./english/40.txt:14:Out were big plenaries with endless lists of celebrity speakers; in were focused seminars involving networks whose roots were first put down in the previous forums in Florence or Paris and are now coming to maturity. Out were corporate sponsorship and high price entrance fees; in were solidarity funds, low entrance fees and thorough international organising work, enabling over 1,000 activists from Turkey and 3,000 from eastern Europe to participate..
./english/44.txt:152:CALL TO STOP THE EU CORPORATE TRADE AGENDA AND TO DERAIL THE WTO
./english/62.txt:39:Social movement scholarship constitutes a specific area of academic study of social movements usually undertaken in the disciplines of sociology and political science. In American sociology, the early movement theorists tended to view social movements as an irrational form of collective behavior, which could be explained by reference to the mobilizers’ ‘social strains’ or ‘grievances’ (LeBon, Kornhauser etc.). Much of the work after the 1970s sought to challenge this kind of thinking, in which social movements were seen in terms of ‘mob psychology’ or as an expression of social breakdown and anomie. Thus, the new dominant paradigm in the study of social movements was focusing on such concepts as ‘resource mobilization,’ ‘political opportunities,’ ‘networks of mobilization,’ ‘framing’ and ‘political contention’ (Jenkins, Zald, McAdam, Tilly, Tarrow, Snow, Benford etc.). As a critical reaction to this structuralistic way of theorizing social movements, some analysts turned to the study of ‘emotions,’ ‘biographies’ and ‘culture’ (Goodwin, Jasper etc.) with the mainstream approach of Tilly, Tarrow, McAdam and their collaborators eventually accepting to incorporate culture as one of the determinants of their structural effects. However, even from the 1960s, European scholars (Habermas, Touraine, Melucci etc.) were elaborating an alternative paradigm, that of the ‘new social movements,’ critically reflecting on the legacy of Marxism and motivated directly from the social struggles of that period (feminism, environmentalism, May 1968 etc.).
./english/62.txt:57:Another, related, aspect of social movements is that we are organisng for egalitarian, democratic, socialist/communist transformation in a context where there is no clear alternative system for which to aim. We believe that there’s got to be a better way; we believe in fighting against exploitation and oppression; for common goods; for a just peace; against corporate power; for popular control and so on – many rich ideas and vision - but without a notion of an alternative system. In some way, the idea of an alternative system was related to a single vehicle and instrument.i.e. the nation state. The emergence of open systems with globalisation – and also the internet - does not invalidate the underlying principles of socialism, whther we use the word `socialism’ or not. The search is for alternative principles of allocating economic resources, producing the means of life, developing human capacities, to that of profit. And it is a search based on experiment and a sense of creating and/or prefiguring alternatives in the course of resistance, as much as on programmatic debate. There is still an important – in some senses more important function - for programmatic debate, but it has a completely different character – or should have a completely different character - drawing very many different kinds of knowledge. It therefore needing to be organised in ways that value practical knowledge as well as more easily codified forms.
./english/62.txt:59:One - defensive and urgent - reason why it is important to become more systematic about this search and our experiments is that many of these new non-heirarchical ways of organising are now being developed by corporate and state organisations but in a way which reproduces new forms of centralised power – for example the power of financial institutions.
./english/147.txt:18:There is no country in Europe where, after the defeat of social democracy, there arose resistance as effective as is in Italy. The overarching mood in Italy is to try to unify workers and all marginalized groups and strata: the unemployed, the poor, industrial and intellectual workers, whites, and people of all other races, men and women, and immigrants, in a “movement of movements.” A great acceleration of efforts started in Genoa, July 2001, where the anti-corporate globalization movement resisted the G8 Summit.
./english/162.txt:60:In this sense one could say that, just like the projects of commons-based peer production, these mobilizations begin and end with the fabrication of publicly available texts. For example, the People's Summit in Quebec City in April 2001 began long in advance, with many different studies of the consequences to be expected from the future agreement on the Free Trade Area of the Americas. These studies led to the drafting of a remarkable document, "Alternatives for the Americas," which is a counter-treaty of great precision, composed through a process of knowledge exchange and political coordination on the scale of the American hemisphere. (17) It's also true that as a direct consequence of the massive demonstration that took place during the summit, the official working draft of the FTAA treaty was made public for the first time; until then it had not even been available to elected representatives of the American peoples, but only to executive negotiating teams (and scores of corporate "advisers"). In this way the counter-globalization movements constitute a public archive. And yet between the fundamental landmarks represented by these text publications, how many face-to-face debates took place, how many moments of singular or collective creation, how many acts of courage and solidarity? And how many emotions, images, memories, and desires were created and shared during the days of action in Quebec City?
./english/162.txt:75:Tucumán Arde is extremely interesting to consider from the contemporary viewpoint of tactical media practice, which in many respects has been one long effort to research, expose, and go beyond the idyllic picture of globalization being painted by the corporate media. (25) But to understand the major differences from today's situation, one must realize that Tucumán Arde was done with the support of the Argentine CGT, that is, a radical labor union, and the exhibition was shown in a union hall. In other words, to obtain the funding and distribution of practices that would not be supported by the market, the Rosario group had to collaborate with a bureaucratic structure, which is essentially an outgrowth of the capitalist firm. And that is almost impossible today, at least in the overdeveloped countries. For complex reasons which have to do both with the anti-bureaucratic bias of the New Left, and with the heightened integration of labor unions to the state after the crisis of 1968, it has become very difficult for social movements, let alone artists, to collaborate with official structures such as parties, unions, etc. The motivation just isn't there. This is why the use of carefully conceived linguistic formulas, of oriented but open signifiers, would become a far more effective means of mobilization in the late 1990s, when ideas could be distributed and constantly transformed through the proliferation of connections offered by the Internet. In this way one achieved a non-bureaucratic capacity for subversive political action on a large scale, outside any compulsory framework. A new kind of conceptualism began to emerge, in which "attitudes become forms," as the curator Harald Szeeman said in the 1960s. An idea or phrase could become a world-wide event, in which every individual performance was different. Just as in Lawrence Weiner's famous prescription, the action could be carried out by the originators of the ideas, or realized by others, or not done at all. In the late 1990s, this revolutionary promise was realized. Thirty years after experiments such as Tucumán Arde, the counter-globalization movement burst onto the world scene as the revenge of the concept.
./english/162.txt:80:"The proposal is to encourage as many movements and groups as possible to organize their own autonomous protests or actions, on the same day (June 18th), in the same geographical locations (financial/ corporate/ banking/ business districts) around the world. Events could take place at relevant sites, e.g. multinational company offices, local banks, stock exchanges. Each event would be organized autonomously and coordinated in each city or financial district by a variety of movements and groups. It is hoped that a whole range of different groups will take part, including workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, women, students, the landless, environmentalists, unwaged/unemployed and others....everyone who recognizes that the global capitalist system, based on the exploitation of people and the planet for the profit of a few, is at the root of our social and ecological troubles." (27)
./english/162.txt:102:9. For example, a government "Superfund" program was deemed necessary in the United States in 1980, to clean up toxic waste on land that companies had used as free dumping grounds. Since 1995 corporate taxation for this fund has been stopped, and since 2002 the Bush administration, hostile to the expense, is curtailing Federal funding. As though the ecological balance were at once priceless and impossible to pay for.
./english/162.txt:120:27. See www.corporatewatch.org.uk/magazine/issue8/cw8glob6.html.
./english/176.txt:24:above claims by investigating the use of the internet in the mobilization for the Paris 2003 European Social Forum (ESF), one of the most important events for the European part of the ‘movement for alternative globalization’. The results derive from a survey undertaken in the Paris 2003 ESF, which asked 257 respondents about the contexts that mobilized them to participate in the European Social Forum (political/voluntary organizations, friends/relatives, workplace/university, news media), as well as the means and methods of communication that were used in each context. This paper aims to present and interpret some of the preliminary results and situate them amongst the wider context of studies in social movements and communication. On a more general note, this study is part of wider effort to restore communication analysis in its rightful place within social movement theory, which even though implicitly or explicitly recognizes the importance of contacts and interactions for the identity, ideology and organization of social movements, has thus far failed to incorporate a more detailed study of communication within its research framework.
./english/176.txt:38:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 76which they interpret social reality), structural-connection (connecting potential activists with an opportunity to participate) and decision-shaping functions (helping individuals to assess the costs and benefits of their potential participation through contact with the actions of other participants) (Passy 2003, 24-25). Given its emphasis on relations, ties and interactions, one would expect that communication and media would be a central element of the networks approach to social movements. This is however not the case. For instance, while social networks are considered as key predictors of movement participation, little attention has been paid to the communicative aspects of an individual’s direct or indirect ties to a movement and to the communication media through which these relationships are constituted. In other words, the fact of whether participants in a movement communicate mainly over the telephone or over the internet may have an impact on the capacity of their social networks to act as agents of mobilization. In addition, the transmission of ideas and cognitive schemata taking place through networks also implies a process of communication whose characteristics and mechanisms remain under-researched. Yet, there are a few studies which ‘have focused on the flows of communication and the links between different territorial areas’ (Diani 2004, 351), showing that the levels of collective action in one place affect collective action in nearby geographical areas. However, these studies examined uprisings of the late 19th century which took place in a completely different communicative and media context, and as such cannot account for the role of current communication media in the diffusion of protest. Thus, the role of communication media, means and techniques remains an under-researched subject within social movement study. Even though all of the aforementioned strands of social movement theory recognize the crucial role of communication and interaction in processes of mobilization and participation, they have nonetheless failed to incorporate these considerations into their theoretical framework or research design. When the role of the media is taken into account, the focus rests on the mass media, disregarding the functions of more personal communication. This perpetuates a seemingly unintentional but nonetheless false perception of mediated communication as indirect or impersonal as opposed to ‘direct’ face-to-face communication. This preoccupation with the mass media tends to focus attention on the ‘external’ communication of a movement and not on its internal modes of communication and their impact on the movement’s identity, structure and ideology. It also maintains a perception of social movements as entities with specific and given characteristics and ways of communicating. This deprives us of Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 77all the valuable observations that a
./english/192.txt:28:The London Forum, which involved the plentiful participation of young people and a broad coverage of all the issues of concern to the movement in the plenaries and seminars, should, together with the mobilization for the G8 summit in Gleneagles next July, help to transform this consciousness into much stronger organized networks in Britain. The corporate media in Britain are notoriously reluctant to provide serious coverage of the altermondialiste movement, but the Guardian (18 October 2004) acknowledged the significance of the Forum, warning that
./english/192.txt:34:But there is more involved here. The war in Iraq is also the dominant issue in world politics. This is not simply because of the divisions that it has provoked among the major powers. The Bush administration's unilateral assertion of military power, the brutality of the occupation, its accompaniment by the imposition of the full neo-liberal economic programme on Iraq - all of this for many activists sums up what is wrong with corporate globalization.
./english/192.txt:47:4. The attacks made on the anti-fascist plenary and the stage in Trafalgar Square were the work largely of autonomists many of whom are in principle opposed to the Social Forums. In addition to claims of lack of democracy, two other excuses were given for these actions. First of all, the 'corporate ESF' and the support given by Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, were denounced.
./english/192.txt:48:It is hard to take this seriously. Anyone who has attended the WSF in Porto Alegre will remember the corporate adverts welcoming delegates and the VIP suite at the PUC. The importance of support from local government (and indeed from political parties) is indicated by the proposal that was made to move the forthcoming WSF from Porto Alegre after the PT lost control of the city in November.
./english/195.txt:7:Perhaps this distinction caused some confusion, since the definition of “horizontality” or “verticality” did not identify a specific group, organisation or network, nor a specific ideology or world view of politics and political events. Often, one could identify "horizontals" in "vertical" organisations and "verticals" in "horizontal" networks. However, we can understand the contrast described by the terminology in terms of modes of doing predicated on opposite organising principles. One, based on participatory, open and inclusive democracy, in which participants through their iterative relational practices reached consensus on both means to be employed and ends to be achieved and were willing to engage in the continuous learning process necessary for these practices. The other in which democracy was identified with a rigid vertical structure within which ends are defined by the few, and the means are seen purely as instrumental to those ends. For “horizontals” the means embody values as much as the ends (whether we use free or corporate software, whether information is posted freely or under coordinating committee control, whether working groups emerge from the ground up or “allowed” by a coordinating committee). Indeed because of this, the shape of ends emerges from negotiations of means. For the “verticals” it was just about “getting the job done”, that is, their concept of “job” and final outcome.
./english/197.txt:19:I know I'm being too harsh. Some valuable ideas are bound to emerge from the plenary sessions at the European and other Social Forums and these forums are indispensable for bringing together social and political forces in the service of a shared ideal. But I just wish for once we could use our time together in European Social Forums to decide, as Europeans, what we are going to do about, say, the Bolkestein Directive-and if you don't know what that is, it's because the movement isn't doing a good enough job of educating and organising. This EU Directive (which I hope may have been killed by the time you read this) is another little reward for our service corporations. If successfully implemented, the Bolkestein Directive would introduce a new legal principle and allow firms to apply the social and labour laws of the `country of origin' to workers in all the European countries where the firms might happen to do business. A European (French, German, British, etc) company could set up its corporate headquarters in, say, Slovenia or Malta and its workers all over Europe would then have the great good fortune to receive Slovenian or Maltese wages and benefits.
./english/197.txt:45:Debt (and its accompanying structural adjustment programmes) would have a lot of advantages as a campaign objective: it is certainly one of the most important contributing factors to hunger, collapsed health, water and education systems, plummeting commodity prices, the switch from public services to private corporate control, the freedom of capital movements and in a general way, to huge leverage for the North over the whole range of Southern policy choices. As a system of domination, debt is far more intelligent than colonialism, requiring no police, army or expatriate administration and even regularly bringing in a bit of revenue. Debt cancellation could be linked to a system requiring that the savings be spent on the priorities determined by the people of the country concerned (what I call `democratic conditionality').
./english/199.txt:33:Unfortunately, rather than accept the basic legitimacy of direct action to make publicly visible contradictions and disagreements within the forum process, some ESF organizers have chosen instead to denounce the recent actions as undemocratic and, even more alarming, racist. Their discourse sounds eerily like past statements from James Wolfensohn, George Bush, or Tony Blair. Why do they support direct action only when directed against others? On the other hand, it is unfortunate that activists chose an anti-Racist workshop to make their demands heard on Saturday night, although this has more to do with the fact that Ken Livingstone was speaking than anything else. There is simply no justification for the arrests on Saturday night or Sunday, and even less for the subsequent campaign of delegitimation. Yet all is not lost. There is still plenty of time for ESF organizers to react more constructively, and begin to incorporate the lessons learned leading up the next forum in Athens . On the other side, before the inevitable calls for abandoning the forum come again, we might wait and see, recognizing that the politics of autonomous space allow us to remain true to our own values, forms, and practices, while tactically intervening within the official forum to move out from our radical ghettos and simultaneously spark constructive change.
./english/199.txt:35:What I am ultimately suggesting is that we renew our vision of the forum itself, recognizing that our movements are too diverse, even contradictory, to be contained within a single space, however open it may be. This does not mean abandoning the process, but rather building on the London experience to recast the forum as a network of interconnected, yet autonomous spaces converging across a single urban terrain at a particular point in time. Some spaces may be larger, and thus generate more gravity than others, while the boundaries are always blurry, diffuse, and permeable. Moreover, there will necessarily be contradiction and struggle, even within and between our networks. Such conflict should not be feared, but rather recognized as an integral part of the forum itself. In places like Prague and Genoa urban space was divided among diverse forms of direct action practice. In London we finally began to incorporate a similar logic on our own terms, without reacting to an enemy. As for we critics, rather than return to our bunkers to recreate an imagined state of pure horizontality, we would do better to recognize that mass movements are always conflictual and contradictory, that horizontalism is about learning to manage conflict without reintroducing formal centers of command. This is the lesson I learned in London , and why I support the politics of autonomous space.
./english/200.txt:9:The forum declared its intention of turning "corporate Europe" into "social Europe." But this can only be possible when the entire continent is redefined and the West realizes that Europe extends beyond the boundaries of the European Union, which is no longer the exclusive club it was 10 years ago. This is all a gift to the left, but the left still has a lot to learn before it can use it.
./english/205.txt:23:In the far end of North London lay Alexandra Palace, a place normally used for big musical events, where most of the official programme took place. A huge space with a few thin partitions defining the area of the halls, the acoustic effect it provided was in perfect correspondence with the process: a reverberating confusion of voices through loudspeakers. Besides offering much less interesting plenaries, seminars and speakers than previous years, the space as a whole showed all the mistakes made throughout the organization. The seminars vaguely related to the ‘third world' took place on an unprivileged corner; the food was all provided by catering services employing low-wage work, plastic packages and corporate brands everywhere; the media centre was small and ill-equipped, while NGO, party and trade union stalls distributed enough leaflets, papers and stickers to drown a small town in.
./english/205.txt:68:First of all, the inside/outside discussion, ore than ever, has proved to be empty. What was the ESF? Alexandra Palace or Beyond the ESF, Life Despite Capitalism, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination? In what seems to me to be the most correct sense, all of them. If Fora will be capable of expressing the diversity of the movement(s) they say to bring together and serve as a public arena, it'll be because of their capacity to incorporate conflict, not to subsume it under a semblance of false consensus. To that extent, the British process, with all its many flaws, points to a promising possibility in its recognition (tacit or explicit, in the form of inclusion in the official programme) of other spaces; the Forum as a constellation of related self-organized convergence spaces without a centre seems a lot more interesting than the present format.
./english/205.txt:72:Another lesson the sad spectacle of Alexandra Palace presents us with is the necessity to incorporate the creative potency of the movement(s), which can provide viable, effective – and politically challenging, and much more cooperative and participatory – solutions to areas such as communications, translation and catering.
./english/221.txt:7:We networkers and flextimers of Northern and Southern Europe, autonomously gathered at Middlesex University and determined to go beyond sclerotizing ESF, solemnly join minds and bodies in the present declaration of conflict against Europe 's governments and corporate bureaucracies.
./english/229.txt:11:The London Social Forum has already been a matter of debate and its events have already been discussed in great depth and length; the overall conclusion derived from both positive and negative feedback is that there is a necessity to reassess the whole preparatory phase as well as the final one. The list of targets, as defined during the London Social Movement, against war, neo-liberalism and racism cannot be achieved alone by the regular meetings, they need to be incorporated into activities as part of the European networks with the scope of creating an ‘auto-reform’ within the boundaries of the Social Forum. The preparation and the “managing” of the European initiatives - already decided in London - must be brought to common responsibility and, in Paris, we need to define methods, contents and workshops to achieve these goals.
./english/237.txt:17:However, worrying trends emerged in the formative stages of the UK ESF process which raised questions about the motivations of the groups holding the reins of the event, namely Socialist Action, the Socialist Workers Party and the Greater London Authority (GLA). We quickly witness a lack of spaces for open dialogue, the delegitimisation of local working groups (including the London Social Forum), vertical company structures for the event and, most disturbingly, the silencing of dissent in the process and non-consensus based decisions. The UK ESF was sold as a gathering for those opposed to war, racism and corporate power, global justice, workers' rights and a sustainable society” but essentially it became a giant market place of commodified politics, with blatant backroom dealing in seminars and the privatisation of the event management.
./english/245.txt:57:One crucial factor for the ESF should be the involvement of the "Media of the Movements" – i.e. the progressive community media which is based in our constituency. However for the 2004 ESF these were treated as inferior cousins of the mainstream corporate press. There was an assumption that they would just provide coverage anyway. So instead of any campaign to involve them, there was little public encouragement given, until the very last minutes when some telephone calls were made to journalists of all types who attended the Paris ESF to encourage them to come to London. Press passes for the ESF were to be available to 'proper' journalists with National Press Cards, but while assurances had been given to media activists in London that community media would be able to gain press passes and access to the ESF media centre, this was never officially stated via the ESF website. Indeed during the preparatory process the media centre had been treated by many as "non-political" - as a purely practical issue disconnected from any political discourse. Some people even going as far as to ask how we can deal with ‘this problem of IndyMedia people and community media wanting to use the media centre’!
./english/248.txt:19:The permeation of market values was clearly visible at the Forum itself, where d iscussions on fair trade and the campaign to boycott Coke sat uneasily alongside the corporate food outlets selling Coca-Cola. But the real ‘innovations' lay behind the scenes. The GLA, having rested control of the budget-making process, kept this under tight wraps and assumed virtually the entire responsibility for the financial aspect of the forum. It brought with it the benefits of professional financial experience, but even this turned out to be doubled edged.
./english/250.txt:27:* Communication working group: journalistic-alike work of the Brazilian committee's communication working group. This incorporates different formats: written, audio, video, photos, etc.
./english/266.txt:6:Home » Research Tools » Hands-On Corporate Research Guide E-Mail Page
./english/266.txt:11:Hands-On Corporate Research Guide
./english/266.txt:30:Step 2: Look for Corporate Information in Business and Financial Resources
./english/266.txt:34:Look up the company with an investor guide like Market Guide, Hoover's Online or Insider Scores. Check out the corporate overview, executive information, stock performance and business news.
./english/266.txt:38:Check Form 10-K, for a comprehensive annual business and financial overview; Form 10-Q, for quarterly financial statements; Form 8-K, for reports on "material events or corporate changes," and Proxy Statements (Schedule 14A), which include executive compensation data.
./english/266.txt:51:Corporate Information
./english/266.txt:75:Corporate Responsibility
./english/266.txt:77:Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility: For nearly thirty years the ICCR has been a leader in researching, campaigning and spearheading shareholder resolutions for denominations and other groups interested in socially responsible investing.
./english/266.txt:86:Environmental Defense's Scorecard: A database of toxic chemical releases that is searchable by corporate facility.
./english/266.txt:110:Focus on the Global South: Does policy research, analysis and action on globalization and other corporate-related issues. Based in Thailand.
./english/266.txt:141:These are just a few on line publications that cover corporate accountability:
./english/272.txt:14:Moreover in practice, if not in theory, they developed a new understanding of knowledge and a recognition of different forms of knowledge. In their different ways they challenged the dominant – but philosophically widely challenged – positivist paradigm of knowledge as exclusively scientific laws based on observed statistical regularites. Without going into detail: it was a paradigm taken from a particular interpretation of natural sciences and applied to social science and both to public administration and to corporate management (cf the `scientific management’ of F.W. Taylor followed by Henry Ford on the one hand and Lenin on the other.) It allowed for one kind of knowledge and dismissed everything else as superstition, folklore, or as merely derivative from scientific laws.
./english/272.txt:37:It became self-consciously part of their/our work. Mayo Fuster’s paper maps out very well, the different forms this takes. The implication, however, of my stress on the interactive connection between knowledge and action this would imply a special emphasis on the various forms of co-research in which I would include the organisations like State Research, European Corporate Observatory, many of the researchers connected to the TNI and many small research centres working closely with different social and trade union movements, following their struggles and working with them to research the power structures their actions reveal and resisting and collaborating on the development of strategy and alternatives.
./english/274.txt:67:efforts of social reconstruction; he argues that much of the failure of centrally planned and engineered efforts lies in how they fail to incorporate, and most often relegate and deny the validity of the forms of cooperative and informal practices that support the formal social order. (1998: 313-340) The horror and atrocity of such “revolutionary states” emerges when such centrally planed schemes come to be backed by an authoritarian state apparatus willing to implement them by force.
./english/281.txt:17:Viewpoints that arise from potential subversive situations [...] are incorporated, neutralised and redefined within the discipline as methodological innovations or merely as qualitative investigative techniques (Gordo-Lopez, 2001). In other words deconstruction and qualitative methods can be used to justify reactionary practice. Deconstruction and relativism, for example, have been used by some to posit the notion that the Holocaust was an invention and to propagate their historical revisionist point of view. Has a similar process aided the reabsorption5 of critical psychology? I feel myself closest to the standpoint of ‘anti-psychiatry’ in the sense expressed by Bucalo (1997, 54), anti-psychiatry is not a theory but a practice…it is an everyday practice with which we confront other people’s experience and at the same time define our own...regarding interpersonal relations, anti-psychiatry does not limit itself to the negation of internment or the coercion of people’s subjectivities; it is furthermore an acknowledgment of those experiences/abilities within human beings. In other words being anti-psychiatry should be read as a way of being in relation to the world and the subjectivities within it. This is primarily a personal anti-psychiatry. Finally, the third set of doubts that the questionnaire evokes in me: What is the anti-capitalist movement? Is it really possible to talk about one anti-capitalist movement? For example, are the Mapuche movement, Tute Bianche or Attac part of the same struggle? Is there a lot of commonality between the anarchist perspective and NGOs’ politics? Do we fight for the same goals? Is there a common struggle? The definition of Social Movements (SM) is extremely varied and includes many groups with different styles and political positions and the attempt to find a common theory to explain them will result in homogenisation and simplification6. Even when we try to limit analysis to self-professed anti-capitalist movements we are still left with an enormous range of different groups and political options. What is the common ground? Do they work as friends or antagonists? Bearing in mind such heterogeneity, if we want to
./english/282.txt:129:Klein is herself a syndicated journalist working for the largest Canadian newspaper and reporting on the anti-corporate movement in the US. The core of the material, then, is generated by movement activism. The sections of her book dedicated to suggesting solutions, however, are by far the weakest - and stand out as particularly thin by comparison with the dramatic problems and movements she has documented.
./english/284.txt:85:This reflexivity of the insider blurs the line between the observed and the observer. In a similar fashion, many of the anthropologists active in global justice movements (Barcelona, Buenos Aires, NYC, …) are embodying a more reflexive position than that of the traditional “participant observer,”. We could call this emergent ethnographic actor ‘the participant who observes’. The goal is to develop accounts of the power of grassroots movements, presenting voices of dissent and alternatives where corporate media sees marginal and unworthy people. Limón’s reflexivity is offering the possibility to envision and conceive of ethnographies of resistance from within.
./english/293.txt:255:All of this places us in the terrain of productive bodies. Something which for us now has a fixed and unforgettable image: the Nike macro-billboard in Plaza del Sol interpolating each and every one of us: “And you, who are you?”: the ‘diva’, the ‘yogi’, the ‘fighter’ and the others: a sweaty black woman in boxing gloves, a blonde absorbed in the lotus position, a rocker-girl in her plastic pants… a condensation of identity which speaks to the possibilities of corporeal or incorporated experience, assuming the sensibility which encourages us to “make yourself a (sexualized) body”, a sensibility which makes anorexia only the extreme experience of a common corporeality.[24]
./english/298.txt:92:MB: Yes, but the real change is that it’s more than just reproduction. Academic managerialism is increasingly in the direct service of extracting surplus value from students as well as staff. The university is an accumulation machine. It employs students directly and it farms cheap or donated student labour out to its ‘corporate partners.’
./english/298.txt:94:As has been suggested elsewhere, especially by the players themselves, student athletes are unpaid workers contributing to campus and corporate accumulation.
./english/299.txt:299:In April of 2003 we drifted through the circuits of media precariousness. Media: graphic design, employment related to cultural and media production, temporary jobs in the industry of the spectacle, staff called ≥creative≤, publicity, corporate design, campaigns and promotion of brandsä yes, yes, the production of logos. Work on codes: translation, language, correction of proofs, editing, investigating, contacting and consulting from the home computer, free-lance in the media, artists without ring or rank, regulars at the casting calls as intermittent workers in the world of the spectacle, etc. Key words: creativity, vocation, connectivity, autonomy, flexibility, merit, proof, realization, professionalism, mobility, (self)education, stress, åfreeπ schedule, projectsä some talk funny and say things like ≥to have some issues on the table≤ or ≥monitoring≤ or ≥cultural units≤ or other similar things. If you look carefully, those who work in immaterial production are not telephone operators or chain-workers but nevertheless on occasions the tasks of communication, control of semiotic flows and management overlap and the only thing left are the features, symbolically very powerful, of a certain prestige and a certain satisfaction provided by creation, if not of åauthorshipπ then at least of åcollaborationπ, but lest you forget: casual.[44]
./english/300.txt:32:“Local people are to be incorporated as students and as professors. They are not to be further exploited. Their point of view is given first place. It is democratic also in that if planning work results, and that is one of the main purposes of the Expedition, then the planners, the geographers, are expected to live in the mess that they create. (Bunge in Peet 1979; p. 35)
./english/300.txt:76:Conversely geographers will need to recognize and engage with the elaborate amount of geographic thinking and analysis occurring within the movements of global resistance. A veritable potpourri of spatial practices and metaphors occupies many movement collectives’ imaginaries: the analysis of the links between the global and the local (as well as the regional and national) and the different sorts of political strategy necessary at each scale are often debated within movement groupings; the idea of ‘reclaiming’ is one that permeates much thinking within the movement-whether the reclaiming of concrete places (squatters’ movements) or reclaiming landscapes (such as Reclaim The Streets actions); the existence of groups with explicit names such as the Department of Land and Space Reclamation which is utilizing Lefebvrian thought on the creation of space and is now toying with uses of GIS to map corporate power in Chicago [2] ; the creation of ‘maps’ of networked power structures at a global scale to complement cognitive mapping practices and begin to visualize that global scale (Holmes 2003).
./english/303.txt:4:Movements against Corporate Globalization
./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:12:Militant ethnography breaks down the distinction between observer/intellectual and activist/practitioner. By organizing protests and gatherings, facilitating meetings, participating in strategic and tactical debates, and putting one’s body on the line during mass direct actions, militant ethnographers can better understand complex movement dynamics, while remaining active political subjects. Rather than generate sweeping political directives, collaboratively produced ethnographic knowledge aims to facilitate ongoing activist (self-) reflection about movement goals, tactics, strategies, and organizational forms. At the same time, there is often a marked contradiction between the moment of research and the moment of academic writing, publishing, and distribution, which involve vastly different systems of rewards and incentives. Indeed, the horizontal networking logic associated with anti-corporate globalization movements represents a serious challenge to the institutional logic of academia itself. Militant ethnographers must constantly negotiate such dilemmas, while moving back and forth among different sites of writing, teaching, and research.
./english/303.txt:30:My own research explores the cultural logic and politics of transnational networking among anti-corporate globalization activists based in Barcelona. I am interested in how transnational networks like Peoples Global Action or the World Social Forum are built and constructed, and how activists generate emotional energy, while physically representing alternative networks through embodied political praxis during mass direct actions. Through militant ethnography I hope to shed light on the concrete processes through which activists can build more effective and sustainable movement networks. My specific project thus involved long-term participant observation with the international working group of the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance (MRG), a broad network involving squatters, Zapatista support activists, anti-debt campaigners, radical ecologists, and other collectives. Between June 2001 and September 2002, I actively participated in action planning and coordination around mobilizations in Barcelona, Genoa, Brussels, Madrid, and Seville, while I had previously taken part in mass actions in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Prague. Moreover, since MRG was a European convener of PGA and many activists were also actively involved in the Social Forum process, I was also able to help organize PGA and WSF-related gatherings in Barcelona, Leiden, and Porto Alegre.
./english/303.txt:41:At the same time, the overwhelming campaign of low-level state terror unleashed by the Italian state also points to some of the potential limitations of the “diversity of tactics” logic. If rather than dividing and conquering, the state pursues and indiscriminate strategy of physical repression it becomes impossible to safely divide up the urban terrain. In particular contexts, such as the upcoming RNC protests in New York, for example, it might make sense to actively dissuade other activists from using militant black block styles and tactics. However, blanked condemnations of protests “violence,” including the widely circulated statements by Susan George after Gothenburg and Genoa, are not likely to produce the desired effect largely because they violate the basic networking logic at the heart of contemporary anti-corporate globalization movements. Rather, it I sonly through dialogue and immanent critique based on solidarity and respect that such contentious issues can be resolved. At its best, militant ethnography can thus provide a mechanism for shedding light on contemporary networking logics and politics, while also making effective interventions into ongoing activist debates.
./english/303.txt:52:For the militant ethnographer the issue is not so much the kind of knowledge produced, which is always practically engaged and collaborative, but rather, how is it presented, for which audience, and where is it distributed? These questions go to the very heart of the alternative network-based cultural logics and political forms more radical anti-corporate globalization activists are generating and putting into practice. Addressing them responds not only to the issue of ethical responsibility toward one’s informants, colleagues, and friends; it also sheds light on the nature of contemporary movements themselves.
./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/303.txt:56:Anthropologists have recently proposed specific strategies for making ethnography useful for activists, which can be incorporated into a broader praxis for militant ethnography. Working with U.S.-based direct action activist, for example, David Graeber (2004) similarly notes the embattled role of the traditional vanguard intellectual, positing ethnography as a potential alternative, which would involve “teasing out the tacit logic or principles underlying certain forms of radical practice, and then, not only offering the analysis back to those communities, but using them to formulate new visions (335).” In this register, ethnography becomes a tool for collective reflection about activist practice and emerging utopian imaginaries.
./english/303.txt:67:Finally, the question remains as to the most appropriate context for practicing militant ethnography and how to distribute the results. One obvious place is the academy, which despite increasing corporate influence and institutional constraints, continues to offer a critical space for collective discussion, learning, and debate. Indeed, as Scheper-Hughes (1995) suggests, those of us within the academy can use academic writing and publishing as a form of resistance, working within the system to generate alternative politically engaged accounts. Moreover, as Routledge (1996: 400) points out, there are no “pure” or “authentic” sites, as academia and activism both “constitute fluid fields of social action that are interwoven with other activity spaces.” Routledge thus posits an alternative “third space,” “where neither site, role, or representation holds sway, where one continually subverts the other.” The more utopian alternative is suggested by the rise of multiple networks of autonomous research collectives and free university projects, including the “activist research” conference cited above. In my own case, by examining the cultural logics, networking activities, and utopian imaginaries within contemporary anti-corporate globalization movements, I hope to contribute to both academic and activist spheres through exploring, as the Argentine Colectivo Situaciones puts it, “the emerging clues of a new sociability within concrete practices (2001: 39).”
./english/303.txt:87:Juris, Jeffrey S. 2004. Digital Age Activism: Anti-Corporate Globalization and the Cultural Politics of Transnational Networking. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.
./english/312.txt:24:First, since the late 1980s demands for an internationalisation of research activities have been advanced in the form of an emerging academic capitalism which has profoundly transformed the way in which scholars undertake research activities: market-like behaviour, the principle of performativity and the power of management in the administration of research funds have become crucial in this regard. What has been considered by the dominant forces and elites as the challenge of the market-economy to the university system has led to greater resource concentrations and, as a result, to the development of a range of ‘centres of excellence’ and ‘corporate universities’ capable of attracting these resources to the detriment of ‘ordinary’ (public) universities. These developments have produced increasingly deeper inequalities at an international scale between the more prosperous countries and regions, where allegedly ‘high-quality’ universities are mostly concentrated, and those that are lagging behind.
./english/313.txt:115:There are many research groups keeping awake on the globalizations mechanism on the political institutions, like the reach develop by State Watch and also putting the accent into economical aspects, like Corporate European Observatory CEO, or the effects of the GMO, convening campaigns with the research, like ASEED, or the research for the denounce of regions doing very hard structural violence.
./english/313.txt:157:Juris, J, 2004, Practicing Militant Ethnography within Movements against Corporate Globalization. SSSP Annual Meeting.
./english/316.txt:15:As for the ‘Global Justice and Solidarity Movement’ (GJ&SM), this is actually a name proposed by the Call, for the general wave of protest against corporate-dominated globalisation, against US-sponsored neo-liberalism/neo-conservatism and war, one name for the new wave of radical-democratic protest and counter-proposition. This ‘movement of movements’ is marked by its network form and communicational activity, a matter recognised by friends and enemies alike (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, Cleaver 1998, Escobar 2003, Klein 2001). Morever, ‘it’ seems to change size, shape, reach, scale, target and aims according to events. So, at one moment it might be focussed against neo-liberal economic globalisation, at another against the US-led war on Iraq. This makes it even more challenging to analyse than to name.
./english/316.txt:36:corporate attempts to copyright genetic resources, to genetically modify foodstuffs, to commercialise them and then coerce people/s into buying them;
./english/316.txt:51:Other major sources of, or contributors to, the new movement must be mentioned. One was the rising wave of protest against unemployment, privatisation and cuts in social services, which gathered steam throughout the 1990s, markedly in Europe. Another was the increasing development of ‘counter-expertise’, concentrated in inter/national non-governmental organisations which had been honed at a series of United Nations (UN) conferences and summits through the 1990s, notably those on the environment in Rio, 1992, and on women in Beijing, 1995. Yet another was the rise of irreverent, often anarchist-tinted, direct action movements, of customarily internationalist appeal, such as Reclaim the Streets in the UK. This supported the courageous, but eventually defeated, Liverpool Dockers’ protest against corporate attack, state legislation - and union passivity in the face of such. A significant international libertarian initiative, related to this kind of national activity, was that of PGA, which held meetings in Geneva, Bangalore and Cochabamba. (Abramsky 2001, PGA website, Reclaim the Streets website, Sweeney 1997).
./english/316.txt:57:It is clear, from yet another appellation - the ‘anti-capitalist movement’ - that this ‘movement of movements’ is as much an aspiration as an actuality, as much a becoming as a being. It has, however, passed one major test. When the terrorist attack on New York and Washington occurred, September 11, 2001, this was a stalemate to a growing movement in North America (Seattle, 1999; Washington, 2001; Quebec, 2001). Yet, with the US-led wars against Afghanistan, 2002 and Iraq, 2003, a movement often considered to be primarily ‘anti-corporate’ morphed into the biggest international anti-war protest in history. A New York Times columnist stated, February 18, 2003, ‘there may still be in our planet, two super-powers: the United States and world public opinion’. A 300-strong anti-war demonstration took place even in Lima, Peru. This is a country profoundly traumatised and isolated by decades of neo-liberalism, counter/insurgency and authoritarian rule, and which had – unlike neighbouring Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia - previously revealed only marginal awareness of the new international/ist wave. (Ashman 2003, Boyd 2003, Callinicos 2003, Starr 2000).
./english/319.txt:10:I personally found a lot of the criticisms against the London ESF rather ridiculous. Alexandra Palace was almost compared to Bastille, the registration fee (slightly over the price of the transport pass it included) was deemed as sign of its corporate character, and the GLA funding as the irrefutable evidence of its subordination to sell- out bureaucrats.
./english/320.txt:48:Accommodative projects seek to separate movements from each other and to incorporate them in selective ways (since to incorporate a movement from below more fully would be to abdicate, both in terms of power granted and in terms of interests). Activists facing such projects need above all to stress solidarity and find ways of building links with one another. In facing repressive projects, which seek to exclude movements from below, activists need to treat civil and political rights as the gains of past mvements (which they are), and understand that (whether legal or illegal) the exercise of such rights is the necessary precondition for movement action. This does not, of course, mean that movements from below should remain passive in this situation, which is after all one where movements from above are on the defensive. Rather, they need both to tackle these responses from above to their own movements and to find ways of taking the initiative further.
./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/331.txt:87:Every week high profile left-wing writers (George Monbiot, Noam Chomsky, Mark Thomas, John Pilger to name a few) comment on the activities of corporate bullies and their partners in crime, corrupt politicians. Landmark publications have fuelled the anti-capitalist fire: Naomi Klein's No Logo was the book that united frustrated protestors into a global movement. Websites such as CorpWatch, Globalise Resistance and IndyMedia disseminate information and propaganda, and mobilise support - not just from rich kids in rich countries, but increasingly diverse groups from developing countries too. Each and every recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, WTO, IMF, World Bank, G8, in Davos, Seattle, Prague, Genoa, New York; environmental summits in Rio and Johannesburg, has had a contingent of protestors challenging the neo-liberal status quo. The left is still there, and it rejects both the conservative and the Third Way’s claim to the moral high ground. To the secular left, morality is compassion and justice on a global, humanitarian scale that transcends religious, ethnic or geo-political boundaries:
./english/331.txt:95:The difficulty with the anti-capitalist protest movement is bound up with the necessity to unite factions under one banner. Some protestors are so over-zealous in their condemnation of unethical corporate behaviour that they feel justified in using violent means of protest. Clearly violence against another human is immoral. However, where can you draw the line when peaceful protest spills over into the expression of frustration against the property of such corporations? If the police are authorised to use deadly force, as they did when Carlo Giuliani was martyred to the protest movement in Genoa in July 2002, who do we blame?
./english/331.txt:97:Corporate responsibility & global governance
./english/332.txt:45:We also need to campaign to incorporate the thousands upon thousands mobilised into the work of the ESF to turn it into a fighting body and to win them to a perspectives well beyond the reformist policies of the ELP, the trade union leaderships and NGOs like ATTAC – for a world wide movement fighting for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and imperialism, for a new international of the workers and youth - a Fifth International.
./english/344.txt:31:The word ‘merger’ seems appropriate, secondly, in analogy with the contemporary corporate world, in which it is the boards of directors who are involved, whilst those lower down the hierarchy are either uninformed, passively observe or – where more actively concerned and involved – may at best express some opinions or hope that ‘unity means strength’. In this union case the merger has been virtually invisible to the 176 million or so of union members claimed, to world public opinion in general - and even to that progressive part of such in the new ‘global justice and solidarity movement’ (GJ&SM). Information denial here goes to the point at which a relevant article by the ICFTU’s Joint General Secretary was published not on the ICFTU website, but in Medellin, Colombia (Oliveira 2006).
./english/344.txt:37:The most obvious challenge in Latin America has been the competition between the regional organisations of the ICFTU and the WCL. The regional body of the ICFTU, the ORIT (Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores, 1951), is actually a hemispheric organisation, including the major national union centres of the USA and Canada. That of the WCL, the CLAT (Confederación Latinamericana de Trabajadores), is restricted to Latin America. In the past the ORIT was widely associated with what was then called the ‘AFL-CIO-CIA’, in other words, with the use of the US unions as a channel for US corporate or state manipulation of Latin American unions (Agee 1975). In the past, the CLAT has struck radical notes, in favour of worker self-management, or the organisation of the self-employed. But neither the one thing nor the other means that today the CLAT is more radical than the ORIT. Its credentials have in the past been also seriously challenged (Stichting Imperialisme en Onderontwikkeling 1984). The ORIT has recently itself been rather more assertive than its mother organisation in Brussels. So much so that its mother organisation, the ICFTU, has ignored its Labour Platform for the Americas (2006), despite its hardly revolutionary orientation. The relative radicalism of ICFTU affiliates in the region is suggested in concerns about the composition of the new international and its relationship with the broader social movements:
./english/344.txt:41:[…] One of the great victories we have achieved in the continent was the non-implementation of the [Free Trade Area of the Americas]. This agreement, nefarious for all workers, particularly those of Latin America and the Caribbean, was only possible thanks to the united struggle of union centres of all the countries, from Canada to Argentina, through the mediation of the ORIT and the Continental Social Alliance (CSA). This alliance, in addition to being of the North with the South – even if for different motives – also incorporated a series of social movements and NGOs, and was a great victory we cannot lose. (Jakobsen 2005:66-7)
./english/359.txt:7:[This is an essay in progress...modest changes will be incorporated until its final version appears in Z Magazine, in March 2003. Ideas for improvements are welcome -- mail to sysop@zmag.org -- most recent changes 02/05]
./english/359.txt:74:On the other hand, there were the rest of the presenters. I don't know their numbers but I would guess a few thousand or so. The events that these participants planned in many cases did not even appear in the official schedules and were subject to last minute termination or, short of that, to room changes. These second-tier presenters were afforded few comforts and little financial support though they included overwhelmingly less well-off people then the 100 or so at the hotels. Gender still seems to play a horrible and destructive role in people’s roles and visibility, as well. Beyond presenters, moreover, there were the youth who were housed in a camp with barely sufficient water and barely acceptable sewage. That the roughly 30,000 people in the youth camp made it a vibrant community in which there were no hierarchies is immensely admirable, but the many virtues of those who endure harsh conditions joyfully don't excuse that they were treated as a separate entity, with little visible effort to incorporate them.
./english/360.txt:7:[This is an essay in progress...modest changes will be incorporated until its final version appears in Z Magazine, in March 2003. Ideas for improvements are welcome -- mail to sysop@zmag.org -- most recent changes 02/05]
./english/360.txt:74:On the other hand, there were the rest of the presenters. I don't know their numbers but I would guess a few thousand or so. The events that these participants planned in many cases did not even appear in the official schedules and were subject to last minute termination or, short of that, to room changes. These second-tier presenters were afforded few comforts and little financial support though they included overwhelmingly less well-off people then the 100 or so at the hotels. Gender still seems to play a horrible and destructive role in peoples roles and visibility, as well. Beyond presenters, moreover, there were the youth who were housed in a camp with barely sufficient water and barely acceptable sewage. That the roughly 30,000 people in the youth camp made it a vibrant community in which there were no hierarchies is immensely admirable, but the many virtues of those who endure harsh conditions joyfully don't excuse that they were treated as a separate entity, with little visible effort to incorporate them.
./english/361.txt:6:Like most social movements anarchism is diverse. Most broadly an anarchist seeks out and identifies structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination throughout life, and tries to challenge them as conditions and the pursuit of justice permit. Anarchists work to eliminate subordination. They focus on political power, economic power, power relations among men and women, power between parents and children, power among cultural communities, power over future generations via effects on the environment, and much else as well. Of course anarchists challenge the state and the corporate rulers of the domestic and international economy, but they also challenge every other instance and manifestation of illegitimate authority.
./english/361.txt:10:Problems arise because from being "opponents of illegitimate authority" one can grow movements of incomparable majesty, on the one hand, and movements that are majestically unimpressive, on the other hand. If anarchism means mostly the former, good people will admire and gravitate toward anarchism. But if anarchism means mostly the latter, then good people will have reservations or even be hostile to it. So what's the not so admirable or even distasteful version of anarchism now? And what is the admirable version? And do even the admirable strands incorporate sufficient insight to be successful?
./english/364.txt:31:Yet Porto Alegre, site of the World Social Forum (WSF) last year and again this year, has become the byword for the spirit of the burgeoning movement against corporate-driven globalization. Galvanized by the slogan "Another world is possible," some 70,000 people are expected to flock to this coastal city from January 31 to February 4. This figure is nearly six times that for last year.
./english/364.txt:35:And the place will be graced by personalities who have come to exemplify the diversity of the movement against corporate-driven globalization—among others, activist-thinker Noam Chomsky, Indian physicist-feminist Vandana Shiva, Canadian people’s advocate Maude Barlow, and Egyptian intellectual Samir Amin.
./english/364.txt:39:The World Social Forum emerged as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of the global corporate crowd in Davos, Switzerland.
./english/364.txt:51:Since its first meeting the stock of the WSF has risen while that of the WEF has fallen. Already put on the defensive as a gathering to "discuss how to maintain hegemony over the rest of us," as one of the debaters on the WSF side put it, the WEF received a further blow when it was forced to hold its 2002 meeting away from Davos since the Swiss government could no longer guarantee the security of its corporate participants.
./english/365.txt:36:The place of government in the activists’ political calculus clearly varies from nation to nation and from organization to organization. However, newly emerging forms of political action are being aimed beyond government nearly everywhere in the post -industrial North. These politics include creative experiments with publicly monitored labor, environmental, food, and trade standards regimes designed to hold transnational targets directly accountable to activist networks and their publics (see examples at www.globalcitizenproject.org, under labor standards, fair trade, and corporate social responsibility). These nimble campaigns aimed at corporations and transnational trade and development targets lend themselves to the repertoires of digital communication: lists and action alerts, swarming responses (e.g., denial of service attacks on corporate websites), and the continuous refiguring of web networks as campaigns shift focus and change players.
./english/365.txt:56:In the American case, the model for activist issue campaigns can be traced to “corporate” campaigns pioneered by labor unions in the early 1980s (Manheim 2001). These corporate campaigns have now spread throughout activist and advocacy circles, being adopted by environmental, health, human rights, as well as by anti-globalization and sustainable development groups and coalitions. For example, a small global network of NGOs stopped Monsanto’s plans to develop genetically engineered seed with a successful media campaign labeling the sterile seed strain “The Terminator.” And the small human rights organization Global Witness successfully targeted the diamond giant De Beers, which ultimately agreed to limit the market for the bloody “conflict” diamonds that motivated mercenary armies to establish regimes of terror in crumbling African states (Cowell 2001).
./english/365.txt:57:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 15 Some of these campaigns resemble traditional boycotts in the sense that they are run by relatively centralized organizations or coalitions, and they can be turned off when specified goals are accomplished. However, an increasingly common pattern is for whole activist networks to latch onto particularly ripe targets such as Nike or Microsoft because their heavily advertised and ubiquitous logos stick easily to lifestyle meaning systems among consumer publics. This stickiness of logos helps activists get political messages into the mass media, reaching audiences whose attention is often limited in matters of politics. Thus, unlike boycotts, many contemporary issue campaigns do not require consumer action at all; instead, the goal is to hold a corporate logo hostage in the media until shareholders or corporate managers regard the bad publicity as an independent threat to a carefully cultivated brand image.
./english/365.txt:60:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 16 ) left the long-running campaign against Nike after generating enough negative publicity (see below) to induce company president Phil Knight to promise to take greater responsibility for poor labor conditions in its contract factories. However, other players (e.g., United Students Against Sweatshops, and Press for Change, Jeff Ballinger’s founding campaign organization) contended that a key unresolved issue was creating an effective labor standards monitoring system in the absence of reliable government regulation (see Bullert, 2000; and Bennett, 2003c). As a result, the network reconfigured after the loss of the Global Exchange hub, and student activist organizations became the central hubs. The campaign focus shifted to verifying Nike’s claims of greater corporate responsibility. communication noise, lack of clarity about goals, and weak idea-framing, also enable networks to refigure themselves after losses and disruptions. For example, the San Francisco based social justice organization Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org
./english/365.txt:96:Thinking about how digital networks can transform the political capacities of both nodes and collectivities raises some interesting questions about measurement. Some combination of ethnographic observation, member narratives of organizational roles, and network link mapping seems appropriate. It is clear, for example, that link maps alone are often difficult to interpret. A study of Web sites linked to by other organization sites at the time of the Seattle protests showed the official WTO site was the link leader (2129 links), followed by several protest hubs with impressive links: One World (348); Institute for Global Communications (111), Seattlewto.org, the sponsored site of the NGO coalition (92); and Corporate Watch (74), among others (Smith & Smyth, 2000). Various accounts of the Seattle protests (www.wtohistory.org; Levi & Olson, 2000) suggest that one could not easily derive the key mobilizing coalition players from these link patterns.
./english/365.txt:104:Another flow from micro to mass media has occurred in the vast global network of anti-Microsoft protest (Bennett, 2003c; Manheim, 2001). Numerous derogatory images have traveled through Internet chats, networked campaign sites, and webzines, and surfaced in mainstream news accounts indicating that the company was trying to “crush competition,” that it was known by opponents as “the Seattle Slasher,” or that Bill Gates was the latter day incarnation of Robber Baron icon, John D. Rockefeller. The difficulty of anticipating the rise of such images -- much less, using standard public relations techniques to combat them -- has given activists new levers of media power in global subpolitics. This media activism has forced many companies to weigh the advantages of highly profitable business models against the damage inflicted upon precious brand images. Canadian media consultant Doug Miller was quoted in The Financial Times as saying “I visit 75 boardrooms a year and I can tell you the members of the boards are living in fear of getting their corporate reputations blown away in two months on the Internet.” (Mackin, 2001)
./english/365.txt:107:Beyond the characterizations of the activists, the predominant news framing of the overall protest movement is also negative, as in “anti-globalization.” This is clearly a news construction that is at odds with how many of the activists think of their common cause. If movement media framing could be put to a vote among activists, I suspect that “democratic globalization” would win over “anti-globalization” by a wide margin. For example, here is how American labor John Sweeney put it: “It's clear that globalization is here to stay. We have to accept that and work on having a seat at the table when the rules are written about how globalization works." (Greenhouse, 2002) In another account, Susan George (one of the founding members of the French global social justice organization ATTAC) rejects the “anti-globalization” framing as an insultingly poor account of global activism. In explaining the inadequacies of the “anti-globalization” frame, she also reveals why better accounts are unlikely to be written by news organizations bent on producing simple narratives: “The movement itself is, however, multi-focus and inclusive. It is concerned with the world: omnipresence of corporate rule, the rampages of financial markets, ecological destruction, maldistribution of wealth and power, international institutions constantly overstepping their mandates and lack of international democracy.” (George, 2001).
./english/366.txt:12:The day sent a clear message about the grassroots organizing power of the net: It enabled the antiwar movement to turn out its base quickly and cheaply, do an end run around corporate-controlled media and reach into the politically disaffected American mainstream. The coming months and years will test how deeply the new movement can tap this potential, and to what extent "nets roots" organizing will be adopted by more established political players, liberal and conservative alike.
./english/366.txt:36:This "tell a friend" phenomenon is key to how organizing happens on the net. It gives people who feel alienated from politics something valuable to contribute: their unique credibility within their particular circle of acquaintances. A small gesture to these friends can contribute to a massive multiplier effect. It is a grassroots answer to the corporate consolidation of media, which has enabled an overwhelmingly conservative punditry to give White House spin real political momentum, and the semblance of truth, simply through intensity of repetition.
./english/366.txt:70:In some ways, the debate over whether online organizing is as "real" or as effective as face-to-face organizing misses the point. What's interesting about meetup.com, the UFPJ website and MoveOn's meeting tool is how they leverage the Internet to get people together face to face in ways (and at speeds and costs) that were simply not possible before. As with the phone, the television or computer-generated direct mail, the Internet won't replace traditional organizing, but it does alter the rules in important ways. Because e-mail is near-instantaneous and costs just fractions of a penny, one can communicate very quickly with a lot of people at the speed of word of mouth. Because it is browsable from home, at any hour, it provides a much easier first point of contact between a campaign and interested participants. Because it is a peer-to-peer tool open to all, it allows geographically dispersed people to find each other easily and coordinate. Because it is still an open-publishing model, free from the constraints of corporate-owned media, it can carry the channels of alternative information essential for sustaining social movements.
./english/366.txt:78:Whatever else it has done, the Internet has helped to level the playing field between an entrenched government and corporate and media power, and an insurgent citizenry. The future might indeed be up for grabs.
./english/367.txt:21:The split in the CPI resulted in the formation of the “right” CPI, which openly advocated an alliance with the progressive national bourgeoisie, but which also had a more democratic (or at least less autocratic) inner party regime. The left split-off, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), was to become the world’s most unreconstructed Stalinist party. But it incorporated in an uneasy alliance two wings — those who wanted accommodation within the capitalist state under somewhat different theoretical premises than the CPI, and those who wanted an armed struggle to overthrow the “comprador-ruled, semi-feudal, semi-colonial state,” as they characterized India. Within a few years, this wing started accusing the other wing of the CPI(M) of being equally revisionist and opportunist, and eventually it split off to form the CPI(ML) and a few other Maoist parties. The spark which led to the split was a peasant uprising in Naxalbari, from which came the name “Naxalites” [a term often used in the press for the Maoists]. The CPI(ML) and the other Maoist groups splintered, united, splintered, and in the process, the original radicalism was lost. Before looking at that history, however, we need to look at a few other sectors of the left.
./english/367.txt:35:By the late 1990s, the CPI(ML) Liberation had indeed spread somewhat. But its real mobilizational power remained restricted to Bihar, and to Assam, where it had incorporated the Karbi Anglong movement. Its one MP came from Assam. In West Bengal, it proved to be a damp squib. In particular, its pretension of being an electoral alternative to the CPI(M) proved to be a total joke, with a large portion of its candidates in municipal elections getting votes in two figures. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous province, it tried to make headway by allying with the bourgeois party of Mulayam Singh Yadav, at one stage defense minister in the United Front government, especially in the petty bourgeois milieu of student politics, which remains its major recruiting ground in the cities.
./english/368.txt:38:This enclosure resembles that of other capitalists who have fenced off agricultural land or industrial space in order to control it. In cyberspace just as in the geographical frontiers of the Americas (the North American West, the South American Pampas or Rainforests) there has been a dynamic struggle between the pioneers and the profiteers. Just as mountain men, gauchos and poor farmers have sought independence through the flight to and colonization of new lands, so cyberspace pioneers have carved out new spaces and filled them with their own activity. Just as big capital (agribusiness, railroads, etc.) has come hard on the heels of homesteaders, seeking to take over their lands, forcing them out or reducing them to waged labor, so too has business chased after the new electronic frontiers with the object of buy-out or take-over. Those threatened with enclosure, of course, have always fought back. As a result, just as the campesinos of Morelia under the leadership of Zapata cut barbed wire to liberate the land in 1910, electronic hackers have chopped down electronic barriers and liberated information, creating a pirate underground of free activity constantly slipping beyond corporate and state control. So too have the colonists of cyberspace defended their own spaces against monopolization in other ways, including public campaigns both legal and political against big business and state control.(9)
./english/368.txt:112:In another sector of RAND, even more closely integrated with the U.S. military, analysts have incorporated Arquilla and Ronfeldt's "netwar" preoccupations into war game modeling. A war game called "The Day After . . . in Cyberspace" includes the activities of a fictional NGO called the Committee for Planetary Peace --"an Internet-intensive, anti-U.S.-military group with suspected Iranian fundamentalists ties." In the game scenario this NGO is portrayed as "mobilizing all its chapters to thwart the U.S.'s 'mad dash' to war."(48) The parallels with pro-Zapatista, anti-war efforts to block the Mexican government's military actions in Chiapas are striking.
./english/368.txt:116:With respect specifically to Chiapas, at least two of us who are active in circulating counter-information have separately received lucrative proposals to sell-out by funneling our information to corporate investors. The proposals came in the wake of the peso crisis in December 1994 when many investors lost money in a devaluation they had not foreseen and the government was blaming its moves on the Zapatistas. The proposals, made by an editor of a major business magazine, were for us to provide "relevant information" from "alternative sources" that could be sold to capitalists anxious to be on top of things so as to avoid such unexpected crises and loses. We would "get rich", he said, and of course we could do what we wanted with our money, e.g., support the Zapatistas. This entrepreneurial editor foresaw eventually generalizing this service from information about Mexico to other countries in Latin America and beyond.(51)
./english/368.txt:118:On the side of the state, besides backing up the "legal rights" of corporate private property, governments struck first against hackers who dared to penetrate the state's own enclosures, e.g., military computer systems. The best known cases in the U.S. have been well publicized FBI arrests of hackers and seizures of equipment. The strategy has been terror: prosecute a few to intimidate others.(52)
./english/368.txt:138:The State of the Struggle in Cyberspace and Beyond Despite scattered attacks by governments in various countries, the initiative in this area still lies almost entirely on the side of those using The Net for the circulation of struggle. So far, those attacks have been rather crude --police raids and censorship-- and caused little disruption to the myriad flows of information and mobilization that continue to criss-cross the globe. The most effective capitalist initiatives in cyberspace have been the commercialization of the Internet and the use of electronic communications for organizing transnational corporate operations. These efforts, however, have not directly impeded the kinds of struggles I have been describing. Indeed, if anything they have provoked greater international organizing to offset the power of multinational capital. Similarly, efforts to introduce legislation in the U.S. to regulate and control information flows have provoked widespread counter-organization and mobilization.
./english/371.txt:38:For me, this third World Social Forum tore the veil off the face of the neo-liberal capitalism which dominates the world. Nafta and the European Union are not democratic. They are key players in corporate globalisation. The European Referendum campaign has been launched in order to build real democracy and ensure the full participation of women and young people in the European Union. For it is the old men who still dominate the politics of the world (whether left or right, whether in the west or east, in the north or south). Across the globe, capitalist globalisation is still riding triumphant. The shadows of imperialism and neo-colonialism are very evident, especially in our region, the so-called Middle East (middle to whom, by the way?). The leaders of the so-called ‘free world’ who met at Davos are moving steadily to the right, hiding their economic interests behind a religious veil, whether Christian or Jewish, using Islamic fundamentalism or post-modern terrorism to reinforce and expand their domination. The so-called ‘War against Terrorism’ has devastated Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, and is relentlessly building up plans to devastate Iran, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Korea and others.
./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/376.txt:40:Take the decision-making out of the closed rooms of politicians and the corporate sector and into a truly public forum. Create a space or spaces where civil society truly has a diversity of voices in the discussion on what media and information technologies should be, with full participation beyond a rhetorical nod.
./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:32:Consequently, in this paper, I focus on the ways that an oppositional politics can use new technologies to intervene within the global restructuring of capitalism to promote democratic and anti-capitalist social movements aiming at radical structural transformation. I would argue that globalization and technological revolution are in some ways inevitable -- barring an apocalyptic collapse of the global economy -- but the forms that they take are not. That is, I think that the trends toward a more global economy and culture, a networked society, and the continued flow of commodities, images, cultural forms, technology and people across the globe will continue apace, as will intense technological revolution. Both take the form of what Schumpeter called åcreative destructionπ and guarantee that the next decades will be highly turbulent, contested and full of struggle and conflict. But the forms that globalization and technological revolution will take are neither fixed nor determined. Hence, I would argue that it is perfectly reasonable to oppose corporate capitalist globalization and its market model of society, its neoliberal laissez-faire ideology and its putting profit, competition and market logic before all other aspects of life. I will accordingly focus on the ways that technopolitics can and are being used for anti-capitalist contestation, while noting the limitations of this conception.
./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:82:There have been many campaigns against the excesses of capitalist global corporations such as Nike and McDonald's. Hackers attacked Nike's site in June 2000 and substituted a åglobal justiceπ message for Nike's corporate hype. Many anti-Nike web-sites and list-serves have emerged, helping groups struggling against Nike's labour practices circulate information and organize movements against Nike, which have forced them to modify their labour practices.[7]
./english/379.txt:86:A British group that created an anti-McDonald's website against the junk food corporation and then distributed the information through digital and print media has also received significant attention. This site was developed by supporters of two British activists, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, who were sued by McDonald's for distributing leaflets denouncing the corporation's low wages, advertising practices, involvement in deforestation, cruel treatment of animals and patronage of an unhealthy diet. The activists counterattacked and with help from supporters, organized a McLibel campaign, assembled a McSpotlight website with a tremendous amount of information criticizing the corporation, mobilizing experts to testify and confirm their criticisms. The three-year civil trial, Britain's longest ever, ended ambiguously on June 19, 1997, with the judge defending some of McDonald's claims against the activists, while substantiating some of the activists' criticisms (Vidal 1997: 299-315). The case created unprecedented bad publicity for McDonald's which was disseminated throughout the world via internet websites, mailing lists and discussion groups. The McLibel/McSpotlight group claims that their website was accessed over 15 million times and was visited over two million times in the month of the verdict alone (Vidal 1997: 326). The Guardian reported that the site åclaimed to be the most comprehensive source of information on a multinational corporation ever assembledπ and was part of one of the more successful anticorporate campaigns (22 February 1996; www.mcspotlight.org).
./english/379.txt:94:On the whole, labour organizations, such as the North South Dignity of Labor group, note that computer networks are useful for organizing and distributing information, but cannot replace print media, which are more accessible to many of their members, face-to-face meetings and traditional forms of political action. Thus, the challenge is to articulate one's communications politics with actual movements and struggles so that cyberpolitics is an arm of real battles rather than their replacement or substitute. The most efficacious internet projects have indeed intersected with activist movements encompassing campaigns to free political prisoners, boycotts of corporate projects, and various labour and even revolutionary struggles, as noted above.
./english/379.txt:100:One of the more instructive examples of the use of the internet to foster global struggles against the excesses of corporate capitalism occurred in the protests in Seattle and throughout the world against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in December 1999, and the subsequent emergence of a worldwide anti-globalization movement in 2000-2001. Behind these actions was a global protest movement using the internet to organize resistance to the institutions of capitalist globalization, while championing democratization. In the build-up to the 1999 Seattle demonstrations, many websites generated anti-WTO material and numerous mailing lists used the internet to distribute critical material and to organize the protest. The result was the mobilization of caravans from throughout the United States to take protestors to Seattle, as well as contingents of activists throughout the world. Many of the protestors had never met and were recruited through the internet. For the first time ever, labour, environmentalist, feminist, anticapitalist, animal rights, anarchist and other groups organized to protest aspects of globalization and to form new alliances and solidarities for future struggles. In addition, demonstrations took place throughout the world, and a proliferation of anti-WTO material against the extremely secret group spread throughout the internet.[9]
./english/379.txt:112:More important, many activists were energized by the new alliances, solidarities and militancy, and continued to cultivate an anti-globalization movement. The Seattle demonstrations were followed by April 2000 struggles in Washington, D.C., to protest the World Bank and IMF, and later in the year against capitalist globalization in Prague and Melbourne; in April 2001, an extremely large and militant protest erupted against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quebec City. It was apparent that a new worldwide movement was in the making capable of uniting diverse opponents of capitalist globalization throughout the world. The anticorporate globalization movement favoured globalization from below, which would protect the environment, labour rights, national cultures, democratization and other goods from the ravages of an uncontrolled capitalist globalization (see Falk 1999 and Brecher, Costello and Smith 2000).
./english/379.txt:124:Hence, to capital's globalization from above, cyberactivists have been attempting to carry out globalization from below, developing networks of solidarity and propagating oppositional ideas and movements throughout the planet. To the capitalist international of transnational corporate-led globalization, a Fifth International, to use Waterman's phrase (1992), of computer-mediated activism is emerging that is qualitatively different from the party-based socialist and communist Internationals. Such networking links labour, feminist, ecological, peace and other anticapitalist groups, providing the basis for a new politics of alliance and solidarity to overcome the limitations of postmodern identity politics (see Dyer-Witheford 1999 and Burbach 2001).
./english/380.txt:65: From these economistic perspectives, globalization is merely a continuation of previous social tendencies; i.e. the logic of capital and domination by corporate and commercial interests of the world economy and culture. Defenders of capitalism, by contrast, present globalization as the triumph of free markets, democracy, and individual freedom (Fukuyama 1998 and Friedman 1999). Hence, there are both positive and negative versions of economic and technological determinism. Most theories of globalization, therefore, are reductive, undialectical, and one-sided, either failing to see the interaction between technological features of globalization and the global restructuring of capitalism, or the complex relations between capitalism and democracy. Dominant discourses of globalization are thus one-sidedly for or against globalization, failing to articulate the contradictions and the conflicting costs and benefits, upsides and downsides, of the process. Hence, many current theories of globalization do not capture the novelty and ambiguity of the present moment that involves both innovative forms of technology and economy -- and emergent conflicts and problems generated by the contradictions of globalization.
./english/380.txt:97: The terrorist acts on the United States on September 11 and subsequent Terror War dramatically disclose the downsides of globalization, the ways that global flows of technology, goods, information, ideologies, and people can have destructive as well as productive effects. The disclosure of powerful anti-Western terrorist networks shows that globalization divides the world as it unifies, that it produces enemies as it incorporates participants. The events disclose explosive contradictions and conflicts at the heart of globalization and that the technologies of information, communication, and transportation that facilitate globalization can also be used to undermine and attack it, and generate instruments of destruction as well as production[k1] .[4]
./english/380.txt:121: The processes of globalization are highly turbulent and have generated new conflicts throughout the world. Benjamin Barber (1998) describes the strife between McWorld and Jihad, contrasting the homogenizing, commercialized, Americanized tendencies of the global economy and culture with traditional cultures which are often resistant to globalization. Thomas Friedman (1999) makes a more benign distinction between what he calls the "Lexus" and the "Olive Tree." The former is a symbol of modernization, of affluence and luxury, and of Westernized consumption, contrasted with the Olive Tree that is a symbol of roots, tradition, place, and stable community. Barber (1997), however, is too negative toward McWorld and Jihad, failing to adequately describe the democratic and progressive forces within both. Although Barber recognizes a dialectic of McWorld and Jihad, he opposes both to democracy, failing to perceive how both generate their own democratic forces and tendencies, as well as opposing and undermining democratization. Within the Western democracies, for instance, there is not just top-down homogenization and corporate domination, but also globalization-from-below and oppositional social movements that desire alternatives to capitalist globalization. Thus, it is not only traditionalist, non-Western forces of Jihad that oppose McWorld. Likewise, Jihad has its democratizing forces as well as the reactionary Islamic fundamentalists who are now the most demonized elements of the contemporary era, as I discuss below. Jihad, like McWorld, has its contradictions and its potential for democratization, as well as elements of domination and destruction (see Kellner, forthcoming).
./english/380.txt:133: My intention is to present globalization as conflictual, contradictory and open to resistance and democratic intervention and transformation and not just as a monolithic juggernaut of progress or domination as in many discourses. This goal is advanced by distinguishing between "globalization from below" and the "globalization from above" of corporate capitalism and the capitalist state, a distinction that should help us to get a better sense of how globalization does or does not promote democratization. "Globalization from below" refers to the ways in which marginalized individuals and social movements resist globalization and/or use its institutions and instruments to further democratization and social justice. While on one level, globalization significantly increases the supremacy of big corporations and big government, it can also give power to groups and individuals that were previously left out of the democratic dialogue and terrain of political struggle. Such potentially positive effects of globalization include increased access to education for individuals excluded from entry to culture and knowledge and the possibility of oppositional individuals and groups to participate in global culture and politics through gaining access to global communication and media networks and to circulate local struggles and oppositional ideas through these media. The role of new technologies in social movements, political struggle, and everyday life forces social movements to reconsider their political strategies and goals and democratic theory to appraise how new technologies do and do not promote democratization (Kellner 1997 and 1999b).
./english/380.txt:173: For instance, the Internet can be used to promote capitalist globalization or struggles against it. One of the more instructive examples of the use of the Internet to foster movements against the excesses of corporate capitalism occurred in the protests in Seattle and throughout the world against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in December 1999. Behind these actions was a global protest movement using the Internet to organize resistance to the WTO and capitalist globalization, while championing democratization. Many web sites contained anti-WTO material and numerous mailing lists used the Internet to distribute critical material and to organize the protest. The result was the mobilization of caravans from throughout the United States to take protestors to Seattle, many of whom had never met and were recruited through the Internet. There were also significant numbers of international participants in Seattle which exhibited labor, environmentalist, feminist, anti-capitalist, animal rights, anarchist, and other groups organized to protest aspects of globalization and form new alliances and solidarities for future struggles. In addition, protests occurred throughout the world, and a proliferation of anti-WTO material against the extremely secret group spread throughout the Internet.[11]
./english/380.txt:189: In May 2002, a surprisingly large demonstration took place in Washington against capitalist globalization and for peace and justice, and it was apparent that a new worldwide movement was in the making that was uniting diverse opponents of capitalist globalization throughout the world. The anticorporate globalization movement favored globalization-from-below, which would protect the environment, labor rights, national cultures, democratization, and other goods from the ravages of an uncontrolled capitalist globalization (see Falk 1999; Brecher, Costello, and Smith 2000; and Steger 2002).
./english/380.txt:205: To capital's globalization-from-above, cyberactivists have thus been attempting to carry out globalization-from-below, developing networks of solidarity and propagating oppositional ideas and movements throughout the planet. To the capitalist international of transnational corporate-led globalization, a Fifth International, to use Waterman's phrase (1992), of computer-mediated activism is emerging, that is qualitatively different from the party-based socialist and communist Internationals. Such networking links labor, feminist, ecological, peace, and other anticapitalist groups, providing the basis for a new politics of alliance and solidarity to overcome the limitations of postmodern identity politics (see Dyer-Witheford 1999 and Burbach 2001).
./english/380.txt:236: And so, to paraphrase Foucault, wherever there is globalization-from-above, globalization as the imposition of capitalist logic, there can be resistance and struggle. The possibilities of globalization-from-below result from transnational alliances between groups fighting for better wages and working conditions, social and political justice, environmental protection, and more democracy and freedom worldwide. In addition, a renewed emphasis on local and grassroots movements have put dominant economic forces on the defensive in their own backyard and often the broadcasting media or the Internet have called attention to oppressive and destructive corporate policies on the local level, putting national and even transnational pressure upon major corporations for reform. Moreover, proliferating media and the Internet make possible a greater circulation of struggles and the possibilities of new alliances and solidarities that can connect resistant forces who oppose capitalist and corporate-state elite forms of globalization-from-above (Dyer-Witheford 1999).
./english/380.txt:240: In a certain sense, the phenomena of globalization replicates the history of the U.S. and most so-called capitalist democracies in which tension between capitalism and democracy has been the defining feature of the conflicts of the past two hundred years. In analyzing the development of education in the United States Bowles and Gintis (1986) and Aronowitz and Giroux (1986) have analyzed the conflicts between corporate logic and democracy in schooling; Robert McChesney (1996 and 1999), myself (Kellner 1990, 1992, 2001, and forthcoming), and others have articulated the contradictions between capitalism and democracy in the media and public sphere; while Joel Cohen and Joel Rogers (1983) and many others are arguing that contradictions between capitalism and democracy are defining features of the U.S. polity and history.
./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/382.txt:29:For some, the hijacking of the forum is proof that the movements against corporate globalization are finally maturing and "getting serious." But is it really so mature, amidst the graveyard of failed, left political projects, to believe that change will come by casting your ballot for the latest charismatic leader, then crossing your fingers and hoping for the best? Get serious.
./english/386.txt:131:Privatisation has become another `mantra' in the globalised era by the ruling block expropriating large tracts of fertile agricultural land for shrimp aquaculture by larger corporate interests - prompted by rapid returns, short gestation periods, the immense demand abroad for shrimp - many corporate house undertook prawn farming in massive way causing ecological, social and economic destruction due to high rate of water usage, introduction of chemical input, salination of water, etc. The struggle by various organisation like Grama Swaraj Movement against globalised aquaculture resulted in the Supreme Court of India giving a verdict to close down commercial shrimp farms throughout the Indian coast. But the government is now contemplating ways to dilute the judgement.
./english/387.txt:32:The younger delegates fortunately had not passed through the sectarian leftist wars of the 1960s or 1970s. Their support for the Cuban Revolution was based on its resistance to U.S. intervention and its progressive agrarian reform. Few, if any, took their “doctrinal cues” from Fidel Castro. They “incorporated” Che Guevara or Fidel Castro to particular national and social struggle. Hence the coca farmer delegate spoke of Che’s anti-imperialism in the struggle against U.S.-DEA eradication policies. Fidel Castro was cited as a forerunner of the Brazilian peasants struggle to occupy land and resist eviction. Thus there is neither repudiation or iconization of past revolutionaries.
./english/390.txt:11:In many countries, Empire has sprouted other subsidiary heads, some dangerous byproducts — nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism and, of course terrorism. All these march arm in arm with the project of corporate globalization.
./english/390.txt:13:Let me illustrate what I mean. India — the world’s biggest democracy — is currently at the forefront of the corporate globalization project. Its "market" of one billion people is being prized open by the WTO. Corporatization and Privatization are being welcomed by the Government and the Indian elite.
./english/390.txt:15:It is not a coincidence that the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the Disinvestment Minister — the men who signed the deal with Enron in India, the men who are selling the country’s infrastructure to corporate multinationals, the men who want to privatize water, electricity, oil, coal, steel, health, education and telecommunication — are all members or admirers of the RSS. The RSS is a right wing, ultra-nationalist Hindu guild which has openly admired Hitler and his methods.
./english/390.txt:17:The dismantling of democracy is proceeding with the speed and efficiency of a Structural Adjustment Program. While the project of corporate globalization rips through people’s lives in India, massive privatization, and labor "reforms" are pushing people off their land and out of their jobs. Hundreds of impoverished farmers are committing suicide by consuming pesticide. Reports of starvation deaths are coming in from all over the country.
./english/390.txt:35:As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows, the fight to corner resources is intensifying. To push through their "sweetheart deals," to corporatize the crops we grow, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the dreams we dream, corporate globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies.
./english/390.txt:37:Corporate Globalization — or shall we call it by its name? — Imperialism — needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice.
./english/390.txt:51:In India the movement against corporate globalization is gathering momentum and is poised to become the only real political force to counter religious fascism.
./english/390.txt:53:As for corporate globalization’s glittering ambassadors — Enron, Bechtel, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson — where were they last year, and where are they now?
./english/390.txt:105:The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
./english/395.txt:443:formulations have not yet been formally incorporated into the WSF Charter of Principles, the IC
./english/399.txt:165:The physical recuperation took several months: State property had to be reclaimed, slogans painted over and foreign students deported; including Dany Cohn-Bendit and John Barker. But with France back in the grip of a right-wing, nationalistic fervour (which it has never really shook off to this day), the show was over. (The Situationist International itself, which had already split in 2, was further decimated by various expulsions, resignations and scissions until it's eventual demise in 1972 - It seems that half the fun of having an International in the first place is so you can expel people). From this point on the action moved with John Barker and chums, to England. A certain group of germans also incorporated some situationist ideas and, in America, groups such as the Yippies, Motherfuckers, SLA and The Weathermen (but by 1969 the hippies had been recuperated to such an extent that there wasn't anywhere much to intervene in America).
./english/400.txt:9:The concept of information warfare, along with related ideas such as information operations, netwar and cyberwar, has gained prominence in US strategic and military circles since the early 1990s. The term 'Information warfare' is used in two broad ways. Defined in technological terms, information warfare particularly emphasises vulnerabilities in digital infrastructures to disruption by physical or digital attack (e.g. Boulanger, 1998; Cobb, 1999) and the growing 'information intensity' of battlefield operation (e.g. Libicki, 1998). The term is also used more broadly to analyse emerging types of conflict in an information society through, for example, the use of information in the management of public and adversary perceptions, and the role of information in the organisational aspects of conflict particularly in the nature and organisation of threats from sub- and non-state actors (Rathmell, 1998; Arquila & Ronfeldt, 1998a, 1998b). Many of the concepts associated with information warfare are also now being used in the analysis of conflict in economic, social and personal, as well as military, spheres (Kovacich, 1997; Cronin & Crawford, 1999a;). In corporate settings, for example, use can be found in discussions of competitor intelligence (Cronin & Crawford, 1999b; McCrohan, 1998) and computer security (Boulanger, 1998; Jajodia et al 1999).
./english/400.txt:32:For unions tactics such as the strike, which may be particularly suited to the Fordist modes of industrial organisation that are in decline in many parts of the world have proved less effective, or at least, less available over recent years. One strategy which has been developed for use in industrial disputes by trade unions since the late 1970s has been that of the corporate campaign. Primarily in the USA, corporate campaigns have developed the use of non-traditional tactics such as boycotts, legal complaints (not restricted solely to industrial relations issues, but including for example, product safety), shareholder actions and media campaigns. These corporate campaigns do not necessarily replace more traditional forms of action, and have been used both to complement more conventional use of strikes, and to substitute for them (Jarney & Maranto, 1990). The campaigns have often broadened the attack from the narrowly industrial to address wider issues of corporate governance and corporate citizenship. These campaigns, sometimes conducted in alliance with other social groups, target not just the company with which a union might be in dispute, but also other organisations connected to it, such as major shareholders, suppliers and customers (see Jarney & Maranto, 1990).
./english/400.txt:33:Arquila & Ronfeldt’s information warfare framework suggests that the corporate campaign may prove to be a characteristic strategy for trade unions for two reasons. Firstly, broadening the dispute into the public arena makes it an information-intensive battle for ‘hearts and minds’. Both sides of the conflict engage in campaigns to control what information is available and the meanings that are widely attached to it. Secondly, the approach is network-oriented both in the attempt to mobilise wider networks of social and governmental/regulatory actors (McGuiness, 1996) and in the identification of actors in the corporate adversary’s financial, supply-chain or other networks as legitimate targets.
./english/400.txt:38:To date, trade unions have made limited use of the Internet either as a terrain or more directly as a weapon. Perhaps the most extensive use of the Internet to win public support for an industrial dispute has been seen in striking journalists from the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, who established an alternative on-line newspaper, the Detroit Journal to help to build community support for their strike (Lee, 1997: 82-84). There have also been examples of using the Internet and other communications media to protest to companies during industrial disputes, as for example in the UK Communications Workers Union with label-printers Critchley (Gibbs, 1999). There is little evidence of unions attempting to disable corporate information systems outright through covert action, and it would appear that these would be unlikely to be adopted widely by unions organised as democratic organisations and hence readily open to legal identification and action. However, sabotage by individual workers has historically featured in industrial disputes and there is little reason to suppose that information systems would be immune. Certainly, computer security analysts have identified hostile individual employees as sources of risk to systems.
./english/400.txt:39:Denial of access to ICT infrastructure is, however, a feature of industrial relations. While some employers have been willing to negotiate access to their communications infrastructures for trade unions, others have sought to restrict access to email for union purposes. In the USA, the legality of denying union access to employees through email is currently a matter of some debate (Spognardi & Bro, 1998; The Economist, 2000). Elsewhere, it is likely that the law will give less protection to employees. For example, in the UK, in the absence of clear legal guidelines, over 80% of employers reportedly monitor employee communications (Eaglesham, 2001). A potentially wider area of corporate interference with union access to the global information infrastructure has also been apparent, through denial of access to particular services. For example, in the late 1980s, trade union researchers were denied access to selected areas of corporate information database by the major database Dialog (Angus & LaPlante, 1987). More recently, the Internet portal Yahoo! refused to place advertising banners in support of the US union SEIU’s campaign to unionise workers at Los Angeles International Airport (Rewick, 2000).
./english/400.txt:77:All three of the industrially-focussed cybercampaigns (A, C & D) adopted corporate-campaign style approaches to identifying the adversary, broadening the campaign beyond the company directly involved to include variously shareholders, bankers, suppliers, distributors, regulatory bodies, politicians and diplomats. Campaign C in particular sought to draw attention to wider issues than simply the company's approach to industrial relations, including health and safety, indigenous peoples' rights and environmental issues (ICEM, 1997; 1998). The focus on shareholders extended to submitting two resolutions to the company's 2000 AGMs in Australia and the UK, including a motion to commit the company to complying with a range of ILO resolutions (Taylor, 2000).
./english/400.txt:99:These cybercampaigns have been conducted as adjuncts to other forms of campaigning: in two cases as a part of moves to globalise more 'traditional' industrial disputes in the US tyre industry; and in the case of the Rio Tinto campaign , the cybercampaign has formed a part of a wider corporate campaign including the initiation of shareholder action and building links with other social movement or civil society activists. The campaigns have not sought primarily to degrade the service of adversaries, though in two cases this appears to have led to minor disruption of service as a by-product of the cybercampaigns. However, the largely symbolic identification of routes in to the company via email addresses and Web sites is one way of taking advantage of companies' growing use of the Web to strengthen links with communities of customers. Each point of openness - request for feedback, contact address or link to related company - provides a possible entry point for protesters.
./english/400.txt:100:Perhaps more important than the use of the Web as a terrain are the relation of ICTs to union organisation. ICT and cheap travel have enabled more effective co-ordination of networked 'real world' responses in at least two of the campaigns, where speaking tours have built support among unions international for those unions direct involved in conflict. Ultimately, in the two campaigns (A&D) which have reached clear-cut resolution, the local demonstrations and pickets and demonstrations of wider trade union support appear to have been much more significant than the cybercampaigns. The cybercampaigns are perhaps better seen as a relatively low-cost form of corporate campaigning, raising the profile of a dispute particularly among Internet-using labour activists and in some cases also the mainstream media. These disputes did to some extent exhibit physical and virtual 'swarming' behaviour as distributed actors came together to act during the dispute, without forming a specific and enduring organisational structure.
./english/400.txt:101:The cybercampaigns examined here have all sought to broaden the campaigns, in two ways. Firstly, they have sought to globalise the disputes. One particular feature of the two tyre-industry cybercampaigns was their highlighting of differences in the treatment of workers in foreign subsidiaries and in the 'home' countries of the parent multinationals (Japan and Germany in these cases) - a tactic to which the Internet, as an increasingly global medium may be particularly well suited. Secondly, and in common with many corporate campaigns, they have identified actors in the immediate adversary's networks as being legitimate targets for protest.
./english/400.txt:124:Cronin, B. & Crawford, H. (1999b) Raising the intelligence stakes: Corporate information warfare and strategic surprise, Competitive Intelligence Review 10(3) pp. 58-66
./english/400.txt:146:Jarney, P. & Maranto, C.L. (1990) Union corporate campaigns: an assessment, Industrial & Labor Relations Review 43(5) pp505-524
./english/400.txt:157:McGuiness (1996) Legal and Regulatory Responses to Corporate Campaigns, Journal of Labor Research 17(3) pp. 427-424
./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:120:Costa deals with the problems and possibilities for Portugal, as a small and peripheral European country with an authoritarian history, and with two major national union confederations - one of the social-democratic and one of the communist tradition. There have been problems concerning the 'more-European' UGT, and the 'more-Portuguese' GCTP, insofar as the social-democratic UGT has been more incorporated into the social-democratic European structures, and the communist CGTP has been stronger on the ground in Portugal. This tension seems, however, have been attenuated along with the traditional ideological distinctions, as well as by the opportunities both see for using advanced European unions and legislation to defend and improve worker conditions in backward Portugal. Costa also considers that, in confronting obstacles to the development of the EWCs, the worker cause can be advanced. These obstacles include: employer imposition of worker representatives; the logic of union competition (UGT v. CGTP); worker skepticism toward unions and participation at company level; the understanding of EWCs in an economistic and instrumental manner instead of as a means for increasing information, solidarity and influence. Costa sees the main advantages won through EWCs for Portuguese workers as follows:
./english/401.txt:195:Following its 1999 conference in South Africa, SIGTUR undertook three campaigns: for a common Mayday 2000, around the issue of jobs; a corporate campaign against the anti-union Rio Tinto mining multinational (involving union cooperation with environmental, indigenous and human rights campaigners), and a 'global unionism' project. The authors report success on all three campaigns. The Rio Tinto campaign is of particular interest in so far as it involved a traditional international labor organization, the International Chemical, Energy and Mineworkers Federation (ICEM). By 'global unionism' SIGTUR apparently means direct cross-national ties of intensive practical exchange and solidarity, as here exemplified by an agreement between port/dockworkers' unions in Durban and Fremantle. L&W recognize four present challenges: uneven union organizational capacity and different local political traditions; the lack of resource commitment to the network by even the stronger national confederations; the necessity for unions to broaden their support base by organizing the casual, part-time and informal sector workers, as well as forming structured coalitions with women's, ecological and other such movements; and finding the right way of relating to the traditional institutionalized union internationals.
./english/403.txt:25:Beyond such subterranean channels, social movements have often relied on corporate and state media as a means of communicating with other sections of society, with all the attendant risks that this reliance brings. Such ‘guerrilla tactics’ (Fiske 1989: 19) were again demonstrated as recently as the Melbourne S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum in 2000: for example, with the mock adoption of a John Farnham song as the protest anthem, and the media furore that this provoked. At the same time, this attempt to detourn corporate media also indicates a fundamental weakness of the movement itself:
./english/403.txt:29:More than this, such dependency also offers space for the social ventriloquism of self-defined vanguard formations. While libertarian circles argued the case as to whether, and in what circumstances, corporate media can be instrumentalised,
./english/403.txt:185:Starr, A. (2000) Naming the Enemy: Anti-corporate movements confront globalization. Sydney: Pluto Press.
./english/409.txt:16:Though the conference was locally organized, it was, in part, the brainchild of ATTAC France, a coalition of unions, farmers and intellectuals that has become the most public face of the antiglobalization movement in much of Europe and Scandinavia. (ATTAC stands for Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens, which, admittedly, doesnt work as well in English.) Founded in 1998 by Bernard Cassen and Susan George of the socialist monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, ATTAC began as a campaign for the implementation of the so-called Tobin Tax, the proposal by Nobel laureate James Tobin to tax all speculative financial transactions. Reflecting its Marxist intellectual roots, the group has expressed frustration with the less coherent focus of the North American anticorporate movement. "The failure of Seattle was the inability to come up with a common agenda, a global alliance at the world level to fight against globalization," says Christophe Aguiton of!
./english/409.txt:52:Perhaps by transforming the anticorporate, antiglobalization movement into a pro-democracy movement that defends the rights of local communities to plan and manage their schools, their water and their ecology. In Porto Alegre, the most convincing responses to the international failure of representative democracy seemed to be this radical form of local participatory democracy, in the cities and towns where the abstractions of global rule become day-to-day issues of homelessness, water contamination, exploding prisons and cash-starved schools. Of course, this has to take place within a context of national and international standards and resources. But what seemed to be emerging organically out of the World Social Forum (despite the best efforts of some of the organizers) was not a movement for a single global government but a vision for an increasingly connected international network of very local initiatives, each built on direct democracy.
./english/470.txt:63:On the other hand, there were the rest of the presenters. I don't know their numbers but I would guess a few thousand or so. The events that these participants planned in many cases did not even appear in the official schedules and were subject to last minute termination or, short of that, to room changes. These second-tier presenters were afforded few comforts and little financial support though they included overwhelmingly less well-off people then the 100 or so at the hotels. Gender still seems to play a horrible and destructive role in people’s roles and visibility, as well. Beyond presenters, moreover, there were the youth who were housed in a camp with barely sufficient water and barely acceptable sewage. That the roughly 30,000 people in the youth camp made it a vibrant community in which there were no hierarchies is immensely admirable, but the many virtues of those who endure harsh conditions joyfully don't excuse that they were treated as a separate entity, with little visible effort to incorporate them.
./english/472.txt:7:Since 2001, activists from around the world who are opposed to neoliberal corporate globalization have gathered annually at the World Social Forum (WSF). The Forum brings together tens of thousands of people from the world’s social movements and nongovernmental organizations in pursuit of varied agendas: for women’s rights, small-scale worker-controlled enterprises, public health, community-controlled schools and a host of other causes. In the words of Naomi Klein, it’s a movement of “one no and many yeses.”1 The phrase captures the pluralism and diversity of the movement, but at the same time makes clear that there is a core of unity about what it opposes. It also shows why it is difficult to analyze the movement.
./english/474.txt:44:"Sometimes we talk about the need for campesinos (peasant farmers) to be incorporated into efforts towards development, but without knowing hardly anything about this matter. That is why it is important for urban movements to listen to campesino and workers' organisations, and vice versa," he added.
./english/500.txt:30:He felt that the WSF and wider anti-globalisation movements have to work through multifarious alignments, coalitions and strategies. ''If the prevailing power structure is built around a corporate-political-military hegemony which utilises globalisation and all its ideological resources, any alternative bloc has to think at a similar level,'' he said.
./english/519.txt:57:At the Mumbai Forum, during a panel about the WSF’s future, Sohi Jeon already warned us about the fundamental implications of this: the Forum process must incorporate the big protagonists from popular struggles in regional, national and local levels, which is the only way for us to keep grow-ing and strengthening, which is also the only way of condensing sets of networks that compose the global movement and the WSF process. Our concern regarding this topic was reflected in the last Porto Alegre Forum, in which we adopted the methodology of stimulating the convergence of themes and struggles, increasing initiatives of dialogues and meetings among different actors.
./english/529.txt:18:Nevertheless, considering a heavy leftist presence, the WSF could easily become another redundant status quo power-pyramid, yet another self-feeding bureaucratized, celebrity-professionalized fundraising compromise/collaborationist gab-fest. I must say that nothing appeared more ridiculous than the tired old all-expenses-paid union flacks pontificating in the crowd of Kashmiri, Sindhi, Baloch and Palestinian activists, advocating labour solidarity as a panacea for all that ails. One hopes that the WSF can rise beyond such predictable insidious entrenchment. As a person involved in the battle to protect ancient forests, I see no difference between those right-wing corporate lackeys who destroy forests, and those left-wing labour lackeys who demand the job of cutting them down. Not to mention, that in my own city of Victoria BC, -to have a union job is to live a bourgeois life of entitlement, an exclusive elite far removed from the incessantly increasing ranks of the desperately poor. While some might say that it’s unfair to compare Canadian abject poverty with that of Pakistan, I would contest that.
./english/532.txt:29:The chief purpose of this article is not to answer these questions by examining the ‘self-evident’ truths of open source production. Such studies are already being carried out in forums like Oekunux [http://www.oekonux.de]; indeed, in this issue of Mute, Gilberto Camara, Director for Earth Observation at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, publishes research that challenges some key tenets of the FLOSS model. His research exposes the possibility that, in many cases, FLOSS does not innovate significantly original software, or sustain projects outside of corporate or large scale academic involvement. Instead this article seeks to address the intense political expectation around open organisation among diverse elements of the diffuse activist organisations which, post-Seattle, have been loosely referred to as ‘the social movement’ or ‘social movements’. In referring to the social movement, this article concerns itself primarily with groups such as People’s Global Action, Indymedia, Euraction Hub and other such non-hierarchised collectives; it does not have in mind more traditionally structured organisations like the Social Forums, Globalise Resistance or so-called ‘civil society’ NGOs.
./english/548.txt:6:Every year at the end of January, the world’s corporate and government elite gather under tight police security in the Swiss resort town of Davos for the World Economic Forum (WEF) to plot the future of corporate-led globalization. Five years ago, community organizers, trade unionists, young people, academics, and others began to meet in Porto Alegre, Brazil to rethink and recreate globalization so that it would benefit people.
./english/553.txt:120:While the Commission uses REACH as a positive example, NGOs argue that, on the contrary, REACH demonstrates how the lobbying activities of the chemical industry have undermined legislation that was designed to protect people and the environment.[4] It was the European business lobby that called on non-European companies to intervene as well. Interestingly, the European Parliament found that large TNCs exporting a few bulk chemicals would mostly bear the costs.[5] But clearly the pressure of the giant corporate lobby industry is not sufficient for the Commission; in future the Commission will call in non-EU corporate interests to take part in the decision-making process. The Commission wants to be more transparent (to foreign business, not to its own civil society) and wants to listen to foreign corporate grievances before making decisions “affecting the market” – decisions such as those on environment, health or social regulations. This will make the EU even more undemocratic. Finally, the Commission also wants to equip people for change. The Commission is aware that if it wants ambitious agreements serving EU corporate interests, then it will also have to offer something in return. The Commission is prepared to open up sensitive sectors of the EU economy while admitting this will bring about “transformations which are disruptive to some in the EU”.
./english/553.txt:129:2. Critique: ‘Global Europe’ - a dangerous corporate agenda
./english/553.txt:155:The EU’s attempt to introduce a multilateral investment agreement failed first at the OECD and then at the WTO’s Cancún ministerial in 2003. The attempt to start negotiations on public procurement also failed at Cancún, while efforts to open up foreign services markets for EU companies have fallen far short of what was hoped for. The EU’s proposed ban on export taxes, which restrict corporate access to the natural resources of developing countries, has failed even to get onto the negotiating agenda. And now the remnants of the EU’s Doha dream lie in tatters, with talks suspended and no sign of a restart any time soon.
./english/553.txt:175:Mandelson has spelled out in his recent speeches what lies unsaid in the vision paper: that this assault on the European model is to be brought about through “regulatory convergence” with the USA. In place of the European model of high standards won through decades of public pressure and committed campaigns, Mandelson offers us a future remodelled along US lines, where corporate interests come first and people’s needs come nowhere. And the reason? “The greater the consistency in rules and practices with our main partners,” says the vision, “the better for EU business.”
./english/553.txt:187:The values and interests at the core of the Commission’s new ‘Global Europe’ strategy are clear. Up to now, pro-development language was used to hide an aggressive pro-corporate agenda. Now the EU has revealed for the first time how the internal projects and directives developed by the Commission and supported by the Council of Ministers are directly linked to the external objectives of the Commission, and vice versa.
./english/553.txt:195:However, today many different civil society groups in Europe all want discussion and dialogue to understand the impacts of Mandelson’s proposed policies. These groups include social movements, trade unions and others working on issues such as agriculture, workers’ rights, consumer interests, development, environment, women’s issues, corporate accountability, climate change, migration, war, etc. Trade policy can no longer be an issue which a few groups address from a development or an environmental angle. It has to be understood within the context of how the EU is pushing forward a neoliberal agenda not only in countries outside of the EU, but also within the EU borders.
./english/553.txt:232:[4] Corporate Power over EU Trade Policy: Good for business, bad for the world, Seattle to Brussels Network 2006, p. 38; http://www.s2bnetwork.org/download/Corporate_power_over_EU_Trade_policy
./english/565.txt:257:enforcing government control and serving corporate interests. While this
./english/565.txt:288:roles, based upon corporate and governmental models. Both advocate
./english/565.txt:299:organising independently, without a central authority nor any corporate
./english/565.txt:302:concerns, without a hierarchy. Against corporate opacity and elitism,
./english/565.txt:363:Questioning the use of corporate and proprietary software by groups
./english/565.txt:504:Indymedia [45] was created as an activist answer to corporate
./english/566.txt:77:# Strive to reach consensus. Modern corporate mythology has the
./english/569.txt:29:This effect of this fragmentation, particularly in combination with Lula’s intervention, is not politically neutral. It runs counter to the trend in the wider movement to make connections between the challenges we face, between neo-liberalism and environmental catastrophe, for example, and crucially between corporate globalization and war. As Emir Sader, one of the leading intellectuals of the Brazilian left and a WSF founder, put it,'while the Forum emphasizes secondary issues, there is no major debate about the most important issue of the day - the struggle against the war and imperial hegemony in the world.'
./english/574.txt:10:A profound political frustration underlies this self-doubt. The global social justice movement and the anti-war movement have both effectively won the moral arguments. But they have had not had a commensurate impact on the exercise of political and economic power. This was visible in the smoke signals coming from the World Economic Forum across the geographical and political divide in Davos. There, the corporate elite were morally on the defensive, desperate to prove that they too cared about poverty yet stubbornly continuing the policies which daily mean millions go to sleep hungry – including the poor of Brazil whose government, under president Lula, (who made a brief and controversial appearance at the Forum) is being forced by the IMF to pay in debt relief which would otherwise go towards the social programme for which the leader of the Brazilian Workers Party was elected was elected.
./english/576.txt:4:It's not Paris or Tokyo, Beijing or New York. Nor is it São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. Enthusiastic residents of Porto Alegre, Brazil will tell you that their modest city of 1.5 million people in the country's deep South is "the last bastion of socialism and rock 'n' roll." Indeed, stalls covered with black Iron Maiden t-shirts stand in the public markets, and the municipality long served as a stronghold of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), the Brazilian Workers Party. But today Porto Alegre is best known around the globe, especially among those inclined to hold a critical opinion of capitalism, corporate power, and U.S. military aggression, as the original home of the World Social Forum.
./english/611.txt:10:The slums are enormous and horrendously poor. Everyone knows that, and we also broadly understand povertys imperial and corporate and caste sources. Seeing the hunger is different than just "knowing it," but even beyond that, what struck me is that despite the evident magnitude of suffering, the usual tension, anger, and rage that characterize slums in the U.S. seemed absent.
./english/611.txt:32:Two central tensions of the WSF still exist, however. First, the WSF has been a venue for information exchange. When you do that over and over, with the information remaining mostly familiar...you start to atrophy. Taking the event to a new continent means reaching new audiences so that old substance is rejuvenated by reaching new listeners. But many people want more than that. They feel that with a burgeoning momentum of connections and commitments spanning the world, there ought to be aprogram that the WSF adopts, furthers, and wins. What about the WSF programmatically addressing war, say - or corporate globalization, or the trends in India, for that matter, or even something narrower such as boycotting particular firms engaged in especially horrible practice.
./english/611.txt:46:In this sense the WSF could undertake to help build a new international activist offensive on a scale like that of the anti-corporate globalization movement, but now with targets all over every country, including mainstream TV, radio, and print media outlets worldwide. The effort would have an activist, "raise the social costs until you meet our demands" component. And the effort would have "a positive build a better world" in our own media component, as well.
./english/611.txt:48:The only ideology this media movement would need is that truth in media is better than lies in media and that media concern for the well being of billions is better than media concern for the well being of thousands and that media in the hands of the people is better than media in the hands of corporate behemoths. And this ideology could be adopted without violating or even transcending the WSFs current definition - which is to facilitate honest, respectful, progressive, information exchange. A WSF media focus might provide excitement and momentum sufficient to rejuvenate and galvanize the forum process, as well as providing an immensely valuable contribution to movements worldwide.
./english/620.txt:21:b) We try to incorporate the activists’ agenda in the program itself, a larger scope in the self-organised events for movements.
./english/626.txt:22:And an Indian newspaper called it an "anti-global event." With more than 120 countries participating, could an event be more global in nature? "Anti-globalisation" is another term often and erroneously used to describe the WSF. This is just another form of globalisation. A counter-globalisation. A globalisation that challenges the prevalent neo-imperial corporate globalisation agenda. A globalisation from below. A globalisation of struggles. A globalisation of resistance. A globalisation of movements, of activism, of defiance. A globalisation of hope.
./english/629.txt:138:Naturally other levels of organization for valuations and propositions for the Forum process, besides the Organization Committees of the events – such as enlarged committees, councils, assemblies - can amplify the effect of the process, should they manage to incorporate an even larger variety and representation of movements engaged in the construction of the “other world”. But, in an option Forum-space, those types of organization - as it occurs with the organization committees – ought not to intend to direct those movements and organizations, but only to endorse and support the creation of more and more Forum-spaces.
./english/634.txt:33:On the other hand, the number of “reformists” was larger than ever at Porto Alegre III—it’s just that their position could not hold people’s attention without moving to the left, something many of them are reluctant to do beyond the rhetorical level. Meanwhile, a few groups of the world’s miniscule far left boycotted Porto Alegre III because they thought it was too “reformist.” India’s prize-winning novelist and political activist Arundathi Roy, who was on the panel featuring Noam Chomsky, received far greater applause than Chomsky did when she ended her moving speech with these words: “The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing” (the entire speech is available on ZNet, January 28, 2003, www.zmag.org/).
./english/634.txt:37:Second, a kind of confusion reigns, as it always has done, in the WSF. How long any of us will put up with this almost inevitable confusion remains to be seen, but so long as pluralism holds as a basic premise of the entire WSF there is hope the WSF will at least stay together, however confused it may be, and continue winning ground in the battle of ideas as it has been doing. A decision was made at the end of Porto Alegre III to rename the WSF “the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre,” since that is how the rest of the world has come to know it even though the fourth annual meeting will take place in India. More importantly, there was a general recognition that activists must have more regional social forums, build better global networks, incorporate better representation from Asia, Africa, women, and the working poor (including organized labor), and not look at the WSF of Porto Alegre as “the center of the universe.” The WSF of Porto Alegre also decided not to hold its meetings when the WEF meets, as it had done in the past.
./english/639.txt:14:Two years ago, at the first World Social Forum, the key word was not "big" but "new": new ideas, new methods, new faces. Because if there was one thing that most delegates agreed on (and there wasnt much) it was that the lefts traditional methods had failed, either because they were wrong-headed or because they were simply ill-equipped to deal with the powerful forces of corporate globalisation.
./english/639.txt:31:For some, the hijacking of the World Social Forum by political parties and powerful men is proof that the movements against corporate globalisation are finally maturing and "getting serious". But is it really so mature, amidst the graveyard of failed left political projects, to believe that change will come by casting your ballot for the latest charismatic leader, then crossing your fingers and hoping for the best? Get serious.
./english/644.txt:6:As politicians and corporate executives met at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a very different meeting took place in the city of Porto Alegre under the slogan "Another World is Possible." The third World Social Forum (WSF) brought over 100,000 people to Brazil. Participants from all sectors of civil society--trade unions, community organizations, womens groups, indigenous peoples, students, and environmentalists--discussed and debated proposals for how build and mobilize an effective movement to fight corporate globalization.
./english/646.txt:10:Earlier attempts to democratise global power, such as the NIEO project, tended to see the problem more in terms of inter-state relations. But now, instead of asking that a particular ‘third world’ state be given more decision-making power in global affairs, today’s activists are beginning to seek more power in civil society groups that confront both governmental and corporate power all over the world. This trend holds many promising aspects. But we may need political structures that ‘civil society’, as it is generally conceived, is unlikely to deliver.
./english/668.txt:8:Protestors marched against fundamentalism of all sorts, against hunger and genetically modified agriculture, the IMF, the Free Trade Area of the Americas and much more. The vibe was almost always near-euphoric with horns blaring, hands clapping, feet dancing, flags waving and chants singing out regularly in at least four languages.Sharp Contrast to World Economic ForumThe World Social Forum began last year to provide a counter vision and voice to the World Economic Forum a staid corporate and government gathering designed to informally facilitate corporate globalization. And while "Davos" -- along with the protestors against it -- grabbed the lions share of the corporate-media headlines by switching its venue to New York City this year, Porto Alegre was a cauldron of ideas, creativity and debates all under the slogan "Another World is Possible."Candido Gryzbowski, director of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis, one of the events main organizers, went so far as to assert that Porto Alegre had left the World Economic Forum in the dust. "We dont need them. Our message, our concerns are more comprehensive," he noted. "We want to create alternatives, not just to neo-liberalism, but also to various types of fundamentalism and un-democratic governments."Certainly, the World Economic Forum 3,000 person event in New Yorks Waldorf Astoria was a significant gathering of powerful world players. But the sheer magnitude of the Porto Alegre event far surpassed Davos this year, becoming so large as to be difficult to comprehend, even for its most avid participants.The program of conferences, workshops and seminars, along with films, music and artistic events ran more than 70 tabloid pages in each language.
./english/668.txt:11:And this being the beginning of the 21st century, his most-marketable non-trademarked image was for sale in nearly half of the hundreds of vendors stalls. There were Che books, Che t-shirts, Che CDs, Che baseball caps, Che posters, Che flags, and even little-mini bottles of Che cacaca -- the local cane alcohol drink. By contrast, despite the anti-US government sentiment of most of the meeting, images of Osama bin Laden were nowhere to be found, neither in the vendors stalls nor the meeting halls. Anti-fundamentalism and pluralism were the themes of the day.There was also a plethora of music every day in a makeshift amphitheater, all night concerts, and stirring speeches by the stars of the anti-corporate globalization movement Walden Bello, Martin Khor and Naomi Klein, by venerated leftists like Noam Chomsky and Brazils Luiz Ignacio "Lula" da Silva, as well as by Nobel Peace Prize winners Rigoberta Menchu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel.Both the "war on terror" and Israeli-Palestinian conflict figured prominently in a multi-day session entitled "A World Without Wars is Possible." The Argentine economic debacle was hotly debated in many a venue, and the scandalous demise of the Enron corporation was high on the agenda. There was a World Youth Congress.
./english/668.txt:15:Strategy sessions addressed not only how to combat the WTO, the World Bank and giant corporations, but also on how to build alternative economic, political and cultural structures. The main conference on corporate power, in which CorpWatch participated, focused on a series of proposals to "separate the corporation and the state." The argument went that just as we need to separate church and state to avoid a religious fundamentalist nation and build democracy, it is also necessary to separate the corporation and the state to avoid market-fundamentalist governance. From there sprang a fruitful discussion.This approach fit well with one of the most interesting and innovative movements to make its voice heard in Porto Alegre.
./english/668.txt:20:Joshua Karliner is Executive Director of CorpWatch and author of the Corporate Planet (Sierra Club Books).