has continued to grow unchecked, increasingly and incontestably. In that sense, at least one part of the predictions made by socialist theoreticians showed itself to be on target and the wave of financial capital valorization that can be observed in the present form of market globalization confirms those forecasts.

./english/401.txt:134:at least in principle, there would be no incompatibility between the pro-social movement position coming from the North and the union practices of the CUT. On the contrary, cross-contamination between the two cultures could instill radicalism among other changes greatly desired by the most dynamic nucleus of Brazilian syndicalism [unionsm – PW]. The fact that there has been more than a little resistance to the influence of unions in Mercosur forums demonstrates that the manner in which those actors have tried to address problems related to regional integration has been conflictual and creative at the same time. Finally, to acknowledge that the possibility of a working-class internationalism has its problems does not mean that it is doomed to failure. The challenge of trying could bring new meaning to an old and celebrated call.

./english/401.txt:146: Reflecting further on the history of labor internationals and internationalism, Oliveira criticizes both revolutionary and reformist theorists and proponents for failing to recognize that national working classes are made, or make themselves, in ways that differ according to traditions, relations with capital and state, religion, ethnic and even moral identities. He also questions whether the current radicalization of labor in the abstract can - given such continuing differences between countries and regions - provide a base 'for the action of this supposedly universal working class'. He considers, rather, that what is common to workers in general, is their increasing exclusion, and the attempt to make their organizations superfluous. It is this grim international scenario that leads Oliveira back to his main subject, the attempt of the metalworkers unions based on São Bernardo (the B of the São Paulo ABC region) to impose a national metalworkers' contract that challenges the casualization, 'greenfields' and anti-union efforts of the major auto manufacturers within Brazil.

./english/401.txt:150: Véras/Brazilian Metalworkers. This is another paper focused on the industrial and national struggles of Brazilian auto/metalworkers, and concerned with their efforts to re-assert themselves nationally in the face of a neo-liberal globalization that has profoundly changed the socio-political weight of the industrialized and unionized working class in that country. Véras concentrates on the mobilization of workers for a national-level collective contract for the auto sector in Brazil (see Oliveira above). He refers to the attempts to develop a union presence within the Mercosur and union activity in relation to the Free Trade Areas of the Americas (FTAA, see Mello e Silva above). He also mentions the activities of the CUT to create new alliances at local, national and international levels. The CUT has been active in relation to the environment, children's rights, citizenship and education, and against the neo-liberalism of the Cardoso government:

./english/401.txt:162:In terms of theoretical approach, Romero refers to literature not so much on class and unions as that on citizenship, representation and participation. He is, it seems, primarily interested in the establishment within Urabá, and more widely, of some meaningful kind of civil society, in which a life and death struggle - between traditional landholding and other elites and the insurrectionary left and the poor - is surpassed by social compromise and pacts (from the local to the international level), to the benefit of both sides. He also considers that this kind of settlement provides the necessary base for any emancipatory struggle.

./english/401.txt:166:As we know, Communist mythology has now collapsed and, as a result, ‘class unionism’ is today riven by innumerable problems and fragilities. Not only have the strikes of the working class been ‘cannibalized’ by capitalism, the administrative structures of the main trade unions have also largely become instruments of state regulatory action. The trade unions themselves have also contributed to this process, by ‘cannibalizing’ the old proposals of emancipatory action. In the midst of all this, the conquests made by workers and by the traditional trade union movement have largely given way before the pressures of co-option, and have imperceptibly entered the dynamic of the system, becoming absorbed by the rationale of regulation… However, alongside the discrediting of the ‘old’ worker- and national-based trade unionism, there are signs of revival, especially on the level of ideas and political debate. These, which occur as much in academia as in the trade union domain, point towards the emergence of a ‘new’ social trade union movement of global or international character…

./english/401.txt:167:Estanque reveals the dramatic historical development of contradictory class and communal relations that seem to have permitted this exception to the rule of national-industrial unionism in Portugal (as elsewhere!). Beginning as a region of pre-industrial shoe production, where the putting-out system was practiced alongside farming, the Sao João de Madeira (SJM) traders/capitalists were early involved with Brazil. As the area industrialized in the 20th century, it became highly dependent on export production, and Portugal itself the second-largest shoe exporting country in Europe. Most recently SJM footwear has found (or been given) its place as an unlabelled subcontractor to major North European multinationals. At the same time, whether under liberal or authoritarian national conditions, the region appears to have developed a sharp sense of local identity, through the paternalism of local entrepreneurs and/or autonomous associational self-activity. It has been involved in major historical class and democratic struggles, industrial and national. And, most recently, the union has had to juggle the tensions between 1) practical and effective defense/advance of member's immediate interests, and 2) those of a growing radical-democratic local, national, European and global community of which it considers itself to be a constituent part.

./english/401.txt:173:For Estanque the case has, however, far greater significance, in so far as it appears to provide empirical evidence for an extensive theoretical argument, largely but not solely drawn from Sousa Santos (1995), concerning modernity and emancipation. Perhaps the key understanding here is that concerning the emancipatory possibilities within highly-regulated relations of class, of community and, indeed, of the world. In such an understanding, regulation and emancipation exist not (simply) as binarily opposed in either time or space, but rather co-exist in tension. Such an understanding is perhaps encapsulated in the subheading: 'From regulation to emancipation: between industry and community, between the local and the global'. As with regulation:emancipation, the other paired terms in these binary oppositions (which are understood both as institutional practices and as discourses) are shown as contradictory and therefore unstable. If, he suggests,

./english/401.txt:177: Dietrich and Nayak/Fishworkers in India. Focused on the non-industrial fisherpeople of Southern India, D&N reveal how their fate has been largely determined by the inter/national capitalist market and both Northern and Indian state development and/or modernization policies. Far from accepting this fate, however, fishworkers have been attempting, for 30 years or more, to organize themselves both for defense, within the existing structures, and processes and counter-assertion beyond such. Their struggles have been rich, complex and even contradictory, since they have had to come to terms with class identity/divisions, and with communal identities (ethnicity, caste, residence, religion). They have also had to negotiate with the local and national state apparatus, and with organizers/intellectuals from the church, parties, unions. In so far as Kerala has been a progressive state within India, and that unions of the left have a major presence there, the fishworkers have also had to confront the statist and developmentalist left:

./english/401.txt:185:The most crucial question seems to be how to valorize the contribution of the working class in the informal sector worldwide and to give it a unified voice. This voice has to have a feminist perspective, as the mass of women in the Third World or the Global South are working in the informal sector. From this point of view, the experience of the NFF [National Fishworkers Forum – PW] is encouraging, as its leadership has been willing to create space for a feminist perspective on fisheries and the women involved, despite much hardship, have also not given up on asserting themselves in a heavily male dominated environment. However, this alternate perspective on interaction with nature, energy use, subsistence production as base for extended production, production of life and livelihood as central concern, has not found support from any of the mainstream trade unions. This can be explained by the fact that organized trade unionism had its origin in the very concept of industrialism which has turned out to devastate the resource base. Organized labor has the same insensitivity to the informal sector and resource management as patriarchy has had towards women’s housework and other subsistence labor. Even in Seattle, the unions of the organized sector deflected the mass struggle against market fascism of the WTO by demanding that the WTO include the social clause [the inter/national union attempt to establish labor rights through the WTO – PW]. The position in India is that social clause must be separated from trade agreements.

./english/401.txt:187:They end with two final and inter-related questions: firstly, of whether the current crisis of 'organized labor', and its incapacity to relate positively to the fishworkers and other such working classes, might allow for the rebirth of class-conscious working class organizations; secondly of whether a class- and ecologically-conscious women's movement can – given they are the majority in the informal sector – help to impose the production of life and livelihood as the central concern of production.

./english/401.txt:189: Lambert and Webster/Southern Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights. This paper deals with a particular attempt to create a new kind of union internationalism, originating in and primarily oriented toward the South. ('South' is here defined not geographically but politically, as a common project of 'some of the world's most exploited working classes, many…denied basic ILO…rights') SIGTUR is a network of old and new left or radical-nationalist unions, 'which would still claim to be fighting for a socialist transformation'. Under the provocation of neo-liberal globalization, it is taking direct and common action across, or regardless of, particular party-political affiliations locally, or international affiliations globally. Rooted in the left and internationalist traditions of Perth/Fremantle, in Western Australia, it began life around 1990, as an Indian Ocean network. It was, and is, most effectively linked at this ocean's two extremes, the other one being Durban, South Africa. However, the network has expanded, with growing links to Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea. And then, with a link to the Brazilian CUT (which has its own warm relations with South Africa's COSATU), it adopted its present name. It has seen a series of effective solidarity campaigns, including those of the South African and Indian with Australian workers and unions. The network claims to combine the old (union institutions) with the new (networking, campaigning, computer communication). L&W – both of them academics long-involved with the South African and/or West Australian and international unionism – set up an opposition between the Old Labor Internationalism (hierarchical, centralized, bureaucratized, formal, diplomatic in orientation, workplace-focused, etc) with the New Labor Internationalism (networked, decentralized, de-layered, oriented to mobilization, focused on coalitions with new social movements and 'Southern'). SIGTUR is presented as exemplifying the latter. Despite earlier opposition from the ICFTU internationally, and from rightwing unionists or neo-liberal governments nationally, SIGTUR evidently meets a common desire for leftwing unions confronted with globalization and aware of the ineffectiveness of the existing internationals. Recognizing, on the one hand, the severity of the neo-liberal offensive, on the other the commonly weakened condition of unionism, SIGTUR is working out a modest and practical alternative:

./english/401.txt:193: L&W establish the credentials of SIGTUR by reference to the classical socialist values of international labor solidarity and social emancipation, to its chequered history, and to recent social theorizing on globalization, the discontents it creates and the movements it provokes. It is the last of these sources – or discussions - that is most challenging since it leads them to criticize a common 'infatuation with new information systems' in such theorizing, and to argue for the necessity of the new networked, global and social movement to be based on, or grow within, the historical union institutions. L&W also favor a 'grounded' approach to globalization and opposition to such, which seems to mean a focus on 'globalization from below', as it expresses itself where people live and work. They see this as both justifying their approach and expressed by SIGTUR itself.

./english/401.txt:256:The studies certainly reveal the unions as either defenders of worker and democratic rights under neo-liberal or global attack, or as proponents of a deeper or more extended democracy. The attachment to democracy, the attention to citizenship, the extension of those addressed from union members to working people, women, children and others – all these are new, notable and valuable. In many cases, however, what the unions are trying to establish is a meaningfully liberal democracy in situations where this does not yet exist. Given the multiple shortcomings of liberal democracy, as revealed yet again by its globalized war against Afghanistan, this is a utopia turning into a distopia: islands of political democracy in oceans of social fascism - as Sousa Santos somewhere declares) – with the implication that the two spheres are inter-dependent. Even where the talk is of 'counter-hegemony', this is mostly in recognition of its non-achievement. And, even where it is seen as being achieved, such 'counter-hegemony' does not seem to amount to either the old socialism, nor a post-capitalist political alternative - nor even the old union utopia of the welfare state! The issue of 'international', 'cosmopolitan' or 'global democracy' does not arise here. Moreover, the extension or transformation of democracy within the trade unions is hardly (if at all) mentioned, though this has been recognized as the problem of unionism ever since the classical formulation of the 'iron law of oligarchy' early in the last century (Michels 1915).

./english/401.txt:262:It is no surprise that knowledge sources, rights or claims should remain un- addressed in these cases/studies, given that this aspect of emancipatory struggle is not only the newest but the furthest from traditional (not classical) labor concerns. The labor movement used to have its own knowledge – various socialist theories and ideologies – many addressed to the areas raised by the RSE Project. It also had its own means of knowledge-production and conservation – schools, papers, journals, colleges, archives. The shortcomings of the old theories, the collapse of Communist, Social-Democratic and Populist projects, and the frontal assault by (neo-)liberalism, seem to have provided the coup de grace to any independent notion of labor knowledge, to its classical values and to any self-confident identity. Whilst the contemporary movement might make gestures, or preserve rituals, referring to classical labor traditions, it can hardly be expected to be sensitive to new and unfamiliar issues, claims and challenges to raison du capital - positivist, instrumental, consumptionist, technocratic and possessive-individualist.

./english/402.txt:6:3. Combined and Uneven Development: Gender, Ethnicity, Class and Age

./english/402.txt:8:I was somewhat alarmed, at the elite hotel I eventually found myself in at Porto Alegre, by the number of people who looked like me: White, Male, Middle-Aged (hey, I am not yet 70!) and, evidently, Middle-Class. I do not know to what extent this bias applies to the decision-making committees, but it existed visibly on the various platforms and other public events. This does not, of course, mean that women, Africans, Indians, Indigenous Peoples, or the Under-30s are excluded from the Forum, or from that hotel. But the youth were under canvas in the Youth Camp, the Argentinean piqueteros were in the streets, and, it seemed to me, the women were less visible than they had been at WSF2.

./english/403.txt:7:Mass actions by networks that identify themselves as anti-capitalist have prompted both extensive mainstream media coverage and broad public interest in recent years. Nor has all of this attention been drowned out by what Matthew Fuller (2002) calls the current ‘war over the monopoly on terror’. As is proper, the anti-capitalist potential (or otherwise) of such movements has been widely debated. Amongst other things, this have involved assessment of their engagement (or otherwise) with contemporary class composition, and the risks within many of them of particular understandings of political practice: above all, the ‘activist’ syndrome (see, amongst others, Aufheben 2002; RTS 1999). Even making sense of the terrain and parameters of these movements is not always an easy task. Whilst formally constituted organisations play an integral part within them, in certain cases these movements’ experience of ‘"organising" may not take the form of "organizations" but of an ebb or flow of contact at myriad points’. Indeed, some have argued that their very confluence may lend a number of today’s movements an anti-systemic edge, to the point where ‘current struggles for particular changes are linking up into a collaboration whose impact may wind up being much larger than the sum of the individual influences’ (Cleaver 1999).

./english/403.txt:17:Conflict as the moment of identity, as ‘the’ moment of constitution, of politics, of class constitution … this for me is a forced understanding. Amongst other things, this conception still attributes great value to visibility. The ‘other’, in order to be such, must be visible, manifest, and the more clamorous the conflict, the greater the identity it confers … This is the back door through which the traditional logic of politics is returned to play. I prefer the image of beams eaten from within by termites, I prefer a non-visible, non-spectacular path, the idea of the silent growth of a body that is foreign to the sort of visibility that leaves you hostage to the universe of mediation (Borio, Pozzi & Roggero 2001: 14).

./english/403.txt:57:In other words, any discussion of how to process the volume of information circulating within and between the various movements engaged with the Zapatistas immediately raised questions about the nature of the power relations existing within and between the various class forces with which they were associated. For his own part, Neill (1997b) saw no simple solution to the problem; any real answer, he believed, would only follow from a serious exploration of how to challenge the more general problem of ‘hierarchy — of race, gender, nation, work, wages — within the [global working] class’.

./english/403.txt:115:Cleaver, H. (1993) ‘Theses on Secular Crisis in Capitalism: The Insurpassability of Class Antagonisms’, http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/secularcrisis.html, accessed 24 December 2001.

./english/403.txt:169:Neill, M. (1997a) ‘Toward the New Commons: Working Class Strategies and the Zapatistas; IV. Localism, Homogeneity, and Networks’, http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3843/monty4.html, accessed 1 April 2000.

./english/403.txt:171:Neill, M. (1997b) ‘Toward the New Commons: Working Class Strategies and the Zapatistas; V. Class Composition and Developing a New Working Class Strategy’, http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3843/monty4.html, accessed 1 April 2000.

./english/409.txt:61:By the third day, frustrated delegates began to do what they do best: Protest. There were marches and manifestoes--a half-dozen at least. Beleaguered forum organizers found themselves charged with everything from reformism to racism. The Anti-Capitalist Youth contingent accused them of ignoring the important role direct action played in building the movement. Their manifesto condemned the conference as "a ruse" using the mushy language of democracy to avoid a more divisive discussion of class. The PSTU, a breakaway faction of the Workers Party, began interrupting speeches about the possibility of another world with loud chants of: "Another world is not possible, unless you smash capitalism and bring in socialism!" (It sounded much better in Portuguese.)

./english/410.txt:10:A large number of events, in one way or another, related to Latin American Socialist parties. Some – usually smaller gatherings – bore the remnants of ultra-Marixist rhetoric lashing out against the "capitalist pigs" and calling for a revolution by the world's working classes. But most events were more conciliatory in their approaches, calling for reforms over revolution. For example, the Italian NGOs ROBA dell' Autro Mundo and Mani Tese organized a panel discussion on developing international legal frameworks, which would enforce the multinational corporations' social responsibilities. In fact, a public discussion with IMF and World Bank representatives, which drew some protests, in the end amounted to a fruitful exchange of opinions. Responding to his critics from international NGOs, the World Bank representative, John Garrison, maintained that free trade was the key to achieving dignity and justice at a global level. But he also welcomed pressure from civil society to make governments and corporations deliver on their promises.

./english/420.txt:58:classic international law to a politically defined world community.

./english/467.txt:27: The radical Friedman-Pinochet phase of the Chilean economic counterrevolution came to an end in the early 1990’s, after the Concertacion came to power. In violation of classic Friedmanism, this center-left coalition increased social spending to improve Chile’s income distribution, bringing down the proportion of people living in poverty from 40 per cent to 20 per cent of the population. This modification, which increased internal purchasing power, contributed to the post-Pinochet average yearly growth rate of six per cent a year.

./english/467.txt:29:However, with the social democratic regime unwilling to challenge the upper classes, the basic neoliberal contours of economic policy were kept, including the emphasis on agricultural and natural resource exports. This focus on primary product exports has created tremendous environmental stresses. Overfishing along Chile’s coasts has gone hand in hand with ecological destabilization from the spread of the fresh salmon and mussel farms inland. A booming wood export industry has promoted the growth of tree plantations at the expense of natural forests, resulting in Chile becoming the second most deforested area in Latin America after Brazil. Environmental management is widely acknowledged to be ineffective, being consistently subverted by the imperatives of export-oriented growth.

./english/470.txt:41:The real WSF leadership, I think, makes many key decisions. Will the event have Lula present, and in what capacity? What about Castro, or Chavez? Will there be exclusions, and if so on what grounds? The Zapatistas? Will being in a party, advocating violent tactics, or even just being from some group that the inner circle finds too radical or otherwise dislikes (such as the Disobedienti from Italy, or the international People's Global Action) preclude prominent participation? What content will be part of the core of the events (more on this below) and what content will be left as periphery? Who will have their way paid--and who will not? Will there be a march, and who will be the key speakers? Will there be a collective statement, with what content? What efforts will or won’t be made to achieve gender balance, race balance, geographic balance? How will class differences be addressed, if at all, within the process and more broadly? How will press be handled, both mainstream and alternative? Will the WSF start to discuss facilitating an international movement of movements, or will it persist only as a forum? What will be the accommodation between advocating reform of capitalism and advocating a new system entirely?

./english/470.txt:67:Without attention, layering of participants’ material circumstances abets as well even less warranted differences -- due to gender, race, class, place of origin, and fame -- in how people are regarded in general, in the media attention they are accorded, and in the visibility and promotion they receive. Often attention afforded rises in nearly inverse proportion to the activism people do, to the extent they are anti-hierarchical in their own lives, and to the lessons and insights they have to offer and to share with other people at the WSF's events. It isn't surprising that in the youth camp there is sharing and equity dwarfing what prevails in the hotels. So while it would probably be impossible to do without the hotels, it is the logic and culture at the hotels that needs examination. Of course we need presentations, sometimes even to very large audiences, but it ought to be possible to reduce or even eliminate relative passivity and subordination of those who come to the WSF mainly to listen, and of those who present but have less known names.

./english/471.txt:18:The best refutation of such views is the experience of WSF participants themselves. The overwhelming majority of Indians who attended came at their own cost, which included lost income from the workdays they missed, and involving little or no subsidy from the organisations they represented. The same is true for most middle-class activists, both from India and abroad.

./english/472.txt:27:Organizers of the WSF originally conceived of the meeting as a counterweight to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the annual conclave of the international capitalist class that usually meets in Davos, Switzerland. (The WSF times its meetings to coincide with those of the WEF.) In 2000, a network of Brazilian and French activists, NGOs and unions began organizing a meeting for the following year. Many of the Brazilian groups had indirect ties to the Workers’ Party (PT), while the French activists were largely from the Association for a Tobin Tax for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC, later renamed Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens), an international movement based in France to promote a proposed tax on international speculative capital movements, with the aim of making developing countries less vulnerable to capital flight.

./english/472.txt:48:After the 2003 Social Forum, many of those who had celebrated it for the first two years began to complain that the WSF was not living up to its promise to serve as a model of democratic organization. Indeed, the forum now contends with four big issues of internal debate: internal democracy, political action, global vs. local struggles and class inequality. The first two issues have been debated extensively in the forum’s councils and on the Internet. The latter two have not been so openly recognized.

./english/472.txt:50:Size and format conspire against democracy. A global movement has to be big, but the Social Forum bursts at the seams. It is a challenge for tens of thousands of people to come together in the same space for a short time and accomplish anything. The plenaries held in stadiums that seat 15,000 people only allow for one-way communication. Even the smaller workshops held in classrooms are often impersonal. Most of them follow a hierarchical model: a panel faces an audience, gives prepared talks and leaves little time at the end for the audience to respond.

./english/472.txt:64:There is another largely unaddressed issue: stark class disparities pervade the Forum. Though the elite within the movement place themselves in solidarity with the oppressed, the Forum reproduces the hierarchy it claims to be fighting on a global scale. The class divide largely falls along the geographic division between North and South. It starts with who can afford to attend. Class differences create an internal hierarchy within the Forum that produces divergent positions on important global issues.

./english/513.txt:10:The rapid emergence of regional, national and thematic Forums soon led to the emergence of a process anchored in diverse realities being built from a basis of multiple critiques, but which merge together in shared hopes of a world of peace, justice, rights, diversity, and radical changes in patriarchal, class-based, racist and exclusive relations.

./english/513.txt:55:The Policy of Equality adopted in 2005 by the Forum’s International Council is an important recognition that changes cannot be generated spontaneously. Given the expansion and interrelatedness of an exclusive, class-based, racist, sexist, homophobic, urban-centrist culture, these changes are needed more than ever. Can’t the Forum recognise that there are social groups that need reparation and to whom society has a social debt that should be indemnified, starting at home? Indigenous peoples, afro-descendants, peasants, women, people discriminated against because of their sexual orientation, and other people who are marginalised for a variety of reasons, won’t find a space as equals in the Forum, without the risk that its self-convocation might limit their participation or restrict their autonomy.

./english/529.txt:10:The language of dissent has widely permeated into the farthest regions of the world, and farmers, tribals, fisherfolk, and others at the low eschalons of the class cline have been well-familiarized with concepts like globalization, gender-equity, environmental degradation, militarism, GWB and the USA global hegemony project, Peak Oil, GMO’s, and the evils of the WTO and the IMF. Similarly, the Pakistani street is, I would say much more aware of global geo-politics than are their CANWEST-Global-benumbed counterparts in Canada. There were many accomplished public speakers, but there were also just as many who faced the mike for the first time. It was wonderful to see tribal women get up on stage, and with hearts-in-mouth, make their case. Inevitably, after their initial stage-fright, they were able to relax and speak their piece.

./english/529.txt:24:Not a single status-quo extant political system, nor any of its players, which are currently arrayed along a left/right cline are offering anything which can check our path-dependent, headlong rush to global catastrophe. No Robert’s Rules meeting can produce the required course of action. A clear majority of humanity understands clearly what is wrong with this world, yet is completely stymied by the zero political options to turn around this hell-bent march to destruction. This human majority is mutually instantly recognizable, -we can spot each other out of crowds of thousands, regardless of nationality, class, colour or creed. There is a desperate need for a new political paradigm, and that’s what needs to be discussed at these kinds of Forums. The World Social Forum should be the place where this discussion happens. I don’t know of any bigger gathering of people who are trying to believe that "Another World is Possible."

./english/544.txt:34:It is not that there is no pool of human resources to mobilise in Pakistan. The WSF meeting in Karachi and the response to the earthquake in the north in October 2005 amply prove that the people would participate in a public process if they are provided direction and leadership. On both occasions young people from all walks of life and of all classes turned up, be it the WSF venue or the earthquake relief centres to participate in the activity announced.

./english/548.txt:16:Alongside the main activities, 35,000 people gathered in the international youth camp. Some consider the youth camp to be the truest expression of the social forum. Participants dispose of hierarchy and privilege, as they work together in a common project to transcend race, class, and gender barriers.

./english/565.txt:181:variable quantities, depending on gender, race, age, class, sexual

./english/566.txt:36:package of fringe benefits, but on top of that are first-class dining

./english/574.txt:33:It was only a beginning, however, involving only a fraction of the Forum’s participants. But it reflected a recognition that the WSF itself is not the embryonic framework of a new political force but rather the catalyst for the variety of assembled collectivities to build that force themselves. What this new `subjectivity’ will be is also an open question. Certainly it will not be singular. The old agencies of left politics were socialist parties, providing leadership of different kinds for the broader working class movement. The development of Social Forums is leading the more innovative left political parties to rethink their role, their understandings of leadership and representation. The traditional organisations of labour are also using the Forum to create new alliances and develop new tactics in the face of capital’s global reorganisation and the new insecurity and fragmentation of labour.

./english/578.txt:9:Brazilian President Luis Ignacio “Lula” da Silva chose to address January’s WSF 2005 during the launch of the Global Campaign Against Poverty (G-CAP) rather than, as many expected, in the bigger session after the opening march. I believe that the G-CAP is a campaign conceptualised and designed in the boardrooms of NGOs and funding organisations, rather than in the streets and trenches of practical grassroots struggles by social movements, trade unions and other mass organisations of the working class. While the WSF slogan is “another world is possible”, the G-CAP campaign seeks to build this new world using the scaffolding of the old, namely, the United Nations' Millenium Development Goals, International Monetary Fund/World Bank prevarications and Southern governments' capitalist policies.

./english/578.txt:19:As the ASF we should be aware of these dangers and take vigorous steps to circumvent them. In all that we do let us put the interests of the African masses first. This means the interests of the working class and its constituent elements, namely, employed and unemployed workers, the landless peasants, women, youth, informal traders, cross border traders, the aged, people living with HIV/AIDS and all the social groups smashed by capitalism. None of these sectors can truly advance their cause so long as capitalism is the dominant economic system in the world.

./english/578.txt:24:In our preparations for the WSF in Africa we will need to draw the class line between exploiter and exploited, capitalist and victim/opponent of capitalism. Let us unite and build towards a WSF 2007 that will take forward the struggle to destroy capitalism rather than merely reform it.

./english/579.txt:6:Asia from West, South and East was well represented as also Western Europe; the rest of the world less so. This concentration when coupled with the unmatchable social and cultural diversity of India, fully represented at this WSF, created a general atmosphere of collective political solidarity and vitality that has clearly set a new standard for future WSFs.(1) By contrast, the social composition of participants at the 3rd WSF was far more middle class and youthful. If the youth camp in Porto Alegre was a considerable success, in Mumbai it was organizationally and politically a disappointment. The ironies and contrasts do not end here. Lula, unwanted at, and uninvited to, the WSF was the honoured guest of the Indian government at this year’s official Republic Day celebrations on January 26, 2004.

./english/579.txt:24:The Indian economy continues to move along the neoliberal path at a steady if controlled pace. Worries about a slowing down of average annual growth rates after 1997 have been temporarily assuaged by the spectacularly good monsoons in 2003 that have dramatically raised agricultural growth rates and now promise a GDP growth rate in 2003-04 of around 8 percent. Thus the average annual growth rate for the last five years will reach the 5.7 to 5.8 percent level that has sustained itself over the last two decades. True, average annual growth in manufacturing over the last five years is an unimpressive 5.3 percent. Agriculture will undoubtedly revert to its normal pattern of low and slackening growth. Annual software exports have now reached the $16 billion mark and there are brighter prospects for export of auto parts but the trade imbalance continues. Remittances by Indians abroad (mainly from the Gulf and US) at 3 percent of GDP are still more than double annual FDI flows which since 1997 have not crossed the peak that year of $4 billion. Though the $100 billion reserves position has a disturbingly large component of more volatile portfolio investments and Non-Resident Indian (NRI) short term bank deposits as well as a high proportion of commercial borrowings by the government, it is large enough to be cited as evidence of a now “Shining India” and of a “feel good factor” that are the new slogans being internalized by the Indian ‘middle class’, courtesy of incessant media repetition.(4)

./english/579.txt:28:After the 1997 East Asian financial crisis, the Indian government congratulated itself on not prematurely moving towards full capital convertibility. It is still some way from this but the intent is clear. In the new millennium New Delhi eased restrictions to allow Indian companies to invest up to 25 percent of their net worth abroad, no questions asked. Today, free capital investment abroad is allowed up to 100 percent of a company’s net worth. Apart from stubbornly high fiscal deficits, stagnant savings rates, persistent poverty, growing social and regional inequalities, the major area of unease for the government is the relatively jobless character of current growth patterns compared to even the eighties. The number of unemployed reached a staggering 34.85 million in 2002 and is expected to reach 40.47 million in 2007. The employment elasticity of output has fallen from 0.52 between 1983-94 to 0.16 between 1993-2000. It is here that the political weak spot of Indian neoliberalism resides – in the not too distant prospect of a substantially greater proportion of youth mostly educated in provincial colleges and belonging to the middle and lower echelons of the ‘middle class’ becoming disillusioned with the heady promises of neoliberal project that currently still retains its appeal.(6)

./english/579.txt:52:Overall, it would be fair to say that the mass fronts of the left parties, substantial sections within the parties including many major leaders, have moved closer to the social movements and progressive NGOs, and vice versa. This movement towards closer collaboration is still hesitant, wary and uneasy. There remains a lack of that kind of general perspective that could help systematize forms of collaboration going beyond occasional common actions. But the movement forward is real. Internationally, the Indian left has nowhere to turn except towards a global radical milieu that is naturally anti-Stalinist and much more developed in its attitudes on matters concerning sexual choice, female oppression and ecological sustainability. Domestically, greater coordination amongst radical forces is required to confront the neoliberal project as well. In this respect, public opposition in India is likely to grow. In South America what tipped the balance towards successful mass resistance was the antagonism of whole swathes of the middle class whose savings were destroyed by the combination of unstable currencies, recession and unemployment. This has not yet happened in India. The neoliberal reforms have a shorter history and a more cautious approach to capital convertibility has provided a measure of protection. But the problem of educated unemployment is rising to serious proportions. Youth belonging to the lower echelons of the ‘middle class’ are finding neither secure nor well-paid jobs. A growing crisis of expectations is emerging. In retrospect Mumbai 2004 might well be identified as the first major collective warning of the shape of things to come.

./english/579.txt:54:At the international level there are parallel concerns. Greater collaboration between the main radical actors – parties, unions, movements, the best NGOs – is urgently required. The crucial task remains what it has always been – how best to combine the politics of the universal and the politics of the particular. The first is most powerful and effective precisely when it encompasses and respects the latter. Historically, the classical, indeed only, organizational form which has shown itself capable of embodying this combination has been the party. One need not assume that this must remain the case. But the principal challenge facing the Social Forum project is whether it will be able to contribute to the creation of those new organisational forms equipped with the general vision and capacity to simultaneously and systematically pursue the politics of the universal and the particular. Insofar as the state remains a crucial nodal point of concentrated bourgeois power no radical strategy can afford to merely ignore or sidestep it.

./english/579.txt:67:4. A fuller treatment of the Indian economy’s basic character is to be found in my “India’s New Right”, May/June 2001 issue of the New Left Review. A booming stock market provides further reassurances to an Indian elite that includes the misnamed ‘middle class’, which far from being a median category comprises the top 10 to 15 percent of Indian society. Of the Rs.100,000 crores that went into the secondary market in 2003, only Rs. 2000 crores was new investment in new ventures.

./english/580.txt:66:Coming back to the discussions in the IOC in this regard, an interesting trend was discernible. Broadly, WSF organised events could be classified into those that focussed on overarching themes (i.e. thematic) and those that focussed on issues pertaining to a sector (i.e. sectoral). Initially, there was a strong view that WSF organised events should largely confine themselves to the sectoral issues, viz. gender, labour, caste and discrimination, etc. This strong articulation may in some ways be also seen as an articulation of the major foci that were mentioned at the beginning, as well as the major mobilisation of sectoral representatives around some of these foci – viz. groups representing trade unions, women’s groups, groups working on caste issues, etc.

./english/589.txt:72:Once children have joined the association, they are prepared to get education and ultimately ease their social insertion. Each child is individually prepared to enter primary school. In addition to normal classes, they can attend supplementary sessions organised by the associations staff that also help them with their homework.

./english/589.txt:74:Girls are also introduced to yoga, singing songs about childhood, Indian classical dancing, sowing, and computer literacy while boys are involved in sports activities and introduced to carpentry, mechanics, and computer literacy too. The education project apparently emphasizes the importance of a critical approach.

./english/589.txt:177:[6] Caste belonging is determined by birth. The Dalit caste consists of about two hundred million people. It is the most starkly oppressed. Its members are traditionally considered untouchable because impure. Although the Indian constitution abolished untouchability and guaranteed equality among Indian citizens, the caste system is still deeply rooted in every reality. The upper class, the local elite, the land owners, who generally belong to upper castes, see to it that it lives on as a source of cheap and expendable manpower since in practice Dalits cannot apply to qualified jobs.

./english/595.txt:8:1. The Mumbai Forum was above all a popular demonstration for and by the people. In comparison to Porto Alegre, but above all in comparison to the European Social Forums which have mainly mobilised the middle classes. At Mumbai the great majority of the people present were untouchables, peasants, and members of women’s and young people’s organisations. Not only has the Forum become more “global” it is now also more “social”.

./english/605.txt:27:The IV WSF organizers have made possible to the participants in the event an exemplar contact with the unequal development and lead to paroxism, with fantastic post-modern towers raised in huge slums with cosmopolitan rootless elites who live with a rural miserable India, stuck on eighteenth century, with billionaires and affluent middle-classes who live without sorry in midst of countless dalits, people who fight every single day for survival. This experience has imposed, even for the Latin American, an existential redefinition of the sense of misery and exclusion caused by neoliberal globalization.

./english/605.txt:36:These were the sectors which with most highlight have brought their problems and struggles to the IV WSF – specially the dalits, who comprehended few less than half Indian delegates. The hottest problems in these people´s lives – which delegates of their organizations had understood being linked to the neoliberal globalization – were those motivating most part of the discussions realized in Nesco Grounds. In addition to the issues with a special class focus established by the communist or socialist left sectors, another great range of inquiries emerged more directly from combat to castism, communalism, religious sectarism and patriarchalism have earned centrality in the Forum.

./english/605.txt:51:The decisive logistical option in Mumbai was concentrating the activities in one place and don´t disperse them. That has made easier the effervescence and vital mood in the IV WSF. It was carried out in an abandoned textile complex that now serves as events center, creatively transformed by the Forum organizers in order to house the multiple activities to be realized. We had not had, such as in Porto Alegre, the classrooms and the PUC (University) infrastructure, but even so the result of the activities was not harmed. The critical note is related to the Youth Camp, which had much more modest dimensions than Porto Alegre Youth Camp – it had settled in the area belonging to a catholic high-school ten kilometers away, what has made difficult a better integration with the Forum ensemble.

./english/605.txt:57:This network hat introduced in Mumbai, through the hands of the French collective of sound artists Apo33, a new work instrument, a computer program based in free software, called Nômade, which allows instant digitalization of every speech (from the talker and the translations too).Therefore, each room equipped with the system Nômade has a computer net which plays different functions: voice transmission (digital or FM), storage and classifying of the debates, coordination of the translation and internet transmission of sound and video archives. In India, after problems in the first day, originated specially from improvised electrical installations, it has passed the test. That allows further Forum activities to be attended in real time by people all over the world in his language, if it is among the ones adopted for the simultaneous translation. This tool opens great possibilities to the internationalist movement.

./english/634.txt:14:Aside from numbers and mega-male events (which were not as prevalent as Klein makes out, although the general impression is that women were less well represented than the previous year—an ominous sign!), the atmosphere at Porto Alegre III was electrifying – 5 days of multi-ethnic, multi-racial, internationalism in a country bubbling over with hope after the overwhelming electoral victory of a veritable “working-class hero” to Brazil’s presidency (Lula). Social analyst Peter Waterman has given the flavor of Porto Alegre III in this personal commentary: “[I was inspired by the] energetic and innovative social protest, and original analyses of the local-national-global dialectic in Argentina…by the Kidz in the Kamp who were discussing under a tree, and with informal translation, how to ensure that the emancipatory and critical forces have more impact on the Forum process…by the increasing number of compañer@s, of various ages, identities, movements and sexual orientations, who believe that, in the construction of a meaningfully civil global society, transparency is not only the best policy but the only one” (Waterman, “First

./english/636.txt:16:The rejection of the "Washington Consensus," often imposed on Latin America by US-controlled institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, is what brought Brazils President Lula da Silva to power last October. And so he is an appropriate symbol of the growing importance of the WSF and its ideas, relative to its elite counterpart in Davos. Last year Lula was also welcomed enthusiastically by the crowds here, as a genuine working-class hero who everyone loved but few thought would actually win. Now he is president of the second largest country in the Americas.

./english/644.txt:14:There were almost twice as many people this year, representing 717 organizations from 156 countries. There was also a notable increase in U.S. participation (1,100 people) including the Grassroots Global Justice Delegation - a working class group of more than 100 community and labor activists from around the country, including Jobs with Justice, SWOP, the UE, Agenda, Just Act and many other organizations who provided vibrant accounts of the challenges faced by poor and working people in the U.S. as well as some of our successes (our delegation was predominantly women and people of color and more than a third were young people). It was also important that in panels, news conferences and media interviews, members of our delegation helped to make clear that many U.S. trade unionists are actively engaged in struggling against war with Iraq.

./english/646.txt:16:Some observers, such as Camilo Guevara, characterise Seattle and other similar media events in the US and Europe as irrelevant for the great majorities of the world, expressions of the delusions of alienated western youth. While I do not fully agree with his observation, it is undoubtedly true that in the poorer regions of the world a lot was going on long before Seattle; middle-class youth protesting in a European or North American city are much more attractive to global media networks than impoverished peasants campaigning against structural adjustment programmes in the south.

./english/671.txt:17:The non-sovereign, alternative globalization position, in contrast, was minoritarian at the Forumnot in quantitative terms but in terms of representation; in fact, the majority of the participants in the Forum may well have occupied this minoritarian position. First, the various movements that have conducted the protests from Seattle to Genoa are generally oriented towards non-national solutions. Indeed, the centralized structure of state sovereignty itself runs counter to the horizontal network-form that the movements have developed. Second, the Argentinian movements that have sprung up in response to the present financial crisis, organized in neighbourhood and city-wide delegate assemblies, are similarly antagonistic to proposals of national sovereignty. Their slogans call for getting rid, not just of one politician, but all of them que se vayan todos: the entire political class. And finally, at the base of the various parties and organizations present at the Forum the sentiment is much more hostile to proposals of national sovereignty than at the top. This may be particularly true of ATTAC, a hybrid organization whose head, especially in France, mingles with traditional politicians, whereas its feet are firmly grounded in the movements.