./english/31.txt:4:There were many good meetings in which the need for the organisational unity of the left was debated. For example, there were half a dozen gatherings where the various existing ESF networks discussed joint campaigns and days of action (for instance, there are plans to organise an ESF-style conference on the fight against privatisation).
./english/31.txt:28:As can be expected, a handful of diehard defenders of the ‘social movements’ have demanded that parties be banned once more. On the ESF email discussion list, they have used the presence of a banner of Marx, Lenin and Stalin - which was hung rather prominently right above the entrance to the forum - to kick off a debate on the subject. At the first day of the ESF, a group of people actually climbed up the building and took down the banner. The Turkish Maoist group MLKP complained to the Greek organisers, who agreed that the banner could be hung.
./english/31.txt:34:Alternatively, though, the organisations involved in the ESF could use this opportunity to dramatically turn around our cooperation and thereby resolve our crisis positively. The programme the CPGB has been putting forward from day one is still as politically necessary as it was five years ago. We will again present these proposals at the next ESF preparatory assembly in September, where the future of the ESF will be one of the key debates.
./english/31.txt:38:l Structures that allow us to debate a joint programme to challenge the Europe of capital and its bureaucrats, as well as our own national ruling classes.
./english/35.txt:75:high level, deep debates. But generally the analysis of the different
./english/35.txt:81: During the evaluation debate of 16th May held in Budapest about the
./english/35.txt:83:less seminars with deeper and more fruitful debate”. We have been
./english/35.txt:85:two hours of debate, dialogues, questions and answers. Because of
./english/37.txt:18: During the debate on the situation we have made in Athens
./english/37.txt:27:at the debate. Some people considered that the methods of Black Block
./english/40.txt:12:It wasn’t just the size and composition of the demonstration that made the concept of social movements likely, at last, to become a potent part of the language of public debate in Greece. It was also the forum itself, which was organised very consciously to illustrate that it is possible to run a 30,000-strong extravaganza of political discussion and cultural experience in a participatory, egalitarian and way illustrating the values of the society we are trying to create.
./english/44.txt:34:Languages are not only about transmitting ideas, but are also the cradle for new ideas. This is why we push for the presence of a much larger number of languages in Social Forums, allowing more and different people to express themselves and participate in the debates. Since the creation of Babels, the Social Forums have increased the number of languages with interpretation from 4 to over 20 different languages. This, in turn, has allowed more people to participate, and not only the fortunate intellectuals and activists who have been trained to speak and to understand the neo-colonial languages.
./english/44.txt:174:At the conclusion of a debate on repressive and fail-safe politics and their repercussions on the most vulnerable members of society, the organisations present proposed the establishment of an information, resistance and warning system given that such policies are being implemented in all countries.
./english/54.txt:65:Forum debates
./english/54.txt:67:Debates centred on the 16 themes, in seminars organised by coalitions of
./english/54.txt:68:organisations. This once more led to a format where debate was often limited
./english/54.txt:83:platforms as well as repeatedly intervening in debates, boosting the much
./english/54.txt:84:clearer political nature of many debates.
./english/54.txt:289:critical. It must debate how to get out of the state of paralysis the
./english/54.txt:302:that was debated was the issue of who was to blame for the minor skirmish,
./english/54.txt:304:SEK/SWP! The attitude of the SWP to political debate was shown when Jonathan
./english/54.txt:310:decisions by debate of resolutions, counterposed where need be, and then
./english/62.txt:8:• Presentación del debate by Mayo Fuster Morell (Castilian)
./english/62.txt:19:Presentación del debate by Mayo Fuster Morell (Castilian)
./english/62.txt:28:a abrir un espacio de debate y encuentro en torno a posibles diálogos entre investigadores, activistas e investigadores activistas. ¿Qué cooperación y sinergias podríamos desarrollar?, ¿Qué rol pueden jugar las técnicas de investigación en los procesos de movilización? ¿Cómo crean los movimientos sociales conocimiento y como gestionarlo? Para esta discusión contamos con la participación de Vanessa Andreotti en representación de Simon Tormey; Marco Berlinguer; Claudia Neubauer; Nicolas Haeringer; Moses Boudourides ; Hilary Wainwrigh, que amablemente harán presentaciones iniciales, y de todos vosotros y vosotras. Nos gustaría llamar al respeto a todas las intervenciones y a una actitud de escucha activa. Y por favor no extender las intervenciones a más de 10 minutos. Las notas del debate serán enviadas a todos los que dejen su e-mail. Gracias a todas!!! Mayo Fuster Morell (info(at)euromovements.info)
./english/62.txt:29:Nota participación: Contamos con una amplia asistencia al debate (en torno a 150 personas frecuentaron la sala) y una rica discusión e intervención de los y las asistentes.
./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/147.txt:86:n Amsterdam in 1997, during a huge summit against the European Union, about 40 activist projects established a network called “admission free.” The network gave way to the “Noborder” network in 1999, formed in front of the Finnish Tampere Conference Center, where the EU-Migation Summit was taking place. Actions and activities were developed and executed across national borders, most dramatically in July 1998 when a few hundred activists put up tents for a ten day stay near the border of the River Neise, leading to summer camps in the following years along the borders of the European Union. Instead of campfire romanticism the motto was, “hacking the borderline.” Characteristic of the border camps was a multiple strategy consisting of the exchange of experience and political debate, classical political education in the remote areas, and direct actions to disrupt the idea of the border regime.
./english/150.txt:10:Euromarch has developed into a network of activists who are organised under the auspices of a pan-European secretariat based in Paris with liaison committees operating in countries throughout the continent. Policy is debated and demands are formulated at open »Assizes« which are held at approximately 6 monthly intervals. Regular coordination meetings are held at national and pan-European levels and these have tended to focus on declarations and organisational matters for the protest activities which have surrounded the EU summits in Amsterdam, Luxemburg (November 1997), Cardiff (June 1998), Vienna (December 1998) and in Cologne (June 1999).
./english/150.txt:11:Communication and debate
./english/150.txt:12:A Euro-wide paper, »Marches-Europeenes-News« is produced regularly and this is supplemented by nationally based publications. Much communication takes place via e-mail and use of the internet as continent wide meetings are costly to arrange and incur sizeable travel expenses. However, the »Assizes« are well attended with 500 participants from many countries. These gatherings, together with the counter-summits, provide opportunities for the exchange of information, experiences of struggles and for debate over policies, demands, actions and ways of organising the movement. Although debate can become heated, there is a spirit of cooperation which is just as well with the large number of languages being spoken. The organisation of summer camps in Thessalonika (1998) and Cologne (1999) provides another forum of debate for activists from diverse movements.
./english/150.txt:16:With such a new movement and one so broad and diverse as Euromarch, encompassing people, campaigns and movements from across a continent, it is not surprising that the demands formulated to date, have been general ones. Euromarch has reasserted the right to work and has declared its opposition to the intoduction of »Workfare« style programmes. It argues for a drastic reduction in working hours without loss of pay and for the immediate introduction of a 35 hour working week. The idea of a guaranteed minimum income underpins the demand of a unified European social welfare system which would provide basic social rights to health, housing, education and welfare regardless of gender or nationality. Euromarch is campaigning for the imposition of a Tobin Tax on capital and speculation and for a uniform property tax. It declares itself in favour of equal rights for all and against any form of racism and social exclusion, including controls on immigration which restrict the right to the free movement of people. Such demands clearly have the potential to attract the support of the people of Europe but their translation into concrete policies is no easy matter as conditions in different countries vary so greatly and the debate around specifics may lead to divisions in the unity achieved around the general demands. There have also been claims that the outlook is too defensive and that minimalist demands have been shaped in order to maintain maximum unity but that the demands and resulting policies will not challenge the capitalist system which is at the root of neo-liberal restructuring.
./english/150.txt:18:As is the watchword of progressive movements, after the debate is over all actions need to have the unified activity of all participants. However it is the diversity of activities which has come to characterise the struggles of groups which come under the Euromarch umbrella. Action at a European level has also had a catalytic effect on national activities, for example the Amsterdam demonstration provided the impetus for the campaigns of the French unemployed movement in the winter of 1997, and this activity then fed back into the Euromarch organisation which has a strong French presence. The large number of occupations of unemployment offices played a central role in the French campaign and challenged the Labour Minister, Martine Aubry, who ridiculed the movement and claimed that the occupations were the actions of a tiny minority. In Germany there were fewer occupations but more regional and local demonstrations which coincided with the monthly publication of unemployment figures. This served to keep the issue of unemployment a prominent one, especially in the run up to the national elections. In Spain, the unemployed also took to the streets but this time to form blockades to draw attention to their situation and to the increasingly casualised nature of work where 90% of all new contracts are temporary. In Italy the unemployed and other people living in precarious situations, who have become known as the »Invisibles«, have asserted their right to free transport. In the run up to the 1997 demonstration this took the form of an occupation of trains and the successful demand to be taken to Amsterdam. Euromarch has also played a part in linking struggles and this was highlighted at the Cardiff summit where the demonstration was followed by a street party protest organised with the assistance of the »Reclaim the Streets« organisation.
./english/150.txt:20:However there is by no means unanimity over what form action should take. The last Euromarch »Assizes« saw a debate chiefly amongst the Italian delegates about whether another train occupation or a march linking up with people in their communities would be the best way to approach the Cologne demonstration. Behind this division is perhaps a difference in aims with one side attempting to further strengthen the grass roots campaign and the other more concerned with putting pressure on national and European leaders and institutions, especially through use of the media. The pan-national demonstrations which target the EU summits are also being accompanied by counter-summits which have been described as the »European Parliament of the Unemployed«. These provide a forum within which alternative policies can be developed. However here too there is a potential tension between shorter-term policy changes and longer-term social and political transformation.
./english/150.txt:22:In its opposition to the extension and broadening of neo-liberal style policies, Euromarch can be seen as part of a growing extra-parliamentary opposition to governments of any political persuasion which pursue these types of policies and to their adoption by the European Union. This opposition encompasses campaigns and struggles in a movement which spans highly organised political and pressure group type organisations which plan their actions carefully to display their opposition, and more spontaneous struggles which are more sporadically organised and focus around everyday resistance to neo-liberal policies. The differing perspectives of participants are not so easily identified but a contrast can be made between those who see such a movement as a source of social democratic renewal and those whose aim is to develop a more fundamental challenge to the existing order by building an explicitly anti-capitalist movement. In this sense key Euromarch demands like that for a minimum income can be viewed as the basis of a »Social Europe«, but the meaning of the word »Social« is itself subject to debate and its content will be an object of struggle.
./english/150.txt:23:With the election of social democratic governments in several key countries a situation has arisen in which social democratic parties are in office in the majority of EU countries, but these parties are generally carrying out neo-liberal policies. Euromarch could be seen as a way of exerting pressure on these parties to alter the course of their policies at the national and EU level. Alternatively, Euromarch could be viewed as a way of linking and coordinating struggles with a view to developing an anti-capitalist strategy to challenge not just government policies but also the whole dynamic of capitalist restructuring. In this sense the debates which are occuring are debates about the orientation of the labour movement and what Christophe Aguiton (Euromarch Secretary) calls a redefinition and reconstruction of the working class and its relationship to social movements.
./english/150.txt:25:In this wider struggle, building international, as well as European wide, links are seen as central to the development of Euromarch. Strong links have already been made with unemployed organisations in South Korea and with the land rights movement in Brazil. Euromarch will be raising money to bring over representatives of such movements to take part in the activities and demonstration in Cologne. Moreover the understanding of the global dimension of struggles has led to an extension of the actions surrounding the EU summit in Cologne in late May to include the G8 summit in June. Contact has been made with many organisations worldwide to ensure that joint actions can be organised to bridge the three weeks which separate the two summits. These three weeks will provide the opportunity for debate and action which will be truly global in character and will represent global resistance to the policies of neo-liberalism.
./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:66:There is no nostalgia for a primitive life in the fact of quoting Mauss, nor any facile admiration for the "revolutionary fête." Things are much more complex. On the one hand, the contemporary quest for "direct action," for "direct democracy," finds an initial realization in the collective, cooperative production of these public events, which bring together all the rigorously separated aspects of modern social life. Indeed, the very aim of such events is to criticize certain fundamental separations, like the one that amputates any basic concern for life from the laws of monetary accumulation. But that doesn't mean that the event, the ecstatic convergence, is a total solution: instead it is a departure point for a fresh questioning of the social tie, at times when its deadly aspects become visible, as they are today. The protestors' claim, not just to the occupation but to the creation of public space, with all the conflicts it brings in its wake, offers society an occasion to theatricalize the real, in order to replay the meaning of abstractions that are no longer adequate to the needs and possibilities of life. The "total social fact" of the contemporary demonstration is, at its best, a chance to relearn and recreate a language for political debate, which isn't just about money, and doesn't only have "¥ € $" in its vocabulary. And the networked protests we are speaking of, including those of the peace movement in 2003, have produced the first chances to do this at the scale of the globalized economy and of global governance.
./english/162.txt:74:These admissions of defeat are well known. (21) But in recent publications, another history of conceptual art has been coming back to light. It is a history that unfolds in Latin America, and particularly in Argentina, in the cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario. It would seem that here, in the context of an authoritarian government and under the pressure of American cultural imperialism, conceptual art could only be received – or invented – as an invitation to act antagonistically within the mass-media sphere. Certain Argentine pop artists considered that the commercial news media could actually be appropriated as an artistic medium, like a canvas or a gallery space. To do this, Roberto Jacoby and Eduardo Costa created an artificial happening, one that never really happened, and they stimulated the media with information about it, so as to achieve specific fictional effects. (22) But this attempt was only a first step towards a fully political appropriation of the communications media by artists. The most characteristic project was Tucumán Arde, or "Tucumán is Burning," realized in 1968. (23) The military government was attempting to "modernize" the sugar-cane industry in the province of Tucumán, with a shift from small, locally owned businesses to larger factories owned by foreign capital; at the same time, the official media painted an idyllic picture of a region which in reality was wracked by impoverishment and intense labor struggles. So a group of some thirty artists and intellectuals from Buenos Aires and Rosario researched the social and economic conditions in the province, carrying out an analysis of all the mass-media coverage of the region, and going out themselves to gather first-hand information and to document the situation using photography and film. They then staged an exhibition that was explicitly designed to feed their work back into the national debate, so as to counter the media picture. Yet the project, although it did not shy away from advertising techniques, could not be reduced to counter-propaganda. As Andrea Giunta writes: "In many of its characteristic traits – such as the exploration of the interaction between languages, the centrality of the activity required from the spectator, the unfinished character, the importance of the documentation, the dissolution of the idea of the author, and the questioning of the art system and the ideas that legitimate it – Tucumán Arde maintains a relation with the repertory of conceptual art. But not with the tautological and self-referential form of conceptualism, in which, from a certain viewpoint, one finds a reconfirmation of the modernist paradigm. Language does not refer back to language, to the specificity of the artistic fact; instead, the contextual relations are so strong that in this case, reality ceases being understood as a space of reflection and comes to be conceived as a possible field of action oriented toward the transformation of society." (24)
./english/172.txt:25:We call on all the European movements to open a large debate in order to decide all together new common steps during the next months within the framework of the ESF process.
./english/176.txt:137: Klein, N. (2002) Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, Great Britain: Flamingo.
./english/187.txt:23:The necessity of creating a Common Space for sustained coordination: Given the growing capacity of our calls to action and mobilization, the system is creating the most favorable conditions to fight against us: new economic resources, police impunity, restriction of our liberties, intimidating the population and manipulation information. One vital strategy in this new situation, which was already vital before, is deepening our contact and communication with society, decentralizing our struggle and working intensely in local and regional contexts in a coordinated way and with common objectives. In order to do this, we need to provide ourselves with strategic, long-term projects. There is no better path for moving forward than from an informed social debate, from collective participation and mobilization, from the cohesion of our groups and social movements. In order to advance in the construction of responses and in the coordination of actions in local and global contexts, we need to create a common meeting space from which to begin elaborating common proposals and projects as the basis for this other possible world.
./english/187.txt:43:A call for critical reflection, debate, direct action and the development of alternatives to the current system as tools for social transformation.
./english/187.txt:53:Internal Consultation among collectives and social movements. The Internal Consultation consists of a process of diffusion and contact among movements and organizations through a system of questions that will spark a debate in order to help us develop an understanding of the various reactions, ideas, proposals and affinities toward the project. It will allow us to build this project together through a collective process, and will culminate with the First International Gathering where we will define the project’s subsequent stages.
./english/187.txt:54:Spaces of social debate: We will create local spaces of participation and discussion connected at the European level with as many people as possible. A multitude of dynamics might be useful for this: assemblies, seminars, gatherings, etc., around the questions, issues, objectives and with a methodology previously agreed upon through the Internal Consultation. From these spaces will emerge the critiques, analysis, proposals for transformation and the agreements that will be the starting points for the following stages. These spaces will be sustained and constitute teh nmost important part of the process.
./english/187.txt:55:Mass Consultation among the entire population. Around those issues decided upon in the spaces of debate at the European level, mass consultations will be carried out in order to extend the debate to the entire population. This consultation will be held around those themes decided upon in the European gatherings and the local assemblies can add other issues in their territories in an autonomous fashion. These actions do not mean ending the debates described above in section b), but rather just the opposite, widening and enriching those debates.
./english/187.txt:58:Processes of Application: this involves moving forward in the application of the agreements around each aspect obtained in the spaces of social debate. This stage, as all others, would be subject to the agreements and consensus constructed throughout the entire process and would lead to initiatives coordinated at the European level that would create their own dynamics.
./english/187.txt:60:The initial idea would be to engage in a global analysis of the current economic, political and social system, but including Europe, its specific issues and the transformations we can promte from here, as a context of particular importance. In terms of levels and issues of debate, we start from the idea that the consultation process should integrate all those levels and themes of debate that might be of interest to those collectives and social movements that become involved in the process. It should marginalize neither analytical nor concrete debates and should attend to proposals for structural transformation (political, economic and social system), sectoral debate (ecology, social rights, militarism, immigration, gender, etc...) as well as concrete reforms (ending specific laws regarding immigration, abolishing the external debt, guaranteed income, tobin tax, etc...)
./english/187.txt:69:As we have already explained, the “Internal Consultation” consists of a process of diffusion and contact among movements and organizations through a system of questions that will spark a debate in order to help us develop an understanding of the various reactions, ideas, proposals and affinities toward the project. It will also allow us to define the stages of the Process itself proposed above.
./english/187.txt:71:The main objective of the internal consultation is to ensure the active participation in the definition of the process itself from the various geografic and social contexts on the European content. That is to say that the first steps of the consulta and the initial decisions should be extremely participatory, transparent and should result form a process of debate and consensus, with the equal participation of all the groups involved.
./english/187.txt:78:Our first objective is to promote the creation of different promotor groups in each territory in Europe, so they can extend the debate surrounding this process in their own territory.
./english/187.txt:85:Diffuse the internal consultation guide and explain the proposal for the European Social Consulta, encouraging all the collectives in thier territorial context of action (community, region, nation, state...) to participate in the process of debate, inviting them to attend the first European gathering.
./english/187.txt:94:The “Internal Consultation” will culminate in a debate at the First International Gathering, in which hundreds of participants from all over Europe will participate having already engaged in a previous discussion and where decisions can be consensed on among everyone.
./english/187.txt:105:The second would be to debate and decide on all those issues we will have worked throughout the Internal Consultation.
./english/192.txt:16:-> The concentration of the bulk of the ESF at Alexandra Palace recaptured something of the atmosphere of the Fortezza at Florence, producing an intensification of energies by bringing together a large number of different actors and debates in a confined space for two and a half days;
./english/192.txt:19:-> London also displayed the same interplay of mobilization and debate that has been the driving force of all the great social forums: the ESF culminated in a demonstration in central London of around 100,000, before which the Assembly of the Social Movements launched a call for international protests against neo-liberalism and war on the weekend of 19-20 March 2005.
./english/192.txt:25:-> My impression - and that of others to whom I have spoken - was of a significant increase in the intellectual quality of the debate: in the seminars that I attended I was very struck by the extent to which both platform speakers and contributors from the floor avoided the ritual denunciations of neo-liberalism and imperialism for serious analysis and discussion.
./english/192.txt:29:mainstream politicians are out of touch with both the spirit, content and the style of the inclusive non-party politics now emerging under the ESF umbrella. Any professional politician observing the audiences of 1,000 or more people raptly listening to debates on globalisation, the power of corporations, racism, food or the environment would do well to reflect on the narrowness of their own political agenda and the genuine transnationalism now clearly informing European youth…Out of the connections being made between radically different groups, it is possible to see in years to come the emergence of a genuine new politics of the European left.
./english/192.txt:36:Often it is more difficult to acknowledge the significance of these disagreements because they are presented as procedural problems. Thus a number of French networks have complained about the fact that the platform at one seminar were all agreed in defending the right of young Muslim women to wear the hejab, even though this does not seem to have prevented a very vigorous debate taking place from the floor. This seems to me like an evasion of the real issue.
./english/192.txt:38:The issue of the hejab is really a symptom of the real problem, which is how to expand our movement to embrace those at the bottom of European society who suffer both economic exploitation and racial oppression and many of whom, for that very reason, strongly attach themselves to their Muslim faith. Once again, this isn't a question on which we will reach rapid or easy agreement. But at least we should recognize the importance of the debate, rather than take refuge in arguments about how one seminar was organized.
./english/192.txt:52:But even if the criticisms that have been made of the British organizers were largely correct, this would not justify the introduction of violence inside the Forum. Violence and debate are antitheses: those who believe that diversity and discussion are among the greatest strengths of our movement cannot tolerate attempts to settle arguments by force. Moreover, those who bring violence into the movement bring the state in with them: the attacks in Trafalgar Square gave the police the pretext to intervene and arrest people. Those European comrades who have refused to condemn, or condoned, or even colluded in the disruption of the London ESF should reflect on the very dangerous precedent they are creating for the future.
./english/193.txt:7:One of the most debated aspects at the ESF was how to develop strategies of social transformation beyond a simple negation of the existing neoliberal from of globalisation. In the face of changing conditions, altered modes of capitalist production, transformed social relations and social forces, the left has had to think through its self-understanding, its inner contradictions, its strategies. Ever since there has been discussion about non- or anti-etatist political forms and strategies or more institutionalised ones – and what the relations between them should look like, if there are some. We could remember the split between Marx and Bakunin, or later between Marxists and Anarchists. We could remember the different concepts about the relations between the movement, in the singular, the supposed male workers movement, and socialist or communist parties, ranging from Lenin to Luxemburg to Trotsky to Gramsci to Mao and so on. We could also remember the movement of ‘68, its march through the institutions or into an alternative space/niche for new modes of living. And of course the relation between autonomy and institutional politics was a problem for the second feminist movement in the 1970s and 80s well as for the peace movement and the ecological movement – just think about the German Greens. There is a lot of experience that should not be forgotten. Maybe that was one reason for a – not political but - generational uniformity discussing that problematic at the ESF.
./english/193.txt:37:This link to concrete situations of resistance in time and space on the ESF is sometimes difficult to achieve. In many seminars and workshops you just get flat, already known analyses, simple propaganda and wishful thinking. Again and again the common enemy (neoliberalism, transnational corporations, the US, the WTO etc.) is condemned – in this sense the perspective on the ESF seems too unified; the few times debates became concrete consensus was melting away – the different approaches and goals were too diverse: a necessary result emerging from the contradiction of the ESF (and WSF) process itself as open space for discussion and self-education, without a real attempt to develop some applicable and visible alternatives. Therefore the Forum is no movement in itself (in contrast to Thomas Ponniah’s view8), but maybe a space for a new political consciousness and sovereignty, the modern form of articulation and association of structurally fragmented groups, classes and movements. However, because there is no alternative social project formed, the actual representative crisis of neoliberalism does not lead to a weakening of its hegemonic position. Pierre Khalfa supposes that diversity paralyses. 9 But its not diversity as such – which might enrich the movements – but a lack of deep analysis, including the production of neoliberal hegemony from below, in combination with non-committal plurality. This undermines a generalization of experiences, views and understandings (without closed unification under one primary force) preventing us from achieving coherent approaches and strategies. On the one hand there are more or less successful local social movements, creating autonomous spaces and transforming subjectivities, sometimes re-appropriating the essential means of reproduction from below, but hardly touching the relations of power on national or even transnational level. On the other there are global events for the altermondialist, national and transnational NGOs, some national parties, getting some media presence, shaping the public discourse, but far away from the everyday experience of the people, acting in some kind of representative vacuum without really questioning the ruling political form (Brand 2004). There is a need for intermediate political forms. At the heart of the problem lies the relation between representation and participation. A permanent movement (in the strict sense of the word) is difficult to sustain, movements are fragile forms with periods of higher or lesser activity, they develop out of concrete situations of dissent with the ruling mode of production and living, with a perspective of (molecular) social transformation, while the struggle for this transformation has to be a very long-standing one. Out of this results a need for institutionalisation to bridge times of less activity, disintegration, defensive situations and to overcome defeats, save experience and knowledge for the next generation of activists etc. A renewed concept for left political parties could be one possibility to create intermediate institutionalised political forms.
./english/193.txt:85:5. A discussion in extension of ESF debates between Holloway and Hirsch, co-organised by Attac and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin, October 18. (see the debate in Das Argument 249 and 250 in 2003.)
./english/199.txt:7:The third ESF has officially ended, but the barrage of attacks and counter-attacks around the autonomous actions and arrests continues to rage. The simmering conflict between the horizonal and verticals became fully visible when a group of activists from Beyond ESF, including the Wombles and many others, rushed the stage during an anti-Racism plenary Saturday night to denounce Ken Livingstone and the lack of democracy within the forum. Tensions grew after several activists were arrested on the way out, and resurfaced yet again when a highly respected Indymedia activist, who happened to have also played a key role in NOMAD and the broader ESF process, was dragged away by police after trying to make a statement following the march on Sunday afternoon. Things have since come to a boil as SWP members, the mayor's allies, and others dismiss such direct actions as violent, anti-democratic, and even racist, while their critics continue to defend the right to take direct action to publicly voice their concerns. Debates once pitting activists against mainstream politicians and bureaucrats in the WTO, World Bank, and IMF now rage within the very heart of the Global Justice Movement itself.
./english/201.txt:19:In this article I'll seek to lay out honestly and starkly what, in my opinion, were the strengths and weaknesses of the London event. Whatever others think of my analysis, it's important that everyone is able to openly debate this – because only that way will the fast-snowballing phenomenon that is the social forum movement be able to grow in the right direction, and avoid some of the mistakes of the past.
./english/201.txt:25:Previous social forums have been largely open events. Entrance prices, where they existed, were kept deliberately low, spaces were provided for all to participate, free accommodation was provided and organising committees were deeply, even if often frustratingly, democratic. All this is in keeping with the overall principles of the social forum movement, dedicated to creating open, free, largely non-hierarchical and democratic spaces for serious debate about the future.
./english/201.txt:59:Take, for example, a debate entitled “ Hijab : a woman's right to choose”, which focused on the French law banning religious insignia in schools . There were seven members of the panel for this event, and every one of them were in agreement. The French law was “racist” and “Islamophobic”, part of a giant worldwide conspiracy against Muslims by the racist west. Every speaker referred to the law as a “headscarf ban”, omitting to mention that it forbids all blatant religious insignia, including skullcaps (why no panel of angry Jews complaining about this?) Some audience members felt short-changed, and rightly so. What kind of “debate” features no opposing views? And what kind of “progressive” movement promotes the case for religious exceptionalism and hardly mentions the case for secularism, long a key principle of the left?
./english/201.txt:71:Making this forum happen, then, was a hell of an achievement in itself. And despite the far-from-perfect way it was organised, it was still an occasion on which a huge diversity of people from across Europe and further afield could get together, talk, debate and, perhaps most importantly, plan how to work together in the future.
./english/201.txt:83:The veteran activist Susan George put this starkly to the audience in one of the Forum's best events – and one which summed up, for me, both the strengths and weaknesses of the whole weekend. It was a debate entitled “Life After Capitalism”, and she was on the panel.
./english/201.txt:93:On the other side there is a still-new, still-young movement of people – a new generation – who can see that the solutions to the problems of today's world will have to be new, novel and above all, democratic. Neither Castro nor Marx nor George Galloway is going to save us. Honest debate, serious analysis, damned hard work and a determination to stand up to power just might.
./english/202.txt:7:The ESF 2004 was an extremely contradictory event and process. Thousands of people found ways to use this space in the spirit of the WSF principles. They debated strategies for the anti-capitalist movement, while developing Europe-wide activist networks which could act together more effectively. Some devised alternative methods and capacities which could make another world possible. All this happened because activist gatherings generally find ways to make things happen according to the means that are available and despite the obstacles present.
./english/202.txt:17:Moreover, the programme structure reproduced the categories of bourgeois society. For example, the thematic structure fragmented practical reality: the ‘war on terror’ was nearly lost through its separation into three themes (war, civil liberties, migrants). Party activists in the programme group narrowly defined those issues according to their party agendas, sometimes even acting as if their own agendas represented all the relevant movements. At many sessions, speakers harangued the audience with cliched slogans, aimed mainly to elicit applause and preclude debate.
./english/203.txt:9:At the first ESF in Florence two years ago, the unprecedented support of the Italian leftist trade union federation Cgil and, more widely, of the European confederation of trade unions (ETUC) gave the movement a decisive impact on public opinion. It strengthened the protests against the imminent attack on Iraq and contributed much to the debate on the alternatives to neo-liberalism and imperialism. In London , three of the main British labour organisations (Unison, GMB, RMT) played the same fundamental role in managing and sponsoring the event. But the ESF came just a few days after New Labour's party conference, where the unions ended up backing Tony Blair's party and general policy, even if officially opposing his alliance with the US and the occupation of Iraq .
./english/203.txt:11:The forum also came after the ETUC's general secretary John Monks approved the EU Constitutional Treaty, strongly rejected by the majority of the associations and groups that gathered in London. Monks' official position is that “despite shortcomings, the Constitution is still an improvement on the acquis” and that “it will bring real benefits for working people and citizens across the EU even if it is not as good as the one the unions proposed”. Even Cgil, which was initially against the Treaty, in the end supported it: “We cannot hide the limitations of a draft that does not ban the use of war and does not guarantee the right of citizenship to migrants” said Titti Di Salvo, Cgil's International Secretary, “But at the same time the treaty defines some values that belong to the European social model. That's why we propose now to re-open the debate with a campaign to collect a million signatures' calling for a referendum to modify the text”. However, in the final document issued by the Forum's organisers the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty was clear, and so was the fight against the widespread attack in Europe to public services, to labour and social rights.
./english/203.txt:17:But the strongest contrasts emerged on the issues of the war in Iraq, and the relationship between trade unions and the US-appointed Iraqi interim government. During a key Iraq debate in Alexandra Palace a few delegates – many of them Iraqis – interrupted (and ended) the meeting protesting against the decision to invite Sobhi Al-Mashadani, the general secretary of the Iraq federation of trade unions (IFTU), the only one recognised by the Iraqi interim government and also by the international and European confederations of trade unions. Mr Mashadani was denounced as a collaborator of the US, belonging to the Communist Party of Iraq, one of the forces represented in the Allawi government. The TUC and UNISON immediately condemned the action and, repeating their support for the IFTU, said “These attacks are unfair and must stop. The people who harassed Mr Mashadani and prevented the meeting from taking place have no interest in genuine debate or the peaceful, democratic future of the people of Iraq.” Ex-Labour MP George Galloway attacked the decision to invite the Iraqi unionist even if he said he didn't approve the method of protest: “There was a place for registering in a demonstrative way the disapproval of such a person representing a ‘puppet' regime, but no protest which actually stops a democratic meeting taking place should go that far.”
./english/205.txt:11:The London bid for the ESF was presented in Paris during the second edition as the result of an agreement between the Socialist Worker's Party (SWP) and the Greater London Authority (GLA). It was discussed and approved at a closed meeting, one of those that still abound in Social Fora everywhere – like those that prepare the agenda of the Social Movements' Assemblies. The decision to present London as an alternative was never debated among British movements; in fact, the GLA (and the group behind, a small Labour tendency called Socialist Action, basically composed of advisers to the mayor, Ken Livingstone) had never shown any interest in the process at all, whilst the SWP, by means of its myriad front groups (Globalise Resistance, Stop the War Coalition, Project K etc.), although active in the WSF and the ESF, had made systematic efforts to stop the spontaneous process of organization of Local Social Fora, in places such as London, Manchester, Leeds and Cardiff. The GLA's involvement was a demand made by certain key actors in the European process, such as Attac France, to make sure the event was financially viable. The beginning of the organizing process in December in London came as a surprise to many.
./english/205.txt:38:It's unnecessary to remark how bad a precedent the use of the police by the organization of the ESF against participants is; but an evaluation that concentrated on that too much would end up forgetting the most important thing about these two days: that the autonomous spaces were above all extremely productive. Be it the discussions around how to develop an ‘activist research' and a ‘research activism', at the Radical Theory Forum and elsewhere; the excellent debates on precariousness and migration at Beyond the ESF; the exploration of the idea of ‘the commons' at Life Despite Capitalism; the creative and joyous search for new ways of protesting at the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination; the debates on media and knowledge and the No Vox night at Camden Centre – there was a tangible feeling of convergence and creation of subjectivities; it was a ‘less ideological' opposition not because it had no ideas or alternatives to propose, but because it shunned facile binaries – the simplistic ‘us and them', ‘inside and outside' – and favoured the least reactive, most productive aspects of the new European movements.
./english/205.txt:58:It's no exaggeration to say that this debate was one of the most successful at the ESF, resulting in a call out for the European-wide organization of a Mayday parade of the precariat in 2005 like the ones in Milan and Barcelona this year. It's also clear, however, that some problems remain: for example, the lack of a theoretical solution for the evident differences between immaterial and material precarious labour; or the question of how this new European movement identity relates to other struggles elsewhere (which is a central problem for a truly ‘global' resistance that goes beyond mere ‘international solidarity'). It also remains to be seen what the paths this transformation might take are – many possibilities, including neo-trade unionism, are open. One thing is certain, though: the intensity of the debate and attention doesn't mean per se the guarantee of the existence, or creation, of this new subjectivity; it should be observed that a few of the groups that signed the ‘Middlesex Declaration' have had little contact with the idea, let alone done any work on the area; therefore, for those who left London celebrating the victory of their position, the lesson of Bologna '77 should be applied to movement building as well: lavorare con lentezza.
./english/209.txt:5:Let me try to explain the peculiarities and mysteries of left politics in Britain – essential to understanding the UK ESF ( www.fse-esf.org ). There has until recently been an unconscious `Little Englandism ' on parts of the left (occasionally it has been quite conscious, like the leading left MP of the 1970's and 80s who proudly declared that he did not have a passport). This has led to an almost complete disengagement from the debate and campaigns around the proposed European constitution. Some engage but only to defend national parliaments as the means of achieving democracy against a ‘bureaucratic Brussels '. But engagement with the Europe-wide thinking about different levels of democracy, from the local to the continental, is only just beginning. The hosting of the ESF is proving an important catalyst.
./english/209.txt:7:This distance from the political debates of the rest of the continent has many roots. Britain 's early industrialisation , its sectoral craft based trade unionism, and the way this trade unionism created the Labour Party giving it a monopoly over working class political representation, prevented the growth of a significant Communist Party with internationalist traditions, however ambiguous. A more recent factor, until the blows of Thatcherism, has been the immense self-confidence and industrial strength of the British labour movement, almost to the point of arrogance. This produced a highly independent stance, as if the British trade unions did not need support or allies. They presumed that they could win on their own. If there were problems, these were thought to be merely local ones of betrayal and weak leadership. This was especially true at a national level: from the 70s onwards there were always radical trade unionists organising from the factories of multinational companies to build international workplace to workplace connections, through for example the Transnational Information Exchange. Thatcherism destroyed whatever basis there was for this somewhat arrogant self-confidence. As the unions now rebuild themselves, there is a new orientation towards Europe which is already showing itself in a significant union mobilisation for the London ESF.
./english/209.txt:9:This new Europeanism is at two levels, which are in tension with each other. On the one hand, many trade union leaders now look towards Europe as if it was just about the social measures on labour rights. There is a blindness about the market-driven economics built into Giscard's constitution. On the other hand, in trade unions facing EU-led liberalisation , like the Communication Workers Union, or for public sector workers fighting privatisation at a local level, there is an eagerness to link up with workers across the continent to resist a common neo-liberal enemy. Here there is, as yet, little awareness about the constitution but there is a growing interest which will produce a real activist debate in the ESF about alternatives to the present proposals.
./english/209.txt:11:The fact that the ESF is coming to town is reinforcing and hopefully giving stronger political expression to this Europeanisation of British labour, stimulating more articulate debates about the form this should take. The trade union mobilisation for London has also ensured that issues arising from fighting neo-liberalism in its heartlands, such as privatisation , are high on the agenda.
./english/210.txt:3:To asses the 3rd ESF we must take into account that the two elements of which the ESF consists had drifted apart. If we look at the London ESF as a process it is not hard to agree that it was a European success. 25,000 anti-neoliberal-antiwar activists assembled in London , debated, exchanged experiences, built or strengthened networks, organized campaigns and had a good time. The Autonomous Spaces were better than ever. The Preparatory Meetings worked all year round guaranteeing in hard conditions enough transparency and democracy, the expansion of collective intellect networks like BABELS, NOMAD and the Memory Project, things are in a way getting less national and more collective.
./english/210.txt:5:But speaking of the ESF as an event connected to “internal relations” and balances of power we can't say the same. First of all the aim that was put down last year in Bobigny – to use the ESF to build a broad spectrum of anti-neoliberal powers inside the UK based on the antiwar movement – has failed. Anti-neoliberal forces are split between what was called the horizontal and the verticals. The event itself was organized under the influence of the Market: closed doors, a lack of transparency, a close relation to neoliberal powers, exclusions, “managerial” logistics, expensive, not collective and a close relation to the metropolitan police. It followed the “No Money, no honey” politics of the Mayor of London and, because he was the only one with the money, he could influence the way it was organized. And he never felt that he had to be accountable to anybody and especially to the European organizers – and he was helped for this by the left dominating powers of London . Things were so bad that activists thought that a specific seminar was a not a space to debate but a public relations operation of the Mayor.
./english/210.txt:15:Because of these problems we think that the ESF must be held every year. We must admit that our arguments are not very convincing. London was tiring to prepare but most of all we see that our networks are having big problems to survive next to this huge event. We must not slow down, so the one and half-year agreement must be let to show its abilities. Especially when the Networks aren't ready yet and we think that –mostly- parties will not allow them easily to grow. We must find ways to cut down power gained by national quota, change the way plennaries are organized but not by eradicating public political debate on the needs and priorities of the movement, work harder expanding to the East and Balkans but more important than all we must be more inclusive with the social issue of Europe, with the working people that produce the wealth of society, with immigrants that seek their right to escape from poverty and not be discriminated in Europe, with the socially excluded.
./english/212.txt:10:The first European Social Forums (ESF) set the stage for the construction of the European alterglobalisation movement and successfully centred political debate on neoliberal globalisation. Since the first World Social Forum (WSF) held in Porto Alegre in January 2001, the Social Forums, and the ESF in particular, have become the most visible public expression of the alterglobalisation movement. Basing themselves on the Charter of Porto Alegre, which has become an indispensable reference, the Forums have become quasi-permanent processes of crystallization of new forces and struggles that were previously rather disparate. Prior to the Forums the latter acted in dispersed fashion, promoting alterglobalisation in a precocious albeit strategically unfocused way. Today, critical movements benefit from a wide array of tools of struggle and common objectives. This crystallization has been accompanied by geographic expansion. The first three WSFs in Brazil created the conditions for the incorporation into the alterglobalisation movement of powerful social forces from South America, notably the peasant and indigenous people’s movements. The Bombay WSF in 2004 likewise integrated Indian social movements into the global struggle. The geopolitics of alterglobalisation thus mirrors the process of neoliberal globalisation, though its scope is still less all encompassing. It is to be hoped that the WSF planned for 2007 in Africa will play a similar role to the 2004 WSF in India. The global movement still needs to expand its reach to Eastern Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. China remains outside of this process, for an undetermined period of time. Completing this geopolitical expansion of alterglobalisation will require the promotion and development of Local Social Forums in a number of countries. LSFs are prominent organising tools favouring the embedding of the Forum process. The same can be said of the National Social Forums that have emerged in a number of countries. This process constitutes a major step forward in the struggle against neoliberal globalisation. Nonetheless, its future development depends on moving forward to new stages, thereby avoiding the threat of exhaustion, immobility and lack of creativity. In this respect, self-criticism and criticism are indispensable components of the dynamic of the Forums. We have to be lucid about the state of the process. ATTAC, acting as a movement on an international level, has been committed since its inception to the construction of the Social Forums. As such, it has a double obligation. Firstly, to reflect lucidly and uncompromisingly on the insufficiencies and some of the recently witnessed drifts of the movement. Secondly, to stimulate new thinking and propose new forms of action designed to strengthen and amplify the global movement. The WSF has already undertaken to reinvent its formula in 2005. The success of this reshaping will be judged in January. The same kind of effort must occur on a European level.
./english/212.txt:16:The ESFs have generated mixed results regarding their three main missions: The ideational debate, the elaboration of programmatic proposals, and decision making for common action. The ideational debates occurred mostly during the preparatory phases of the Forums and were reflected in the programs of the plenary sessions. Being based on consensus, decision making is inevitably the result of compromises reached by the different forces involved in Forum preparation. This sometimes leads to apparently unsatisfying outcomes. Thus during the three ESFs held until now, the space given to war and racism was particularly important, leaving aside other major issues such as economic, environmental and social questions, or the problem of European construction. It is far from clear that the resulting thematic hierarchy reflects the views of the majority of the social movements involved in the Forum. This can be empirically verified by comparing requests (for seminars and workshops) with the final programme of the plenary sessions. The contrast between requests and outcomes questions the functioning and the modes of discussion of the European Preparatory Assembly (EPA), which manifestly finds it difficult to sustain political debate concerning the strategic priorities of the movement. True, this assembly is ’open’ in the sense that all can participate in it. However, it has become apparent that some organisations are far more active than others are because they benefit from permanent memberships, financial means and political determination. This fact should push the EPA to promote greater representation of all the organisations involved. Moreover, the EPA’s most active core organisations have remained the same over the past three years. This highlights faithfulness and continuity. However, it also points to limits given that the movement requires expansion and the integration of new organisations into the core. The EPA being the essential locus of political construction of the ESF it is essential to enrich its democratic character, its representation and its participation. This will no doubt require setting up a system of financial solidarity. This is also true for the ‘Assembly of Social Movements’. In the course of the Forums themselves, some useful debates occur during the seminars and workshops. However, the plenary sessions are often reduced to a juxtaposition of speeches prepared in advance and to media focused rhetorical exercises designed to enhance the organisations, which fought their way to the podium. Despite the real substantive debates that occurred during the ESFs, the Forums had three failings. The first, which became apparent after the fact, is the lack of guidance for the plenary seminars and workshops. This muddles the event for participants who don’t know if the objective is to confront analyses, exchange experiences or build programmatic alternatives. The second drawback is a total absence of knowledge accumulation. While minutes of various sessions are inconsistently drawn up, no method exists as yet to identify key points raised, to broaden public debate around them, or to deepen work in a sustained fashion. Hence, we have no means to ensure continuity and to measure progress. This situation is unquestionably fuelling a feeling that the Forums are repetitive. The third failing, made apparent in London, is ideological drift. Preceding Forums had successfully avoided this but there were expressions of intolerance, exchanges of insults, and pseudo debates without democratic contradiction in London. Responsibility for this lies with some sectarian political groups and religious organisations, as highlighted during the seminars on Iraq or in debates over the French law on religious signs in schools. These drifts threaten the ESF’s existence and cannot be allowed to continue.
./english/212.txt:30:The three dimensions we referred to earlier (ideational debate, programmatic elaboration, and action plans) have to be elaborated at distinct moments and articulated among each other, while leaving open the possibility for convergence.
./english/212.txt:37:The above implies a necessary reform of the process of preparation of the ESFs, with three major objectives. First, the EPAs must become a real locus of decision making. Second, political debate must occur over the orientations to be implemented during the Forums. Lastly, the EPA’s functioning must be improved through democratisation, better representation, and expansion. The creation of democratic and representative national committees may be a means to favour these objectives. In this regard, we have to question the usefulness of the Assembly of Social Movements, since the EPA is already supposed to encompass the whole social movement. The EPA should be the locus for deepening the debate, for the construction of permanent logistic tools (financing, computerisation, etc.), and for articulation with the national preparatory committee of the host country. As far as the timing of ESFs is concerned, a biannual rhythm, alternating with the WSF, is appropriate to avoid the dissipation of militant energies and the exhaustion of the financial resources of the various organisations. A European gathering of the different ongoing campaigns could be held between two ESFs. Its aim would be to discuss the main mobilisations of the movement a year ahead. ATTAC France believes that the future of the ESF depends on the acknowledgement of these imperatives and their translation into action through adequate preparatory structures.
./english/224.txt:7:The following thoughts result from a discussion hold at the French initiative Committee for the ESF (CIFS). They don't pretend to be exhaustive and simply aim at highlighting the convergences expressed on that very day. They tackle primarily with the future of the ESF and try to open the debate on the perspectives for the ESF process.
./english/224.txt:11:Nevertheless, after three ESFs, a critical assessment has to be made, particularly in respect of the goals established in the Porto Alegre Charter of Principles: to allow debate and exchange of ideas, to build convergences, to help building alternatives, and to support the various social and citizen mobilisations.
./english/224.txt:13:The organising process for debates and its results are not fully satisfying. The exchange of ideas, in particular during the plenaries, has not proved convincing. The time and energy devoted to the plenaries did not allow us to give the deserved importance to the seminars. The organisation of seminars played a minor role in the ESF process. Even with a number of alternative proposals discussed, their visibility and dissemination remained very weak.
./english/224.txt:19:These statements bring us to submit the following propositions for debate:
./english/224.txt:29:- To foresee specific self-organised spaces in order to allow for the development of alternative practices and/or debate on specific topics of interest for one or another actor. The global coherence of all activities is to be discussed by the European Preparatory Assembly.
./english/224.txt:39:- The process of building up a memory should be integrated into the very conception of ESFs and be developed in order to allow the capitalisation of the debates and a better visibility of the alternatives. The form, the continuity and the function of that memory should proceed from collective decisions.
./english/226.txt:8:• The French organizers of the extraordinary European session in Paris are asked to devise the agenda and the by laws in such a way as to ensure two separate rounds of dialogue for all country delegates, one on the issue of the present state of the ESF process, and the other on future perspectives and needed changes. This should happen before the general debate is started, to enable a general opinion to form on these two issues within the European movement and, at the same time, to prevent country delegations who are stronger in numbers to dominate the rest of the session.
./english/226.txt:10:During the general debate it should be ensured to keep to the gender balance and also to enable a balanced participation of speakers from participating countries. In order to prevent social exclusion of specific groups, the organizers have been requested not to limit the interpretation any longer to English, French and Italian. We should really try to set some basic rules for the by laws during the European sessions. In particular these concern: speaker time, order of speakers and the interpretation needs.
./english/226.txt:26:Many participants of the latest European meeting in London are in their statements now criticizing the dominance of certain political groups the ESF. At the same time the choice of Athens for the next location for the ESF is being criticised. The decision for Athens was a difficult one. But it confirmed at the same time the agreement which had already been reached in Bobigny to continue the movement of the ESF with the Forum in Greece. The debate in London on this issue expressed the following objection: the preparation of the ESF in Athens could be dominated by a quarrelling political coalition which would exclude the participation of a number of unions and peace- and student organisations. In this way the confirmation for Athens as a location is connected with the request to the Greek groups to find consensus and to broaden the basis of supporting organisations significantly.
./english/228.txt:10:We believe that its success depends on our capability to bring forward and debate in the European and Greek societies Resistance to war, neoliberalism, racism, the attack against political and social rights, environmental disaster and at the same time focusing on our governments that apply these politics of fear and poverty. We can see fragments of this world “that is possible” through denying neoliberal world and debating in our Forum.
./english/229.txt:8:The following notes, based on a collective debate that took place in Rome on November 8th, aim at disseminating a number of considerations and proposals of change regarding the organization and development process of the European Social Forum, prior to the extraordinary meeting of the European social movements, which will be held in Paris on December 18th and 19th.
./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/229.txt:18:The process of organisation and management of the forum must be European and not “delegated” to the guest organizing committee, except for the inevitable “national” features; this must involve all the realities, which share values and goals and want to set up debates and exchange their expertise. The method of approval in the decision-making process must be preserved; our relation with the authorities cannot influence any stage of the preparation and development of the Forum.
./english/229.txt:23:This double role, not easily manageable, is to be treasured and can be fuelled if the networks, the associations, the local Forums and the movements are involved in the organisation of the ESF from the very first day. In such a way, plenary meetings and workshops can be the “cultural projection” of the themes they carry on. This is an ineluctable step, if we want to avoid the domination of the Forum by the leaders of the social movements, who can also play the role of cultural education and information; therefore, it is necessary to have qualified persons involved in the plenary meetings and workshops. “No global” and experts must find their own space to enhance the role of the “space for learning” again. The exponents of networks, associations, trade unions can have their more natural placement in Forum’s meetings and thematic workshops that are organized by netwoks, supposed to be integral parts of the Forum, without being excluded from considerations and moments of education; also the debate on specific themes between political parties and movements can be the occasion for common efforts and possible confluence of ideas.
./english/232.txt:19:7. The way the ESF works is crucial. Less plenaries, which were just stages for the well known politicians, could be an answer. Start from big thematic or affinity assemblies and then split into working groups in order to establish networks aiming to work on successful actions to fight neoliberalism and build alternatives. Various documents have been written already and ignored, but there is the chance and the time to call for an open ‘How to build the next ESF’ debate.
./english/233.txt:5:The following notes were taken at a meeting that was held under the auspices of the London Social Forum at the LSE on 28 November to review the experiences of the ESF 2004 in London . They do not reflect the collective position of all participants to that meeting, but are circulated in the interests of documenting our discussion and promoting further debate.
./english/233.txt:45:· Small working sessions should have more weight in the programme than plenaries. (It is understood that the WSF will in future lean towards seminars rather than plenaries). However, there is a space for ‘big-name' talks, partly for people new to politics who particularly want to hear them, but also to reflect major debates between thinkers and tendencies. Plenaries are best done in the form of a debate (which might sometimes have three rather than two speakers), rather than having 6 speakers who tend not to systematically engage with each other. There should always be plenty of time for discussion
./english/238.txt:7:Abstract: Language and communication needs are at the heart of the Social Forums. The emergence of Babels, the international network of volunteer interpreters and translators, demonstrates that alternatives to market capitalism can and are being actively produced through the ESF process. Unfortunately, like Florence and Paris before it, the London ESF continued to promote and communicate in the languages of the ‘power elite' whilst marginalising all others, with negative consequences for equality of participation. This article describes the Babels story so far before critically reflecting on the 'politics of language' as a contribution to the debate on the future direction of the ESF process. We conclude that in order to make the ESF, and all Social Forums for that matter, genuinely internationalist affairs from now on, trade unions, NGO, social movements, networks and individuals must work hand-in-hand with Babels at the beginning of every process, while Babels must pro-actively fight to put language politics at the heart of the Forum.
./english/238.txt:10:Language is at the heart of the Social Forums. Or at least it should be. The Porto Alegre Charter that continues to shape and guide the ESF process makes clear our collective commitment to “ reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action”. It reminds us that the Forum must always be open to pluralism and “the diversity of genders, ethnicities, cultures, generations and physical capacities, providing they abide by this Charter of Principles.” Breathing life into these worthy principles requires that people have the means to communicate with and understand each other in ways that are egalitarian and democratic. As Susan George writes in her new book ‘Another World is Possible If …', political activists are as guilty as the ruling classes in using language for purposes of power, control and domination:
./english/238.txt:18:The aim of this article is to critically examine these issues as a contribution to the debate on the future direction of the ESF process. We begin with a brief overview of the Babels story so far before turning to how its identity, principles and activities are being developed by learning from practice. Then we reflect on the serious dilemmas and contradictions relating to language within the ESF through examples from the London ESF.
./english/238.txt:39:Secondly, Babels volunteers are not ‘free' service providers and oppose any attempts by social Forum organisers to treat them as such. Instead, they see themselves as Social Forum organisers like any other and want to participate fully in debates about the “part language plays in the mechanisms of cultural domination and in the circulation of ideas between the various social and citizens' movements” (Babels charter).
./english/238.txt:53:Lexicons are being formed in conjunction with the Situational Preparation Project, more commonly known as ‘Sitprep.', which records WSF and ESF plenaries and seminars in a wide range of languages on to DVD to allow any volunteer – experienced or inexperienced – to more realistically prepare for simultaneous interpretation in the Social Forum. This issue links to the broader ‘memory' implications of the NOMAD project to which Babels belongs . As Sophie Gosselin argues elsewhere in this newsletter, one of NOMAD's main achievements so far has been the creation of Targ, an open source software system which can replace expensive propriety audio equipment used for live simultaneous interpretation. In addition to the revolutionary cost implications, using computers to relay the voices of speakers and interpreters the Targ system enables all speeches and interpretations to be easily archived, creating a direct and accurate ‘memory' of all the debates, themes, and controversies of each Forum. Taking it a step further, the audio could also be streamed live over the Internet. These possibilities would allow millions of people currently outside of the Forum to take part via the web.
./english/241.txt:15:Concerning the Social Forums process specifically, the question is starting to be addressed with the appearance of new actors. Concretely, there now exists an active Social Forum (SF) Memory working group depending on the World Social Forum International Council. This is a global space to coordinate and facilitate the archiving and systematization initiatives of Social Forums and to establish a protocol of memory coming from each forum. A European partner to this process has also emerged in the guise of the European group for systematization and archiving the information, knowledge and communication generated by the European Social Forum (ESF) process. This is a working group depending on the ESF European Preparatory Assembly. There is also the work developed to systematize the contents of debates and seminars at the Paris ESF 2003 and the Florence one. Unfortunately, the London ESF organizational system doesn’t allow us to have many expectations about the documenting of the London ESF by the UK organising committee and the ESF office, as a lack of attention paid to archiving, systematization or participative communication has created difficulties or disrupted several initiatives.
./english/241.txt:48:• A map of web-bibliographic articles on the European confluence processes, articles of reflection about the new social movements and the new confluence spaces in Europe and articles on the data and the new knowledge generated by the Guide itself, as a tool of reflection and debate
./english/243.txt:11:At the Radical Theory Forum there were not only workshops practicing popular education, there were also workshops on popular education itself: about its underlying ideas, about existing projects like ‘Other Worlds' in the UK on globalisation issues, and about possibilities to connect the different approaches in order to have access to each others tools. Popular education has also been a widely debated topic at other recent activist conferences, such as Life After Capitalism in New York in August 2004, which had its forerunner during the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2003. Something is happening here. Why?
./english/244.txt:29:When someone gets to go to an ESF, inside or surrounding spaces like the “autonomous spaces” s/he looks for several things generally: on the one hand, to learn, hear, meet new groups, persons, activities, debates, methodologies. This means that through coming and assisting to conferences, plenaries, speeches, debates, workshops, he/she is going to enlarge and expand her/his own knowledge of the contemporary objectives of social transformation, and aims and strategies to achieve it. On the other hand, all these dynamics won't depend only of the short laps of time when you get to walk with thousands of other people from one meeting point to another one inside the related spaces of the ESF. Those processes are expanded in your daily life through your communicational habits, your inscription to mailings lists, blogs, newsletters and other online tools to receive online flows of information and data.
./english/244.txt:31:One of my questions is related to the ambivalence of our production and creation of information. It is quite certain that those two dynamics (receptor and emitter) always exist side by side inside the same person. Sometimes we only consume, sometimes we are actively producing and spreading our own info and points of view, but what is usually escaping from us is the possibility to evaluate the exact degree of reception of our production/input inside the info flow. When do we communicate the activities of our group or organization, who are we seeking to read, see, and listen to it? Where is the feedback perception outside the use of NTIC digital tools on line; our newspapers, gazettes, pamphlets, flyers, are the X unknown composite that just travels from one house to another one, from one to the rubbish can, but it is also this piece of paper (recycle paper please!) that is at least a factor that can encourage any citizen to change her/his perception around issues like: immigration, women rights, work flexibility, etc. We are not yet able to answer all those questions, we just hope that they have a place where they can be contemplated and stimulate some debates.
./english/245.txt:15:These issues cannot be seen in isolation, since they can only be assessed within a wider political context. For example debates over the importance of key plenary issues and speakers, or the importance attached to the potential for positive interactions given the required seminar merging process, all effect the requirements of any communications strategy.
./english/246.txt:21:These ideals were played out in different forms in the main event and the Youth Camp. The former, besides keeping the big concerts at Por-do-Sol and the exhibitions and film screenings (which again took place in other spaces than were most of the activities took place), introduced three new projects: Instantaneous Memory, Street Dialogues, and the Live Museum of Diversity. The first was a space for videomakers who were active at the WSF to log and edit the material they were producing, while at the same time copies of it could be made so as to be stored by the organisation of the event. The Street Dialogues were events that took place in different public spaces in Porto Alegre and tried to engage the local population – which to a great extent did not take part in the WSF – in the debates that were happening, while also tying them to artistic manifestations such as music and street theatre, with the help of the Decentralisation Department of the Porto Alegre Culture Bureau. The Live Museum of Diversity was a space for exhibitions, workshops and collective on-the-spot productions, such as a mural produced by the MST.
./english/246.txt:27:The success of these experiments was perhaps not great, although they did point ways forward. In general, it could be said that both working groups suffered, in different degrees and manners, from the same problem: the WSF one, being a small, geographically limited group with few connections, had to rely mostly on itself – all the spaces and activities were to a certain extent both proposed and occupied by its members; the Youth Camp one, also geographically limited and having made a decision to control and organise the spaces as little as possible so as to keep them open, had to rely heavily on the participants knowing about the existence, purpose and location of these spaces – which, owing to lots of organisational problems, did not actually happen. This meant that, on the one hand, the groups that were more involved in the organisation – like the hip hop movement – were the ones who more effectively appropriated them and were the most visible. The story-telling space functioned just once, the World Social Soiree and the Cultural Barter Fair only three times; the Instantaneous Memory space and the Living Museum of Diversity functioned for four days, but not many people knew about them as they had been placed in not very visible corners. The transversality we spoke about never really materialised; ideas such as having musical and other artistic interventions – including full-fledged decoration – in the halls where plenaries and seminars took place were never pushed forward, and if cultural issues were present in the debates and speeches, it was only in very vague and inconclusive terms. In the end, the Youth Camp was the living proof of the somewhat pointless nature of our efforts: while the spaces where activities of cultural exchange and production were supposed to happen hardly functioned at all, a short stroll around the Harmonia Park or through its central square showed that what we wanted to do was happening anyway – people sat around, chatted, played music, shared skills, exchanged gifts.
./english/246.txt:35:Secondly, and this is one point were I think both the WSF and the Youth Camp got it right at least in their intentions, is the need to eliminate mediation – a point to be taken up again in the end. By moving the emphasis from ‘seeing’ to ‘doing’ – that is, by creating spaces for on-the-spot collective production, however failed these first attempt may have been, one eliminates the distinctions at the heart of our concept of ‘art’. There are no producers and consumers anymore, no isolated creators but rather collective intelligences that produce. Not only is this a much more participatory way of experiencing culture, in keeping with the ideals expressed in the Charter of Principles – this may also prove to be the central question to any cultural debate. The WSF 2005 for the first time will have no concerts at Por-do-Sol (although a small stage on a much less central area will still exist); unfortunately, the Youth Camp has not pressed ahead with ideas of doing away with the stage altogether – but it will also experiment with a different space, in a circus format, where the stage is at the same level as the audience, and which is set out to be a full sensory experience, with bands providing the background for poets to perform with a video playing above them while dancers, jugglers, clowns move in the middle of the crowd and the mic remains open for interventions from the ground. Potentially great fun.
./english/246.txt:39:Since the first WSF one has heard many cries about culture being left out of the discussions, about it not being transversal to the debates etc. While this is certainly true in the sense of the previous paragraph, it is also a bit nonsensical: if we understand culture in the broader sense used above, how could it be outside? This normally means that the people making these demands want more discussion on the specificities of culture in a globalised capitalist world – which ends meaning equalling culture and art or the industry of entertainment, and this can be as much a part of the problem as it is a part of the solution. All the debates I remember at the first three WSFs which were ‘on culture’ had to do with protections for the national audiovisual industries against Hollywood, or politics of national exception, or politics of national protection to endangered cultural heritage, particularly that of minorities. Although these may of course still be useful instruments in a struggle of resistance against homogenisation, they do not tackle the problem of commodification as such, nor do they tackle the ‘lateral’ importance given to cultural debates in the left. By treating culture as art, they assume without question distinctions we have shown to be very characteristic of the society we want to transform. By placing culture as an exception that can only be adequately dealt with by the nation-state, they not only close more questions than they open, but also compartmentalise ‘culture’ as a subject for specialists, as one of the many issues – and not a particularly vital one – to be debated at a forum. This is mirrored by the way, for instance, free software is also ‘a bit on the side’, something for those who use or develop it to discuss; while in some other corner some people talk about digital inclusion, and yet another group somewhere else talks about the persecution and criminalisation of social movements by the mass media, or the monopoly of information held by big transnational conglomerates.
./english/247.txt:17:Besides the debate about the environmental situation and the search for alternatives that minimized the human impact, the Work Group helped to make approaches for the occupation of the spaces in the Harmonia Park and on the border of Guaiba.
./english/247.txt:27:Of course the everyday details of the proposals were not all perfect during these three years of the process. Certainly, the environmental illiteracy of the majority of people is one of the main causes, added to by technical and administrative problems. But we believe that the difficulties faced in the IYC only reflect the social-environmental problems through which we are (ourselves) confronted in daily life, in the distancing of humans from nature, in the general lack of environmental literacy, and in the total fragmentation of debate, which means that a lot of people still don ' t see politics in the environment or, worse still, they think the search for the solution to our problems should just be made at debate tables and not in daily practices.
./english/249.txt:23:Unfortunately the problems with the leadership of the meetings continued. For one thing, we often seemed to use tremendous amounts of time on discussing who was to speak on which plenary, and how to merge which seminar proposals with each other, leaving very little time to discuss other issues such as, for instance, the main slogans for the demonstration. But worse: the chair did not make a great effort to lead the meetings. Thus, everyone talked about what they found important and nobody knew in detail what was being debated. The chair concluded on certain issues and left others unconcluded. I am not saying that this was necessarily a deliberate strategy. But it is clear that the result is that after a meeting, lots of issues are left with only vague conclusions or none at all. Maybe this is one of the explanations for the different opinion on issues like what decision was made on the Iraqi speaker at the Paris meeting. Whether or not, it again leaves lots of power to the inner circle and undermines democracy.
./english/249.txt:31:Democracy is not only important because everyone wants to have a say in the decision-making. It is also crucial because we all might just be wrong every now and then. That is why debate and democratic deliberation leads to better decisions than power games. Our ideal should be that of Porto Alegre participatory democracy, not that of elitist Blairite England.
./english/250.txt:17:* Dialogue. The programmed events are kept and each organizer commits himself/herself to send to each other a representative member who could jointly inform and construct the debate.
./english/252.txt:19:b) UNFAIRNESS in the use of time. Some speakers were allowed to go on for much longer than others, the time regulation being totally at the discretion of the chairpersons. We recognise that in certain situations it might be necessary to let certain speak longer than an agreed time limit because they are clarifying key positions in a debate where hard decisions have to be made. But in London such key clarifications were cut off while people expressing arguments already brought forward were granted a lot of time.
./english/252.txt:21:c) FRUITLESS debates went on forever, with plenty of repetitions and few concrete and constructive proposals.
./english/252.txt:23:d) AGGRESSIVE ways of behaviour erupted in almost every debate. Shouting, heckling, etc remains a dominant impression when we remember this meeting in London.
./english/252.txt:43:c) DOMINANCE. The negative aspects of this political culture tend to elevate the power of the few (constantly at the microphone, often stating little new) over the many (sitting on their chairs, wanting the meeting to move ahead). This is because the will of the majority in the room almost never finds expression, while the shouters and the ones who eagerly run to the microphone are expressing themselves constantly. The lack of guidelines for the meeting also places vast powers with the chairpersons. When important issues are buried under endless, antagonistic debate, and time is running out, the room often ends up in the hands of the chair: we have the choice between accepting whatever “solution” he/she might propose on the verge of the meeting's breakdown, or having no decision at all. This role of the chairperson also tends to put him/her in conflict with the room, rather than in a truly mediating position where he/she builds up trust from all different groups and interests in the room.
./english/252.txt:57:2) By consensus, the meeting sets a time limit for speakers, at the start of each debate. The speakers are obliged to respect this time limit, and the chair is obliged to impose it equally for all. If necessary for clarification of conflicts that are keeping the meeting in a deadlock, the chair can allow a speaker extra time. This must be applied restrictively and stated clearly to the meeting.
./english/252.txt:59:3) All speakers must be put on the list of speakers by the chairpersons and called to the microphone before they can speak. To avoid endless lists of speakers who sign up to speak immediately, having already made up their minds on what to say regardless of what comes up in the debate, and where those wanting to respond to what was just said have to wait while 15 others speak, chairs can note down the names in groups of five. Once these have spoken, chairs can note another five names.
./english/252.txt:61:4) When we are running out of time (meaning: when the number of speakers signed up, or indicating that they would like to be, multiplied by the time allowed for each, exceeds the time limit of the item set by the meeting) the chair is obliged to do something about it. He/she must put forward to the meeting a choice between (a) extending the time limit for the item, (b) reducing the time for each speaker or (c) closing the list and/or cutting off the last speakers from the list in order to keep the time limit (but giving absolute priority to those who have not yet spoken in the debate). The central point is that it is the meeting, collectively, that decides how it wants to spend its time, and this is done in a way that maximises fairness and equality.
./english/252.txt:65:6) If there is a larger number of people actively blocking a consensus, or when a debate shows that there are strong disagreements in the way, the chair should propose to the meeting that an ad-hoc Consensus Group be set up. It should be made up of (preferably) one representative of each of the most extreme viewpoints and a mediator whom both parties accept. The Consensus Group goes to work on finding a consensual proposal on how to move ahead that might be put before the meeting. In the mean time, the debate is put on hold and the meeting proceeds with other items on the agenda.
./english/253.txt:17:To find ways of ensuring that the Forum treats divergencies as a source of strength and enrichment so that it does not simply represent moments of convergence on particularly struggles but enables a process of testing of different ideas in a process of continuing debate.
./english/259.txt:15:The First International Conference on Social Movements and Activist Research was a key event in such a process. Its publicity leaflet states its objective as the establishment of an adisciplinary ‘space of encounter, exchange, self-formation and debate’ by those participating in ‘social movements’ as both activists and researchers. It declares three starting points or principles:
./english/269.txt:59:One thing leads to another. From the derives to more derives, from workshops to thousands more dialogues and debates, demonstrations, public spaces, the possibility of accumulation. Beyond the politics of the gesture: density, history, links, narration, territory… to be continued.
./english/272.txt:32:These could be understood as two of the functions of the World Social Forum and Social Forums more generally. Certainly, this is the direction in which the developing methodology of the WSF – and hopefully the ESF – is moving. There is growing self awareness of Social Forums as useful contexts in which practical and theoretical knowledge can be shared in order to identify the next action to be taken. Enhancement of the movements’ role as producers of emancipatory knowledge – knowledge integral to the work of social transformation - provides a useful criteria for the workings of the methodology. For it implies a mobilisation process that reaches out to all those involved in struggles for social justice, grass roots movements – not simply co-ordinating groups and NGO’s; it implies open, democratic and empowering discussions through which there can be a real exchange of different kinds of knowledge, from different sources – not simply speeches to a more or less passive audience; it implies ways of organising the event which reveals connections, commonalities and differences between movements so that knowledge of power structures and strategies of transformation from different angles are debated and compared – not simply parallel, separate themes; it implies a tough mutual interrogation and debate of each others knowledge, imbued as it is by values and politics – not simply the co-existence of different perspectives. Only these kinds of activities will move the dialectic of knowledge and action on.
./english/274.txt:40:further democratization of an existing political structure) decides upon it. This is not to say that the community should not have a role, most likely a large role, in their economic affairs – but visions put forth thus far have used this reasoning more as an excuse for not having a coherent conceptualization of an alternative economic arrangement. The debate between Michael Albert and Peter Staudenmaier is representative of this. (2002)
./english/276.txt:41:The compulsion towards insurgent architecture, I submit, could also be a central aspiration and a fundamental knowledge interest in social movement research. As Barker and Cox (2002: 7) have pointed out, there is a schism dividing academic theorizing about social movements and activist theorizing for and within social movements. The former is dominated by a drive towards providing “explanations” of the “normal”, “scientific” type, and the debates within the discipline centre around the type of explanations required, and the theory it generates, is thus of a contemplative nature. Social movements are defined as objects of study to be subjected to observation, description and explanation; they are not conceived of as active processes with which people, engage, experience and transform (ibid.: 4, 5). The latter centres not on providing general scientific explanations, but on generating ‘case propositions of a very definite and practical nature’ (ibid.: 4), that is, movement theorizing produces practical and concrete proposals for action in a given, conflictual setting. Social movement practice is thus characterised by a form of knowledge produced in an attempt to answer questions emanating from an active engagement with a particular context, be it other movements or more generally the social world ‘within which those movements move’ (ibid.: 6). By positing insurgent architecture as a knowledge interest in social movement research this schism might be transcended. For social movement research this would entail putting the focus of attention of the movement process and thus on activists’ attempts to “join the dots” between the particular struggles they are directly involved in and the totality in which these struggles are embedded, and the development of practices and ideas that can match the joining of the dots. In short, social movement research as insurgent architecture would seek to develop theoretical knowledge that can enhance activists’ capacity for transcending militant particularisms, build campaigns, and develop social movement projects9.
./english/281.txt:9:world’ a new surge of radical theory. As a result within academia, especially in Northern Europe and USA, there is apparently more space for critical debate. When I began to get in touch with the ‘first side of the first world academe’, this process seemed to me, as a South-European PhD student, very impressive. However, as an activist, I very soon came across many people theorising Social Movements (SM) who were only familiar with the work being done within academia. Thus the initial optimism soon disappeared. Some questions then presented themselves: What is the meaning of our radicalism? Who is our critique for? Are we really in a radical age or is it becoming fashionable to be radical? This article provides me with the opportunity to reflect on these themes. Still I have to admit to a certain trepidation since I don’t see myself as a political theorist and writing in a foreign language will limit my ability to express myself clearly1. But I’ll try to write to the best of my ability, eroding academic jargons and talking not from the perspective of an abstract Knowledge but from my experiences (including all the voices who debate issues of relevance with me from time by time). I hope my reflections2 will be of interest to some of this journal’s readers. This paper aims to look at us. To me, being critical must start from self-criticism. ‘Self-criticism and personal change are not apolitical- refusing to be what the system requires you to be is a profound and powerful form of direct actions’ (Subbuswamy & Patel, 2001, 541-543). …Situating myself In truth, responding to the initial questionnaire was very hard for me, since I hate giving rapid judgements and I am acutely aware that a short response cannot escape generalisation. I did fill in the questionnaire at the end because as I understand the idea was for us to permit the reader to know where we are coming from (politically), in order to comprehend and critique our work more easily. But I feel I need to spend some more time elaborating my answers since some of the terms used in the questionnaire seem ambiguous to me.
./english/281.txt:21:achieve a cross fertilisation between ‘critical psychology’ and ‘anti-capitalist movements’, we should start by streamlining the definition of ‘anti-capitalist movements’. To complicate matters a further set of questions occur to me: Is there a relationship between academia’s general interest in social movements and the media’s sudden fascination with the ‘anti-globalisation movement’? Are self-defined anti-capitalists really subversive? And, finally, is academe the proper arena for discussing such issues? On this note, let’s start with some concrete reflections on the problematic. Being within or being for... What are we talking about? Why are we talking? When I decided to write a thesis on gender relationships of militants in the radical social movement7, I wanted to work from within (Plows, 1998; Wall, 1999). The aim for me, as an insider was to understand and improve our gender relations and to reduce sexism in all its manifestations8. I was completely unaware of theories on social movements and I immersed myself in the literature. I found both really interesting texts and awful ones, but there was something that was escaping to me, and I wasn't able to put my finger on it. Then I participated in my first Social Movement congress and then, and only then, did I see the light.☺ In my opinion, the problem was that the majority of participants were SM outsiders and were, in any case, trying to explain SM dynamics to academia, to society in general or to a political party, instead of trying to create a debate within SM. In a recent contribution, Barker and Cox (2001-02, page 2), analyse the relation between research on SM and being activists. They use the Gramscian distinction between ‘traditional’ (in this case, academic) and ‘organic’ (activist) intellectuals and pose three fundamental questions in order to decide which side the researcher represents. These are: 1. What kind of knowledge do they produce?
./english/281.txt:25:2. What’s their ‘relevant community’?, and 3. Who plays the part? They believe that ‘traditional intellectuals’ tend to produce a system of knowledge, which is more static and explanatory so that it can be validated by academia. In contrast, ‘organic intellectuals’ develop a more situated and dynamic analysis related to the possibility of action, which then has to be debated and accepted by militants. I find this distinction interesting despite the authors’ romantic vision of activists9, and also despite their more expansive definition of activism (they include trade union stewards and leftist party apparatchiks as activists). Nevertheless, I believe this situation is not specific to Social Movement studies. It emerged from an ethical position within academia (Biglia, 2000). The problem occurs if we set out to explain and justify the SM point of view instead of using its theoretical tools to subvert mainstream knowledge. We, as activist-academics, have to ensure this by introducing the Radical Social Movement’s (RSM) ideas into academia. Some of us have already attempted to do that with feminism10, researching and producing knowledge in all areas (and not just women’s issues) using an ‘autonomous’ feminist perspective. We need to tread carefully otherwise activist theories become ‘rapidly recolonized’ and may even become ‘a source of new, sexy courses and research subjects whose purpose is to attract students, funding and status’ (Barker and Cox, 2001-02, 9). When the Radical Social Movement (RSM) was powerful and involved large sectors of society, the interaction between the two kinds of intellectuals was particularly strong. For example, the Italian anti-psychiatric movement of the 1970s, was firmly connected to street protests. It was characterised by an intense interaction between ‘professionals’ and ‘non professionals’. There was no separation between theorists and activists- theories were constructed collectively and shared practices played a big part in the process. In this context we could locate the Calate di Reggio Emilia11, characterised for the interaction between some psi-
./english/281.txt:29:professionals and other intellectual anti-psychiatry sympathisers with marginalized individuals suffering psychiatric abuse (Antonucci, 1993). Unfortunately the situation is enormously different nowadays since most large demonstrations are often depoliticised. The spontaneous reaction against oppression (globalisation, war, etc.) are supported and frequently manipulated by the institutional left in a desperate attempt to recover some credibility within right-drifting European governments.12 Contemporary institutional powers reconvert the potentiality of protests to their own advantage. A clear example was the Barcelona Summit (2002) where the institutional powers declared, from the outset, their desire to be sympathetic to the marchers’ wishes. Thereby urban space was both militarised and at the same time some local space was conceded by the regional authorities for protest meetings. These zones were protected spaces where NGO and union bureaucrats could express their reformist point of view in collaboration with the manipulative wing of the movement. In this farcical game intellectuals acquired a prominent role, giving papers in the University to show to the rest of us that ‘another word is possible’. The ‘threat’ of an imagined ‘riotous violence’ was then used to justify the burdensome military presence that was deployed to ‘protect’ the city and its peoples (for a debate on that see Miguel Amoroso, 2002). At the same time we find ex-radicals are using the situation to gain recognition as future official negotiators with institutional power. Maybe they are bored of having a marginalized paper and no influence on unfolding events; they use their position to increase their kudos in exchange for future ‘quotas of formal power’ (cotas de poder formal). To this end, most of them deviously call for the ‘democratisation of the protest’ and claim that any form of direct action is violent and will inevitably undermine the subversiveness of Radical Social Movements. As I will describe below, constitutional powers systematically use the strategy of ‘divide and rule’ to create false dichotomies (e.g., the dichotomy between peaceful and violent protestors). They are aided in their efforts by the media who designate ‘responsible’ individuals as the
./english/281.txt:61:Plows, A. J. (1998) ‘Colective identity through Collective Action-Enviromental Direct Action in Britain’. Paper given in M.A. University of Wales Bangor: UK, photocopies. Sardella, P. (2001) ‘Donna e bello’ in Brilli F.(eds) Gli anni della rivolta. 1960-1980: prima, durante e dopo il '68. Milano: Punto Rosso. Schumann, G. (1998) Mujeres en kurdistan. Hondarribia: HIRU. Subbuswamy K., Patel R. (2001) Cultures of domination: Race and gender in radical movements. En Abramsky K. (Eds.) Restructuring and Resistance. Diverse voices of struggle in Western Europe Self-published. Pp 541-543 Telefono Viola Manicomio. La chiusura dei manicomi prevista per la fine del '96 e' un bluff. En http://www.ecn.org/telviola/MANICOMI.HTM Traful M. (2002) Por una politica nocturna, Madrid: Debate Ussher J. (2000) Critical psychology in the mainstream: a struggle for survival, in Sloan T. (Eds.) Critical psychology. voices for change, London: Macmillan, p: 6-20 Valcárcel A. (1994) Sexo y filosofía. Sobre ‘mujer’ y ‘poder’, Barcelona: Anthropos Vázquez, N. and Ibáñez, C. and Murguialday, C. (1996) Mujeres montaña, vivencia de guerrilleras y collaboradoras del FMLN. Madrid: Horas y Horas. Wall, D. (1999) Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement Radical Environmentalism & Comparative Social Movements. London: Routledge.
./english/282.txt:12:However, more problematic questions arise in relation to a specific area of academic study, signaled by the title of the new journal: Social Movement Studies. Over the last few decades, a whole institutional academic apparatus - even including this conference! - has arisen, whose central focus is the theorization of movements and popular struggles. In North America, the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the ASA has, reportedly, some 500 paid-up members. There are several journals devoted to this kind of work, and many other professional sociology and political science journals regularly carry articles in the field. Here there occur ongoing debates about how to theorize the (possibly changing) experience of movements, their ideas, their activities, their forms of organization, and their contests with the powerful. This is the area we want to ask questions about.
./english/282.txt:97:The range of skills required is varied, and they are commonly learned and exercised in varieties of social contexts: planning group actions; poster-making workshops, mass meetings, party newspapers, strikes, knocking on doors to canvas support. Movement intellectuals may have to prove their credentials by such activities as riding bicycles rather than driving cars, refusing to cross picket lines or to eat meat, being available for picketing and leafleting, being prominent in situations of confrontation, dressing in particular ways, making financial contributions, adopting definite speech styles, and so on. Family life and sexual practices can 'decredential' would-be movement intellectuals. All these matters may be - more obviously than in academia - themselves regularly topics for debate within movements, often in connection with movement debates about structures and forms of 'good practice.'
./english/282.txt:146:'Marxism' represents a particular crystallization of the theorizing processes of the workers' movement. From the late 19th century it has formed one of the most important languages within which - and against which - movement debates have been framed (not only in left parties and trade unions, but also for example in the ecological and women's movements). Its most famous 'names' are those of revolutionary activists, heavily involved in the various Internationals and suffering exile (Marx, Lenin, Lukács), political murder (Luxemburg, Trotsky) or imprisonment (Gramsci).
./english/282.txt:156:The 'new social movements' debate
./english/282.txt:157:The 'new social movements' debate offers another illustration of this transformation of theory. In the 1960s and the 1970s, movement activists on the left struggled to engage with and understand a range of apparently connected phenomena: most obviously the rise of a 'new Left' which was critical both of Stalinism and of Social Democracy from a variety of anti-authoritarian standpoints; the increasingly obvious co-optation of the latter within the institutions of Cold War politics and their practical opposition to revolutionary movements (at least within the West); the growing significance of 'new social actors' - rural blacks in the United States, migrant workers in Italy, students in most Western countries; and the development of a range of movements and campaigns that were not easily captured by the institutional and intellectual frameworks of the Old Left - notably movements against nuclear power, women's movements, urban squatters and movements against nuclear weapons.
./english/282.txt:161:Two important things happened to the theory at this point (Geoghegan and Cox 2001), both of them characteristic of what Alvin Gouldner (1971) describes as a 'scholastic' approach to theory, in other words one geared to the structural requirements of teaching, textbooks and literature reviews. Firstly, a contrast was constructed between 'new social movement theory' and 'resource mobilization theory', in the process homogenizing the former considerably (and often restricting it to suitably 'academic' authors such as Touraine and Melucci). This contrast, repeated ad nauseam in introductions to edited collections and 'overviews of the literature', was usually proposed as a debate between generic propositions ࠬa Lofland: 'resource mobilization theorists argue that?' while 'new social movements theorists argue that?.'
./english/282.txt:169:In the process, the banal but nevertheless significant point that by the 1970s the PCF was increasingly isolated within Marxism was conveniently forgotten. When teaching students, it is of course far easier to say 'Marxists said this, but new social movements theorists (or post-structuralists) said that', providing the illusion of an intellectual debate, than to recognize that what was originally at stake was initially a debate between Marxists over practical questions. For example: did 1968 represent a revolutionary moment in Paris or Prague? was it important to be present in student movements or should all energies should go into factory work? were movements against nuclear power a diversion from real issues or a significant new form of struggle? and did green parties represent a worthwhile strategy for expressing and radicalizing a range of struggles or a means for their co-optation.
./english/283.txt:40:What’s the radical value of theory? How can theory be applied, giving currency to the notion of ‘performativity’, i.e. such that expressing something makes it actual. More to the point, how can theory be accessed and accessible - and thereby perhaps inspire and affirm radical practice - given that so many people feel alienated by the language used as well as by the styles of discussion and debate that permeate academia? Obviously this is a longstanding problem, the dynamics of which relate to things like: the divergence between an intellectual vanguard and ‘the proletariat’ in building ‘class consciousness’; the privileging of ‘expert’ knowledges in environment and development initiatives which acts to exclude and disempower local knowledges and experience; and the implications of what can been framed as a constructed gendered/masculinised style of debate in academia that has tended to valorise adversarial and interrogative practices.
./english/284.txt:24:Through three texts encountered during core, I will attempt to present the debates around the issue of representation within the discipline.
./english/284.txt:40:Foucault and Deleuze call for the end of theory as a signifier, theory is reclaimed as action and not as representation: “A theory is like a box of tools (…) there is no more representation; there is nothing but action” (in Spivak1988: 70). Behind these attractive manifesto-like statements, “a post-representationalist vocabulary hides an essentialist agenda” (1989:80) that portrays subalterns as monolithic collectivities. Spivak argues that these “first-world radical intellectuals” are separating the two constitutive meanings of representation. By focusing on the political meaning, they are attacking the “speaking for” in a superficial way since they are forgetting the economic meaning. Without developing her analysis further, I just want to present Spivak as a reference point in bringing political economy into the debate of representation. The micropolitics are not separated from the macropolitics, so “theories of ideologies” based on interests are necessary to complement notions of power based on desire (1989: 74). The international division of labor has to be acknowledged, recognizing its impact in the current epistemological world order. In this sense, Spivak is performing an uneasy –yet relevant and exciting- marriage between Marxism and Deconstruction.
./english/284.txt:51:The debate over representation allows the discipline to accept social movements as alternative knowledge producers. If the activist could ‘speak’ in the academy this would imply entering into an intense horizontal dialogue where the ‘discipline’ would be able to give up its privileges of expertise and to consent to be appropriated by other epistemologies that are using ethnographies as claiming tools of self-representation. Through engaging in this new politics towards representation, Anthropology is forced to embrace dialogical and radical practices, itself being transformed into a locus of resistance.
./english/284.txt:59:After a year of engaging some of the most referential texts on socio-cultural theory, one can appreciate the multiple instances when the discipline of Anthropology has stopped to rethink itself. Two of the strongest moments that are important to recall are the internal criticism over the impact of the colonial encounter’s heritage in the “practicality” of the discipline (Asad, 1973), and the intense calls to be aware of the situatedness of the knowledge industry-especially the practice of representation instantiated by Anthropology, and its political and quotidian consequences (Said, 1989). Those challenges have been addressed and considered seriously by many, producing a discipline marked by its high degree of reflexivity. The mechanisms of self-criticism, internal debate, healthy distance from the discipline, awareness of author’s positionality, experimental methods and literary devices, all contribute to construct a self-conscious discipline alerted to the interstices of power and knowledge. Anthropology then appears as an academic field where new ways of thinking and doing can be accommodated. This history of reflexivity questions the stipulated objectivism of academic thinking, attempting to create a ‘situated discipline’ that stimulates the rethinking of its own research practices.
./english/284.txt:63:Anthropology, in trying to overcome Said’s condemnation to failure in its endeavor of representation through the reflexive process, is offering us an important contribution for engaging with one aspect of the actualité. Concretely, Anthropology today provides both analytical and everyday-life tools to work with current global social movements. Exploring reflexivity in three anthropological texts I hope to show how some of their reflexive insights are building up the possibility of a deeper intellectual and political commitment with global resistance/counter power initiatives. This paper explores the reflexive contributions by “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak, 88), “Carne, Carnavales, and Carnivalesque” (Limón, 1994) and “Beyond Culture: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference” (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997). The three of them are instantiating practices of representation that embrace listening to the subaltern, appreciate the resistance embedded in Mexican jokes, and realize the consequences of global interconnectedness for the ethnographer. I will try to briefly comment on the interesting affinity that could be traced among these developments in reflexivity and the current debates within some of the global justice movements [1].
./english/284.txt:69:Spivak is skeptical of Foucault and Deleuze’s attractive proposal: “a post-representationalist vocabulary hides an essentialist agenda” (1989:80) that portrays subalterns as monolithic collectivities. Spivak argues that these “first-world radical intellectuals” are separating the two constitutive meanings of representation. By focusing on the political meaning, they are attacking the “speaking for” in a superficial way since they are forgetting the economic meaning. Without developing her analysis further, I want to present Spivak as a reference point in bringing political economy into the debate of representation. The micropolitics are not separated from the macropolitics, so “theories of ideologies” based on interests are necessary to complement notions of power based on desire (1989: 74). Spivak is addressing the economic and power privileges of ‘those who represent’. The non-acknowledgement of the political economy of representation has drastic consequences: “the subaltern cannot speak” (1989:104). Spivak, in a later work, points out that this expression “means that even when the subaltern makes an effort [to the death] to speak, she is not able to be heard, and both speaking and hearing, complete the act of speech,” (1996: 272). She is calling to practice a new ‘politics’ –not merely ‘poetics’- of representation. You can only talk about somebody if you have first acknowledged that he/she/they are speaking and then that you are listening. There is no possibility of ‘representation’ -and success in overcoming essentialization- if you have not attempted to engage that person/group as a conscientious protagonist with their own voice. This discourse is found among many activists. If there is no awareness of one’s class, racial, gender, sexual, first/third world ‘situatedness’, one is in dange of falling into supremacist thinking and condescending attitudes virulently condemned by the horizontal spirit of the movement.
./english/284.txt:77:Unlike traditional folklore, Limón’s ethnography of the everyday live of a Mexican working-class community at the border is intensively reflexive. As a Mexican-American and a socially committed scholar, Limón’s presence in the text is very distinct. Since the beginning of the chapter he positioned himself at the heart of a barbeque scene. The fact that he is taking part in that intimate and exclusive activity –making tacos and laughing at chingaderas- on top of his continuous use of Spanish illustrates his intent to prove himself as not only an anthropologist but a member of that community as well. He emphasizes his sense of belonging to this subaltern class several times, presenting himself as part of it through stories and explicit terms. However, he is aware that he is not the same due to his educational and professional background as well as other opportunities which “his people” probably did not have. With the same intense feeling of belonging, he is emerged in the academic and intellectual debate showing us his knowledge about the authors and analysis of this particular topic. This tension is revealed throughout the chapter, for example:
./english/290.txt:126:In second place, the strike appears to us as an everyday and multiple practice: there will be those who propose transforming public space, converting spaces of consumption into places of encounter and play preparing a "reclaim the streets", those who suggest organizing a work stoppage in the hospital when the work conditions don't allow the nurses to take care of themselves as they deserve, those who decide to turn off their alarm clocks, call in sick and give herself a day off as a present, and those who prefer to join others in order to say "that's enough" to the clients that refuse to wear condoms... there will be those who oppose the deportation of miners from the "refuge" centers where they work, those who dare - like the March 11th Victimsπ Association (la asociaciÛn de afectados 11M) - to bring care to political debate proposing measures and refusing utilizations of the situation by political parties, those who throw the apron out the window and ask why so much cleaning? and those who join forces in order to demand that they be cared for as quadrapalegics and not as ≥poor things≤ to be pitied, as people without economic resources and not as stupid people, as immigrants without papers and not as potential delinquents, as autonomous persons and not as institutionalized dependents. There will be those who...
./english/293.txt:53:This is important for the debate, especially since all those questions which concern ‘reproduction’ -both in the strict sense, that is, domestic work and care (whether paid or not) and in a broad sense, such as communication, management, socialization, production of well-being, lifestyles, etc. (a formulation which goes beyond the ‘production and reproduction of immediate life’ of Engels[3])- generally remain in the shadows.
./english/293.txt:61:We see that some of those that participate in the debate on immaterial work are deaf to the question of reproduction and its relationship to patriarchal and racial domination. Facing this reality, we recuperate part of a long tradition of debate within feminism which precisely does elaborate a Marxist idea of reproduction in the broad sense, crossed through by multiple power relations. This orientation coincides with the ideas of Foucault about power and the processes of subjectification, that is to say, about modern forms of domination which to a great extent are not based upon the direct exercise of violence but rather in the active production of submission, an idea which has been amply developed, with different emphases, by thinkers like Butler or Pateman. It coincides also with many of the radical, materialist and psychoanalytic tendencies within feminism, those that give important weight to questions such as the sexual division of work, the control of sexuality, normative heterosexuality or socialization within the family.
./english/293.txt:65:The debates on reproduction smattered through the whole decade of the 1970s now have new things to offer which should be brought to light.[4] From them we rescue an analysis of reproduction, of the articulation of capitalism, patriarchy, racial domination, and now more than ever, the history of colonialism, the geographical asymmetries which have produced the inequalities motivating the displacements of populations in the last decades. We also rescue the political thought and practice which thematize the body as a place of expression of domination and exploitation, and we think of the “productive body” or the “production of the (sexed) body” as a continuous process of incarnation of subjectivities which are simultaneously bound and struggling to determine the conditions of their development. We also rescue the feminist theorizing on the public and the private as a form of approaching the continuities and discontinuities between what happens in the realm of relations and homes and what happens in the more socially valued realm of employment, politics and the State. The growing integration of these realms, of employment and personal life, of education and employment, etc., as a historical process which produces differentiations and as a political criticism of the segmentations of modernity seems to us an essential path for investigation.
./english/293.txt:89:We decided, moreover, that this drifting should be done in the first person, that is, with each one telling the others about herself, and walking together towards a prudent but sustained approximation of the differences between us. We talk, therefore, of seeking common places and, simultaneously, of singularities to strengthen. This approximation has grown through the subsequent debates which have made us modify the initial utterance “we are precarious workers” for others less prone to affirming identity as an original element and more attentive to the processes of (de)identification.[7]
./english/293.txt:184:We dedicated several meetings to defining the axes of our approach, which later, in the course of the drifts, would take more shape. The axes which came out of our debates were informed by our experiences of time (stress, excess, saturation, the impossibility of planning, instability…), of space (mobility, life territories, borders, displacements, sedentarism…), of income (badly paid work, lack of resources, loans from friends and families with guaranteed work, limited access to public services and misappropriation of various cards…), of care and relations (communities of work, affect, sociability), of conflict (possibilities and processes of struggle…), of hierarchies (in many cases diffuse and painful), of risk (insecurity, vulnerability) and of the body (discipline, abuse, sporadic care, compulsive sexuality…). After various drifts, the axes took shape and meaning beyond our own initial intuitions.
./english/298.txt:26:I think it would be good to start with the ‘big picture’, that is how the university is an open system opening onto the larger field of casualised and underpaid ‘socialised labour power’. The latter is also often referred to as ‘mass intellectuality’ or even networked intelligence (an abstract quality of social labour power as it becomes increasingly informational and communicative). I have been thinking about it in terms of the opening up of disciplinary institutions as described by Deleuze in his essay on control societies. I would like to move from the idea that the university is some kind of ivory tower or a self-enclosed institution whose current state and future concerns a minority of professionals to that of the university as part of the ‘diffuse factory’ as described in Autonomist work. I think that their description of a shift from a society where production takes place predominantly in the closed site of the factory to one where it is the whole of society that is turned into a factory – a productive site – is still very fitting politically. But in fact, the debate seems to be stuck in the false opposition between the static, sheltered ivory tower and the dynamic, democratic market.
./english/299.txt:63:But first, might we ask again why sex work? We already knew, either from first or second hand experience, about the polemics that surround prostitution: those within the feminist movement[11] and those that habitually come up in public speech, for example in the media, so prone to prohibitionism. The debate between abolitionists and the defenders of the rights of sex workers that -- for those who do not know -- have cost us great battles, schisms and much bad blood, seem to be at a dead end, and we are not going to be the ones to reproduce them here. Some activists and scholars that are working in this field, prostitutes or otherwise, affirm that they are tired of warring against positions which are too narrow, deterministic and victimizing, and of feeling alone against the renewed wave of criminalization that is upon us and which strikes, first and foremost those sectors of society which are traditionally the most persecuted and marginalized. The touchstone continues to be the rights of the workers, or in other words the recognition of this activity as work and therefore as generator of a series of rights (although these are in the process of being dismantled in almost all sectors) comparable to those which are acquired through other kinds of work, and not as violence or sexual slavery, as something over which no woman might have full power of decision, or as the epitome of patriarchal and capitalist domination.[12]
./english/299.txt:75:On the other hand, the pragmatism that dominates regulationist discourse ≠ in which participate, in varying ways, prostitutes, businesspeople that run places of prostitution, and some feminist organizations ≠ limits them to consider the management of this activity, something that feminists allied to prostitutes years ago linked to a wider debate in which they included other questions which, over the years, have become less important. Among these were sexual senses and practices, their historical transformations and their strategic contribution to gender. This, which could be thought out very well from prostitution and the perspective of the prostitutes, not only concerned the women directly involved ≠ no small thing ≠ but all women. The rights of prostitutes ≠ the invention of new rights ≠ like the rights of domestic workers, have stayed in the margins of legality and, therefore, of state regulation,[15] and their visibility as subjects has had to situate itself in the center of the debate. Moreover, prostitution or sex work is a privileged location from which to speak about the value and the changing dimensions of sex in patriarchal society.
./english/299.txt:97:In any case and despite the state of the question in feminism, what is clear is that the scenario in which sex work is being debated is rapidly and profoundly changing, and that this should provoke a reopening of the dialogue in other terms. Here are a few more points towards that end.
./english/299.txt:173:Our notes, for the moment, are many and dispersed. The accounts and impressions which we have pulled together suggest more questions than answers. We have opened our ears during the trips with Hetaira, the interviews and a first drift with a friend who works in an erotic telephone line and another who is receptionist at a brothel, and we hope to continue opening them in the coming months. In any case, this seems to us a good point of departure in a moment which seemed at first so overdetermined by the impasse in feminist debates.
./english/299.txt:221:All these elements form part of our debates, but in the last months something has changed in us. Perhaps its that weπre getting older or that talking about these things in the first person reminds us that we too will be caretakers and eventually, cared for. Or not? To varying degrees some of us already care for the people we live with, ourselves, and in a still rather lax way, members of our families. Almost none of us have children, nor could we. One of us has them on the other side of the pond and manages one of her households from a distance, with all the uncertainty which that represents. But, letπs see, what options do we have? Many of us are mortified by the thought of living with our families, even by the thought of having to care for them; weπll see how our elders get along. We flee from emotional blackmail and affirm our desire to maintain relationships which are free, that is to say, based upon affect and not obligation. Nevertheless these same relationships ≠ more insecure to the extent that they donπt produce guarantees nor are subject to formal contracts ≠ do not produce frameworks ≠ resources, spaces or bonds ≠ for care. Okay, we havenπt married, we have constructed other kinds of units for cohabitation butä how will we deal with the need for care in these environments? Will we go back to the family? To which family, if we are the youngest members? To the partners, for those that have them? Will we have partners? Speaking in the first person together has its risks. We look back to the family even when it is not grabbing our chin and turning our face, and its difficult for us to think of each other as caretakers, or of the few institutions which we generate as facilities for care. Look out: the hardcore of care is not tea and cake on a depressive afternoon.
./english/299.txt:271:The scenario we are sketching here evidently has little to do with policies of åreconciliationπ which see institutional feminism and the measures designed in its name as tools forming part of the great narrative of womenπs progressive liberation. Our analysis is different. It is primarily global, in the sense that it contemplates the reality of as many women as possible ≠ housewives, workers, from both shores, paid or not, married or not, legal or illegalized, in unions which are recognized or those which are not, etc. ≠ as a whole and in relation, as ambiguous and conflictive as this may be. It is worthless for us to talk about reconciliation or even of valorization if we do not also talk about distribution or division, or better yet, of cooperation and conciliation for all in fair conditions. Worthless if when we speak of the home we do not also speak of the precarization of existence and of employment and vice versa. As some critical positions have indicated, the debate on the reconciliation of home and work departs from inadequate premises (it is women who have to do the reconciling) and either avoids crucial questions (such as that of migrant work, that of the legal forms of union and of citizenship, that of precarious and feminine conditions of work) or directs conflicts towards positions of pacification in which inequalities are justified.
./english/299.txt:279:The strategy of visibilizing, valorizing and even quantifying[42] is fundamental, but to this we must add the analysis of precarious work and migration, as until very recently these efforts were based upon the model of a ≥typical≤ (and ≥native≤) woman, home and employment. These analyses are not always accompanied by reflections which permit a politicization of our lives, which favor the articulation of knowledges, change and collective conflict. The so-called social economy ≠ the third sector ≠ is sometimes a perversely perfect partner to the opportunities for accumulation offered by the (no longer so) ≥new sites of employment≤ and the recent forms of subcontracting. This is accentuated even more in the case of women. The idea of a social salary, about which we spoke in the national feminist encounter in Cordoba in 2000 and in other meetings, is an opportunity to adjust the debates about work and life. It may, however, leave untouched the question of value, salary and conditions (experienced by domestic employees) and the limits of cooperation (which all of us experience in our homes).
./english/300.txt:51:As critical geography grew different trends and foci emerged, came together, specialized and divided. Two examples of this are welfare geography which was firmly embedded in the quantitative modeling tradition, and Marxist geography which in general criticized that same tradition. Yet even though both developed quite a bit during this period, far less attention was paid to the inclusion of affected communities or social movements in the research process even if this was of concern during the early years of their respective development. Welfare Geography for its part developed very elaborate models to measure the spatial distribution of ‘public goods’ necessary to attain a certain level of “quality of human life” (Smith 1977; p. xi). In one of the most important works of that tradition, David Smith describes the mission of welfare geography to be “the study of ‘who gets what where, and how’” (Smith 1977; p.7). Marxist geography, as one can imagine, emerged with a more radical critique of the direction and methods of the discipline. Marxist geographers had their work cut out for them in some sense. Considering the general dearth of complex spatial thinking in Marxist thought, and the previous lack of engagement between geographers and Marxists, Marxist geographers had to engage in elaborating theoretical mechanisms that would allow the mutual incorporation of the two traditions. Besides elaborating on these general debates though, Marxist geographers began to apply their thinking to the different subfields of concern in human geography at the time, for example: geopolitics/imperialism, regional development, urban geography and planning, and human-environment relations (Harvey and Smith 1984).
./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/302.txt:44: 3. Communicative axes, in order to make known, beyond the limits of the physical space, the information, ideas, debates and proposals which transit the agency. This might include the production of texts and audiovisuals, the elaboration of an archive or the production of radio programs which keep our precarious instinct sharp and awake, as well as the production of knowledge related to questions of precariousness.
./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:20:In order to grasp the concrete logic that generates specific practices, researchers have to become active participants. With respect to social movements, this means precisely becoming engaged activists: helping to organize actions and workshops, facilitating meetings, weighing in during strategic and tactical debates, staking out political positions, and putting ones’ body on the line during mass direct actions. Simply taking on the role of “circumstantial activist” (Marcus 1995) is not sufficient; one has to build long-term relationships of mutual commitment and trust, become entangled with complex relations of power, and live the emotions associated with direct action organizing and transnational networking.
./english/303.txt:37:Over the next week I became deeply embroiled in the complex discussions, debates, and negotiations that ultimately led to the creation of the Pink and Pink & Silver contingents during the main days of action, building on our previous experiences in Prague. Not only did we have to generate consensus regarding the wisdom of joining the more militant squatters, whether self-defense constituted an acceptable response to police provocation, or the specific protest route to follow, we also had to negotiate with the GSF and other international networks in order to carve out sufficient space for our action within an increasingly crowded urban terrain involving diverse tactical forms, such as white overalls, black block, festive pink block, and traditional Ghandian civil disobedience.
./english/303.txt:39:There is insufficient time here for a full ethnographic account of the space of terror that subsequently emerged in Genoa (see Juris 2004). Rather, I want to simply point out that it was only by becoming deeply involved in the direct action planning process, which at times meant positioning myself at the center of extremely intense and sometimes personalized debates, that I could fully appreciate the complexity and logic of direct action planning and the accompanying fear, passion, and exhilaration. Moreover, it was only through engaged participation that I began to realize how diverse activist networks physically express their contrasting political visions and identities through alternative forms of direct action. Tactical debates were thus about much more than logistical coordination; they embodied the broader cultural politics that are so important to activist networking and movement building. Learning how to successfully negotiate differences on the tactical plane would thus serve to help build more sustainable networks more generally.
./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:49:A brief anecdote from my own experience illustrates some of the stakes involved. In January 2004, some of my former MRG-based colleagues organized a conference in Barcelona to explore the theory and practice of what they called “activist research.” The idea was to create an open space for reflection and debate among those conducting research from within and for social movements, self-managed political projects, and others situated inside the academy.
./english/303.txt:63:1) collective reflection and visioning about movement practices, logics, and emerging cultural and political models; 2) collective analysis of broader social processes and power relations that affect strategic and tactical decision-making; and 3) collective ethnographic reflection about diverse movement networks, how they interact, and how they might better relate to broader constituencies. Each of these levels involves engaged, practice-based, and politically committed research that is carried out in horizontal collaboration with social movements. Resulting accounts involve particular interpretations of events produced with the practical and theoretical tools at the ethnographer’s disposal, and offered back to activists, scholars, and others for further reflection and debate.
./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/306.txt:53:The Karakola has housed projects investigating the working conditions and urban experience of migrant women, debates about the transformations of the LGBT movement, lesbian marriage and the ‘pink market’, discussions about the feminist grounding for antimilitarist interventions. We have introduced the workshop ‘Tools against Racism’ into local social movements, encouraging ourselves to constantly investigate our own discourses. We have initiated an ongoing campaign against violence against women which insists upon looking at the many and complex ways in which ‘violence’ and ‘security’ are constructed. We participate in a neighborhood network proposing socially inclusive urbanistic alternatives to the ‘rehabilitation’ currently under way. We have participated actively and critically in the lock-ins of ‘sin papeles’ in Madrid. These and hundreds of other investigations, mobilizations, discussions and publications have arisen from the crucible that is the Karakola. We insist that all these apparently diverse concerns are intimately related, and we attempt to trace the lines of their relationship, articulating them within the feminist and the global resistance movements, refusing to separate the academic from the activist, the local struggle from the global context.
./english/307.txt:21:BUDGET Framework: The project’s first phase should be structured around two sets of workshop sessions. Each one of them should comprise two weeks. These two meetings should be separated by a period of three months during which participants would go back to their respective regions with specific tasks to fulfill. Venue of first phase: Brazil Number of participants: 60, 20 from Brazil, 10 from other countries of Latin America Caribbean and North America, 10 from Asia and Oceania, 10 from Africa e 10 from Europe. Budget for 2 meetings of 14 days each, 3 months of activities in the participants’ locality of origin between the 2 meetings, and 6 months of coordination Activity Description Cost U$ (1U$=2,9R$) Travel 2 x 10 LAC e AN x U$ 1.200 2 x 10 Asia x U$ 3.000 2 x 10 Africa x U$ 3.000 2 x 10 Europa x U$ 1.300 2 x 20 Brazil x U$ 400 186.000 Bed and Board 2 x 60 people x 14 days x U$ 40 67.200 Meeting rooms (in the same location as accommodation) 2 x 1 lecture hall for 60 people + 3 working rooms for 20 people + 1 support room x 14 days 5.000 Ground transportation in country of origin and in the country where the course takes place 2 x 60 people x 4 rides x U$ 10 4.800 Per Diem (extras) 2 x 60 people x 14 days x U$ 10 16.800 Didactic material Preparation of manuals, selection of texts, photos, plays, installations, etc. 5.000 Diffusion of results Set up web page for diffusion of texts elaborated in the workshops, etc. 5.000 Administration Communication, administrative expenses, accounting 5.000 Secretariat/Staff 1 full-time secretary for 6 months x U$ 1.000 6.000 Coordination / Staff 1 full-time coordinator for 6 months x U$ 2.000 12.000 Consultants / Staff 2 part-time consultants for general advice, and on selection of topics and texts for 6 months x U$ 1.000 12.000 Facilitators/Staff 10 Facilitators/instructors to organize the debates during the 28 days of the meeting x U$ 3.000 30.000 Scholarships To support the 50 participants in activities linked to the University during the 3 months between the 2 meetings x U$ 300 45.000 Total 399.800 13
./english/312.txt:36:- to developing a post-national space of action, cooperation and debate over issues related to research, education systems and access to scientific knowledge;
./english/312.txt:40:The London Social Forum represents a challenging opportunity for a first exchange of experiences and contacts, from which a future meeting (in December or January) might arise in the form of a European Forum specially dedicated to the issues of research and knowledge. We thus propose to set up a web mailing-list to debate and prepare this forum. We strongly believe, however, that the building of a post-national space of mobilisation and debate is a goal that has to be pursued now, hic et nunc, without waiting for the ‘great event’ and starting instead from the day-to-day relationships that have been already established amongst individuals and groups at the European level. For this reason, we ask everybody to make these pages circulate freely amongst all those that are or might be interested in the accomplishment of such a project.
./english/313.txt:57:Concerning the Social Forums process specifically the question start to be faced appearing new subjects. Concretely, there is active the Social Forums (SF) Memory working group depending on the World social forum International committee. A global space to coordinate and facilitate the Social Forums archive and systematize initiatives and to establish a protocol of memory coming from each forum. It had developed a rich process of “consulta”/survey to define the V WSF main themes of the program, exploring on the participant methodologist to the organization of the Forum. And its recent European partner, the European group for systematization and archiving the information, knowledge and communication generated by the European Social Forum (ESF) process, that it is a working group depending on the European ESF assembly. There is also the work developed to systematize the contents of debates and seminars at the Paris ESF 2003 and the Florence one. Unfortunately the London ESF organizational system doesn’t allows to have many expectative on the documenting of the London ESF by the UK organisers committee and the ESF office.
./english/313.txt:85:Map of web-bibliographic articles on the European confluence processes, articles of reflection about the new social movements and the new confluence spaces in Europe and articles on the data and the new knowledge generated by the Guide itself, as a tool of reflection and debate
./english/316.txt:116:What is taking shape and place is certainly a new internationalism, though it might be more realistic to put this in the plural, or to distinguish it as ‘the new global solidarity’. There will be argument about whether it surpasses the First-to-Fourth Internationals or provides a basis for some kind of fifth one. However, it is also quite possible that it will reproduce the errors, and failures, of previous internationals. The GJ&SM has not, so far, proven to be a movement much aware of that history, which is also part of its own history - or at least of its inheritance. Those involved in such debates are, however, likely to agree that a movement that is not aware of its history is in danger of repeating it. (Bensaïd 2003, Löwy 2003, Waterman 1992, 2001a).
./english/319.txt:29:Second, the formulation of concrete alternatives and strategies. The forum can not of course act as a representative legislative body or decide on a political programme. What it can act as, though, is a bright platform on which the very diverse analytical work that has already been done on specific issues and strategies can be brought together, debated upon and synthesised when possible. The point is not to come to a consensus; that is neither possible nor even necessary. What’s important is that ideas are analysed and contrasted, their advantages and drawbacks clearly elaborated, their starting and finishing points thoroughly mapped out. It will then be the task of the forum to publicise and champion this process and its outcomes as widely as possible, to put them out there as serious and concrete points of reference for the movement to draw on in present and future struggles. In practical terms, this could take the form of choosing a couple of issues each time and then having an opening plenary that will map out the process, a sufficient number of seminars that will tackle their different dimensions and a final plenary where the various approaches and ideas will be presented and debated upon.
./english/323.txt:56:conspiracy keeping activists ineffectively tied up in theoretical debates, rather than just
./english/323.txt:62:the debate: a generation of students those journey into feminism started with an academic
./english/323.txt:157:women’s in particular, from the centre of theoretical debates, re-inscribed the social relations
./english/325.txt:12:Two years ago in an article about the Dutch conference ‘Feminism and Multiculturalism’, I criticized the restricted meaning multiculturalism and feminism most of the time has in western countries (Poldervaart 2002). In dominant western debates multiculturalism is limited to the integration of non-white and Islamic people into the dominant male, white, heterosexual and middle class culture, as if multiculturalism isn’t more than differences in colour and religion. In this way the cultures of gay/queer and of protest groups criticizing dominant culture, disappear from the picture of multiculturalism. Feminism was defined by the conference-organisation as ‘striving for recognition of equality, of equal opportunities and equal rights’. This is, however, a very limited definition: most feminists want more! Moreover, such ‘equal-rights’-feminism stimulate in practice the idea that only non-white people have to struggle for feminism because ‘we, women in the west’ have equal rights already. Both restricted meanings (of feminism and multiculturalism) strengthen the difference between ‘we’ (white, supposed to be progressive) people against the ‘other’ (coloured or Islamic), make affiliation-politics between both groups very difficult, forget all other diversities between people and don’t criticize the dominance of neo-liberal politics.
./english/331.txt:45:The process of economic globalisation has causes and consequences rooted in the inter-related economic, political, social and environmental spheres. Current debate addresses complex relationships between all of these factors. It is not my intention here to analyse these issues in depth, but to focus on the moral values that underpin key perspectives.
./english/331.txt:46:Three broad perspectives have predominated. On the 'right' the main features of the argument tend to be economic and political. On the 'left' the arguments concentrate on the social and environmental impact of the prevailing economic climate. A third perspective loosely aligned with 'third way' politics integrates aspects of both. I will identify how the debate is currently evolving beyond these perspectives in the search for practical solutions.
./english/331.txt:47:The public debate needs focus. The word globalisation is often vaguely defined, an emotive brush stroke that conflates the issues. I explain the interpretation used here in appendix C.
./english/331.txt:72:"…for all that one may dislike some of the manifestations of the market and of the global market, it does bring with it certain values. Notably it brings with it the values of liberty and equality. It is strictly a market view of the world that decides essentially that men and women are equal." Cooper (2002: LSE debate)
./english/331.txt:85:“Morality is now being talked about by the left and the centre-left instead of accepting the popular assumption that the language of morality is somehow the province of the right. That morality, the old morality, concerned itself above all with the regulation of private life, along lines decreed by some supernatural authority.” Joan Smith (2002: LSE debate)
./english/331.txt:134:We need to learn from both a virtue-ethics approach and a moral reasoning approach so that we can “engage in moral education that is neither indoctrinative nor relativistic” Nucci (1987). Why shouldn’t both sides of the debate inform a constructivist approach which enables genuine moral growth?
./english/331.txt:155:I suggest that the balanced and stated commitment approaches are more suitable to teaching issues involving universal moral values. The Neutral Chair seems to be simply Values Clarification in different clothing, and I would be inclined to use it only in very specific circumstances. It would be appropriate at the later stages of key stage 4 and in key stage 5 for example, or in a formal debate at the end of an extended unit of work. I would be inclined to use a stated commitment approach in relation to the development of ethical principles, but a balanced approach in relation to the development of abstract reasoning skills. Clearly as the two are so often combined, both strategies will be used. Which is chosen will depend on the nature and specific learning objectives of the activity and the level of prior knowledge. The strategy may well be changed during an activity in response to the understanding and reasoning of individuals in the class.
./english/331.txt:262:In examining the ethical issues of economic globalisation I have categorised three broad perspectives. In reality the debate is of course much more complex than this. However, I did not find any literature that attempted to draw out the ethical landscape of the issue, so my analysis may be useful as a starting point.
./english/332.txt:3:The EPA takes place in the midst of an important period of sharpening class struggle. The forces of resistance to the coalition waging the “war on terror” have inflicted significant defeats on it. The effectiveness of resistance in Lebanon forced withdrawal of the Israeli invaders, the occupation in Iraq has entered its final stage – where withdrawal is being openly debated and the Afghan occupation has become a major war.
./english/337.txt:17:The fourth ESF took place in Athens. From our point of view, this Forum was a good one: well organised, it has shown that the end of the « traditional » big plenaries (let’s say big meetings) had a positive effect on the event. This battle was useful. Another one has to be led : how to deal with the presence of political parties ? At this stage, the situation is still a caricature. We will come back later to this crucial point. Among the positive points of this Forum, we would like to underline the fact that the European issues and economic and social ones seem to be increasingly debated in the different activities.
./english/337.txt:31:3) Limits of the debates during the ESF
./english/337.txt:35:A lot of debates, badly prepared, are still repeating themselves, sometimes with the same speakers. The Forum suffers from these juxtapositions of political positions well known by everybody. Debates should help to go past well known positions.
./english/337.txt:39:The time for the public debate (after the “speakers’ time”) was often reduced, due to the number of speakers (sometimes 7 or 8). This could be seen as a “side-effect” of the merging process. And with this, some seminaries were again turned into “plenaries”.
./english/337.txt:41:The discussion of various propositions and alternatives should be documented. Especially, the public debate (after the “speakers’ time”) should be carefully documented.
./english/343.txt:4:This summary is not meant to be a list of the opinions expressed nor a benchmark draft text. We have simply tried to give some order to the ideas put forward in order to facilitate a debate at this stage in our work, based on what has already been said.
./english/343.txt:12:Mobilising social movements against this state of permanent war means defining new corss-border ways of ensuring solidarity with those peoples that are mounting resistance. The nature of some of these movements poses questions, especially with regard to the values that we share. We should embrace such a debate.
./english/343.txt:42:3. Bringing together actors is a process designed to end the isolation many struggles face, to build forces and to better coordinate. This allows us to identify a common enemy and enumerate the different mechanisms it uses to exploit and subject. In real terms the Assembly is also a space for debate and exchanging views on the international situation, on relations with political parties and left-wing governments, on the nature of and dialogue with the various resistance movements. By doing so we can define joint working approaches, agreements, agendas, calendars and joint campaigns, while at the same time respecting movements' independence. This type of process has to respect the rhythm of the various collective actors, for fear of paralysis and the alienation of grassroots militants. It is also necessary to draw up our own agenda separate from the agenda of capitalist institutions.
./english/343.txt:50:- to prepare the WSF in Nairobi. In particular with regard to the agenda for the fourth day dedicated to campaigns. The assembly of social movements should allow the consolidation of the campaigns and movements and should plan the fundamental political points to be debated.
./english/344.txt:65:Given the extent to which the international unions have been themselves infected, if not significantly affected, by the global justice movement, a totalitarian outcome seems the least imaginable of scenarios. A reformist orientation seems more likely – though one opted for without the information and debate demonstrated by the newest social movements. The founding event will tell us more. I am aware of a number of independent observers who will be present and from whom we can hope for commentary. But further stagnation, disorientation and ambiguity seems likely until and unless an open global dialogue about the merger takes place.
./english/347.txt:42:Here one could see, the real existing balance of forces in the EPAs and ESFs on show. The whole question of transparency is used to avoid political conflict and bore people to death with vacuous debates on “method”. So an open “preparatory meeting” for the next Preparatory Assembly will take place in January. It will decide the exact date and venue of the EPA. This will meet again at the end of March 2007 to decide on the location of the next European Social Forum. The three candidates for holding its are Austria, Denmark-Sweden and Portugal.
./english/348.txt:7:From 4 to 7 May 2006, the 4th ESF proved to be a pole of debate and struggle with mass participation. It was a space that expressed the radical anti-US, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and anti-globalization sentiments of the big majority of the participants. Particularly the mass and combative demonstration of Saturday 6 May confirmed, from political point of view, that the Athens 4th ESF had the most radical character compared to the previous ones except maybe Florence.
./english/356.txt:48:only a debate space or not? How is possible to act if the LSF is not a
./english/359.txt:87:The issues raised above and many more that other participants no doubt have on their minds must be explored and debated. New ideas need to be put forth, evaluated, refined, and implemented. Here are ten thoughts that may have some merit--but whether they do or not, certainly changes must be made.
./english/360.txt:87:The issues raised above and many more that other participants no doubt have on their minds must be explored and debated. New ideas need to be put forth, evaluated, refined, and implemented. Here are ten thoughts that may have some merit--but whether they do or not, certainly changes must be made.
./english/363.txt:208:One way of thinking about the new movement is as a kind of prefigurative politics - prefiguring not so much "the new society" as a new way of doing politics, and in particular new alliances. One aspect I have found particularly interesting is a sense of a move away from comparing "cookbooks for the future" and "red / green" debates on theology - characteristic both of periods of defeat and of elitist approaches which start from where a popular movement might finish - and towards discussions of strategy and "red / black" debates (7) which are about "what do we do?". This suggests at least the possibility of allowing people to learn from and through practice, and that agreement on where to go might emerge out of the process of struggle - which is, after all, where movement intellectuals derive their understandings from in the first place, albeit sometimes through circuitous routes.
./english/364.txt:47:A televised trans-Atlantic debate between representatives of the WSF and some luminaries attending the WEF was billed by the Financial Times as a collision between two planets, that of the global superrich and that of the vast marginalized masses.
./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/366.txt:50:Now that the war on Iraq--or one phase of it--is over, last winter's intense outpouring of antiwar sentiment feels like a distant episode. The peace movement is collectively catching its breath and wondering what to do next. At a June convention in Chicago, UFPJ consolidated its far-flung coalition by forging a unifying program for a new wave of movement-building. Many in the peace movement are looking to the 2004 elections, when MoveOn's fundraising and outreach muscle--the group seeks to raise tens of millions of dollars and mobilize a million volunteers--could be a factor. In a much-debated experiment in online democracy, MoveOn challenged the power of pundits and wealthy campaign donors to wield control over the presidential nomination process, by asking its 1.5 million American members to vote on which Democratic candidate the organization should endorse. Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich, the top two vote-getters, have both emerged as magnets for antiwar Democrats disaffected by the party's tepid opposition to Bush's extreme agenda. But Dean, who outfundraised his competitors last quarter through a torrent of small online donations, is the only one of the pair to have caught the Internet wave. His campaign manager, Joe Trippi, sees the net as the missing element that will make Dean's 2004 run a "perfect storm." (It couldn't hurt that MoveOn was a paid technical adviser to Dean's campaign, prompting charges of partiality from the Gephardt and Edwards campaigns during the MoveOn primary. Exley says other Democrats declined such assistance, but wouldn't say which ones.)
./english/366.txt:66:Matzzie is not the only organizer rejecting Internet hype for a more measured view of its capabilities. "The Internet has been an enormous boon to grassroots mobilizations," says UFPJ's Kauffman. "But it can't replace old-fashioned face-to-face organizing, especially when you're trying to build something as delicate as a multiracial coalition." The polarizing debate about how to take up the issue of Palestine, for example, which roiled the UFPJ listserv in May, was handily resolved in the more goal-oriented and accountable setting of the coalition's June conference. E-mail is a notoriously bad way to resolve serious disputes over contentious issues, since it easily leads to harsh tones and misunderstandings. The Internet is best for pulling together a coalition when there is already a broad base of agreement--as there was for UFPJ and MoveOn around the Iraq war. And fault lines in the MoveOn consensus may yet emerge if a prowar Democrat gets the nomination.
./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/367.txt:13:The left in India developed out of the freedom movement. Militant nationalists who were in favor of armed struggle to overthrow British rule were enthused by the Russian revolution. The Communist Party of India (CPI), first “founded: in Tashkent in 1920, but in reality in 1925, when a number of Communist groups united at a conference in India, was virtually smashed by the Meerut Conspiracy Case of 1929. By the time the party was rebuilt, the grip of Stalinism on the international Communist movement was almost absolute. From then on, Indian Communism knew few of the debates and uncertainties that Communist parties experienced elsewhere.
./english/367.txt:159:If we expect the WSF itself to become the focal point for anti-imperialist struggles, we would be suffering from illusions. But if we think that we can ignore this, one of the world’s major anti-imperialist gatherings, we would simply be handing the thing over to reformist politicians. They come in droves. They come as CPI(M) leaders, and as European Social Democrats. And by the way, it is not quite correct that parties can have no role. One of the key debates around the European Social Forum was over whether and how to build a party of the European left, and the temperature suddenly mounted in Florence when the representatives of the French Communist Party and of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, French Section of the Fourth International, crossed swords. The WSF is a real event. Revolutionaries have to go in there, be a part of the real movement, and thereby seek to influence others in the movement. Forces like the NAPM, and others, have clearly taken a dual-track approach, building the movement and at the same time criticizing the NGO dependence. This alone shows the way ahead. Will the Indian left grasp this unique opportunity?
./english/368.txt:84:All of this thorough and rapid circulation of news and observer reports of the situation in Chiapas led quickly to analytical and critical assessments of the origins and meaning of the Zapatista uprising. Here too cyberspace provided forums for informal discussion and debate. Alongside editorial pieces from the print or sound media appeared questions and opinions from a wide variety of concerned participants. Unlike "letters to the editor", every single one of these comments and feedback appeared in electronic "print", not days later but hours or even minutes after an original story or argument. The repressive response of the government, with its torture and killing, was subjected to widespread condemnation, while being very feebly defended, mostly with lies that were quickly exposed. Unlike government or editorial "retractions" which might be buried in some obscure corner of a newspaper, the exposure of lies within an ongoing "thread" of discussion in cyberspace emerges right up front where everyone can see it. Within this context of open debate, the Zapatistas were condemned by some and praised by many, dismissed by the apologists of the state and treated with great seriousness by those who studied their communiques. Wild charges of "terrorism" (echoes of state propaganda) were dissected and demolished in plain public view.(35)
./english/368.txt:90:As the dual phenomena of a rapidly growing pro-democracy movement and an increasingly unstable and desperate ruling party have became more and more apparent, peoples' sense that things could change significantly in Mexico has grown. As the multiplying flows of information, analysis and debate have provided the sense of collective concern and organizing necessary for committed forms of action, increased numbers of caravans and observers have gone to Chiapas, less to "learn what is happening" than to curb state abuses and bring aid and solidarity to those suffering the brutalities of the state's counterinsurgency strategy of so-called "low intensity warfare", i.e., a generalized terror campaign against all viewed as sympathetic to the EZLN and radical change. In turn, political innovation in Chiapas, from the CND through the formation of a Rebel Government of Transition to the EZLN's calls for a broad-based Liberation Movement and a general plebiscite have circulated to the rest of Mexico and beyond.
./english/368.txt:92:The result for business, the state and the ruling class generally is a continuing crisis of "governability" wherein virtually every historical mechanism of domination is being challenged and ruptured from below. The old combinations of repression and co-optation have not been working and the traditional elite coalitions are splitting apart. The PRI has had to accept electoral reforms, cede state governments to the opposition Partido Accion Nacional (PAN), tolerate public denunciations from its own human rights commission, suffer repeated exposures of massive state corruption, while watching the center of gravity of public political debate and action shift toward radical groups like the EZLN or moderate groups like Alianza Civica. Desperate in the face of so many crises, the fragmenting ruling alliance has struck back with its usual violence --military repression in Chiapas, police state repression all over the place. At the same time, unfortunately, it has not collapsed and is hardly without resources --both financial and human-- even in extremis. As a result we have begun to see some new efforts to fight back on various fronts, including that of cyberspace.
./english/368.txt:98:In the summer of that same year, Cathryn Thorup, then Director of Studies and Programs at the Center for U.S. Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, published an assessment of "cross-border coalitions" in the Columbia Journal of World Business.(38) Her primary focus was on the actions and impact of the anti-NAFTA network. She traced the development of opposition to and lobbying against the governments' "fast-track" approach to railroading NAFTA through Congress as well as elite efforts to divide and conquer that opposition. While calling the debate "healthy for both societies" (the U.S. and Mexico), she also highlighted the "tremendous vulnerability" of the state to such organizing and discussed how state policy makers might seek to convert such opposition into "valuable political allies" by consulting with them and cutting deals. Her vision of how the political system might cope with the emergence of these new rogue networks would seem to lie squarely in the tradition of pluralism, i.e., integrate and co-opt the new forces into a slightly modified fabric of governance.
./english/368.txt:124:In the case of the Zapatistas and Mexico, it is clear that the Mexican state is well aware of the way The Net is being used to undermine its credibility and challenge its policies. This became publicly evident when Jose Angel Guru, Mexican Secretary of State, told an April 1995 gathering of businessmen at the World Trade Center that the conflict in Chiapas was a "war of ink, of the written word and a war of the Internet".(56) How the Mexican government has chosen to fight this "war of the Internet" has become a hotly debated subject on The Net itself.
./english/368.txt:148:While the collapse of the Cold War and the disintegration of the ruling coalitions in Mexico have left both of these sets of institutions in some disarray, they have continued their work, albeit perhaps with less unity and consistency than before. This was apparent in the battle over NAFTA where both US and Mexican capital were able to field substantial teams of apologists to attempt to control the debate. It has also been true with respect to the Zapatistas --but with less success.
./english/369.txt:119:For the first time in many years, a political polarisation is taking place in Europe, clearly and visibly, in struggles, in the various social movements and trade unions and in elections. This anti-capitalist polarisation is developing, not on the basis of abstract ideological debates, but on the basis of big, earth-shaking events and the lived experience of the popular masses.
./english/370.txt:50:These ideas are today being hotly debated in the field of interface design. The general consensus is that interfaces must become more intelligent to be able to guide users in the tapping of computer resources, both the informational wealth of the Internet, as well as the resources of ever more elaborate software applications. But if the debaters agree that interfaces must become smarter, and even that this intelligence will be embodied in agents, they disagree on how the agents should acquire their new capabilities. The debate pits two different traditions of Artificial Intelligence against each other: Symbolic AI, in which hierarchical components predominate, against Behavioral AI, where the meshwork elements are dominant. Basically, while in the former discipline one attempts to endow machines with intelligence by depositing a homogenous set of rules and symbols into a robot's brain, in the latter one attempts to get intelligent behavior to emerge from the interactions of a few simple task-specific modules in the robot's head, and the heterogeneous affordances of its environment. Thus, to build a robot that walks around a room, the first approach would give the robot a map of the room, together with the ability to reason about possible walking scenarios in that model of the room. The second approach, on the other hand, endows the robot with a much simpler set of abilities, embodied in modules that perform simple tasks such as collision-avoidance, and walking-around-the-room behavior emerges from the interactions of these modules and the obstacles and openings that the real room affords the robot as it moves.{8}
./english/372.txt:13:The depth of the problem first really struck me when I first became acquainted with the consensus modes of decision-making employed in North American anarchist and anarchist-inspired political movements, which, in turn, bore a lot of similarities to the style of political decision-making current where I had done my anthropological fieldwork in rural Madagascar. There's enormous variation among different styles and forms of consensus but one thing almost all the North American variants have in common is that they are organized in conscious opposition to the style of organization and, especially, of debate typical of the classical sectarian Marxist group. Where the latter are invariably organized around some Master Theoretician, who offers a comprehensive analysis of the world situation and, often, of human history as a whole, but very little theoretical reflection on more immediate questions of organization and practice, anarchist-inspired groups tend to operate on the assumption that no one could, or probably should, ever convert another person completely to one's own point of view, that decision-making structures are ways of managing diversity, and therefore, that one should concentrate instead on maintaining egalitarian process and considering immediate questions of action in the present. One of the fundamental principles of political debate, for instance, is that one is obliged to give other participants the benefit of the doubt for honesty and good intentions, whatever else one might think of their arguments. In part too this emerges from the style of debate consensus decision-making encourages: where voting encourages one to reduce one's opponents positions to a hostile caricature, or whatever it takes to defeat them, a consensus process is built on a principle of compromise and creativity where one is constantly changing proposals around until one can come up with something everyone can at least live with; therefore, the incentive is always to put the best possible construction on other's arguments.
./english/372.txt:15:All this struck home to me because it brought home to me just how much ordinary intellectual practice--the kind of thing I was trained to do at the University of Chicago, for example--really does resemble sectarian modes of debate. One of the things which had most disturbed me about my training there was precisely the way we were encouraged to read other theorists' arguments: that if there were two ways to read a sentence, one of which assumed the author had at least a smidgen of common sense and the other that he was a complete idiot, the tendency was always to chose the latter. I had sometimes wondered how this could be reconciled with an idea that intellectual practice was, on some ultimate level, a common enterprise in pursuit of truth. The same goes for other intellectual habits: for example, that of carefully assembling lists of different "ways to be wrong" (usually ending in "ism": i.e., subjectivism, empiricism, all much like their sectarian parallels: reformism, left deviationism, hegemonism...) and being willing to listen to points of view differing from one's own only so long as it took to figure out which variety of wrongness to plug them into. Combine this with the tendency to treat (often minor) intellectual differences not only as tokens of belonging to some imagined "ism" but as profound moral flaws, on the same level as racism or imperialism (and often in fact partaking of them) then one has an almost exact reproduction of style of intellectual debate typical of the most ridiculous vanguardist sects.
./english/372.txt:51:In the 19th century idea of the political vanguard was used very widely and very loosely for anyone seen as exploring the path to a future, free society. Radical newspapers for example often called themselves "the Avant Garde". It was Marx though who began to significantly change the idea by introducing the notion that the proletariat were the true revolutionary class--he didn't actually use the term "vanguard" in his own writing--because they were the one that was the most oppressed, or as he put it "negated" by capitalism, and therefore had the least to lose by its abolition. In doing so, he ruled out the possibilities that less alienated enclaves, whether of artists or the sort of artisans and independent producers who tended to form the backbone of anarchism, had anything significant to offer. The results we all know. The idea of a vanguard party to dedicated to both organizing and providing an intellectual project for that most-oppressed class chosen as the agent of history, but also, actually sparking the revolution through their willingness to employ violence, was first outlined by Lenin in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?; it has echoed endlessly, to the point where the SDS in the late '60s could end up locked in furious debates over whether the Black Panther Party should be considered the vanguard of The Movement as the leaders of its most oppressed element. All this in turn had a curious effect on the artistic avant garde who increasingly started to organize themselves like vanguard parties, beginning with the Dadaists, Futurists, publishing their own manifestos, communiquŽs, purging one another, and otherwise making themselves (sometimes quite intentional) parodies of revolutionary sects. (Note however that these groups always defined themselves, like anarchists, by a certain form of practice rather than after some heroic founder.) The ultimate fusion came with the Surrealists and then finally the Situationist International, which on the one hand was the most systematic in trying to develop a theory of revolutionary action according to the spirit of Bohemia, thinking about what it might actually mean to destroy the boundaries between art and life, but at the same time, in its own internal organization, displayed a kind of insane sectarianism full of so many splits, purges, and bitter denunciations that Guy Debord finally remarked that the only logical conclusion was for the International to be finally reduced to two members, one of whom would purge the other and then commit suicide. (Which is actually not too far from what actually ended up happening.)
./english/375.txt:1:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 1 Harman-Hardt Debate: The working class or the multitude
./english/375.txt:2:This debate was organised by Globalise Resistance on 25 January 2003 at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre Brazil in front of about 300 people. The two main speakers spoke for 21 minutes each, and there were then some 22 contributions from the floor – one of the highest degrees of participation at any meeting at the forum.
./english/375.txt:3:In transcribing the debate, I could not decipher from the recording of most of the names of contributors from the floor, and four of the contributions at all. The transcriptions of some of the other contributions are based on translations provided verbally at the meeting.
./english/375.txt:6:What I want to start by saying is how absolutely important this debate is. It is now jus over three years since the new movement around globalisation bust on the scene at Seattle. Since then we have had the great ;battle at Genoa, we’ve had September 11th, we’ve been through the war against Afghanistan and we have the expectation of the world’s greatest power directing its armed might against a poor third world country in the next four or five weeks. For all of us the centrality of agitating against the war is there.
./english/375.txt:9:I only want to focus one element – how Marx placed at the centre of the debate the understanding that capitalism itself creates a force that can potentially grow up in opposition to it and overthrow it. This force is the working class.
./english/375.txt:13:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 2
./english/375.txt:21:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 3So a man called Andre Gorz wrote a book some 20 years ago called ‘Farewell to the working class’ which put across these ideas.
./english/375.txt:33:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 4If we talk about the disappearance of the traditional working class in manufacturing, mining, and so forth. The reality is that this is not a class that is disappearing. I just want to give a few figures from what is still the world’s biggest economy, the United States. At the end of the 1970s there was a panic in the United States with people talking about ‘deindustrialisation’. But in 1998 the number of people working in industry in the United States was 20 per cent higher than in 1974, roughly; 50 per cent higher than in 1950 and it was four times the level of 1900. There was this continual growth in the number of workers in old style industries – mining, manufacturing and so forth. It is true that the total number employed in the economy as a whole grew more rapidly than that. But the absolute size of the traditional industrial working class – if you want to use the Spanish term, the obreros as opposed to the trabajadores – continued to grow right up until the beginning of the recession that began two years ago.
./english/375.txt:40:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 5boring, as tiring, as devastating to their lives as any traditional manual work. Something like 42 million people altogether in such jobs in the United States.
./english/375.txt:48:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 6But if you analyse the categories further, you find that in most third world countries today about half the people working the land for themselves are to some extent also dependent on waged labour. So about a third of the world’s workforce are involved in classic capitalist relations of production, dependent completely on waged labour to survive, about a third remain self employed, mainly peasants in the countryside, and third who spend part of their time working for capital, part of the time working for themselves – and increasingly under the control of multinational trading corporations, supermarket chains, and so on.
./english/375.txt:58:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 7
./english/375.txt:68:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 8
./english/375.txt:78:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 9
./english/375.txt:87:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 10So unpaid domestic labour is excluded, the poor are excluded. The peasantry also is excluded. There is long tradition of this in Marxist and socialist thought. It is in many senses an unfortunate tradition. The claim was in the 19th century among Marx and Engels that the peasantry and the industrial working class did not have common conditions of labour and that they could not unite politically. The peasantry, he said, because of their incommunicability, their dispersion, could not unite politically, could not act politically. At best – this is the very bad tradition on our shoulders – at best the peasantry can act under the guidance of the industrial working class.
./english/375.txt:95:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 11We traditionally have as an alternative to that in the various academic and intellectual notions of class what is thought of as a liberal model in which is about a pluralism of classes. This liberal model says there is not just one category of labour but rather there is a variety of classes in society, none of which has priority over the other. This is the liberal pluralistic model as opposed to Marx’s unitary model.
./english/375.txt:106:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 12they have to be guided, the need an external force that leads. By contrast, the multitude acts on is own, it is able to act in its own name, it refuses leadership.
./english/375.txt:116:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 13So the notion of the multitude is trying to mean that. The notion is that we have to have a new kind of organising that gets away from the exclusionary centralised intractability that has traditionally been associated with the party and traditionally been associated with the exclusion of various social groups.
./english/375.txt:117:Debate from floor
./english/375.txt:129:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 14
./english/375.txt:139:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 15movement that wants to see an end to this horrible system which is inflicting harm on millions of people.
./english/375.txt:147:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 16them and led the movement against the war, blocked the production of those factories producing arms, and turned the movement against the war into movement directly against capitalism.
./english/375.txt:158:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 17precisely because there is a great desire to respect the differences and autonomy of each actor and this requires a tremendous time and effort to agree a common agenda for all the actions. We can agree what we against – against the war, against globalisation – but we have a great difficulty in agreeing strategies and visions of where we want to go. In terms of that getting more numbers, certainly the mobilisation of the working class, but in terms of sustaining adhesion to an agenda, I think there are great differences. The people we are fighting against are producing changes at great speed, and we have these difficulties in arriving at what we want to do.. I would like to hear from both speakers what you think about these factors
./english/375.txt:169:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 18propose that Microsoft workers in Seattle are going to lead us to the future. It is rather used in an analytical mode to try to recognise how other forms of labour are being transformed, how industry is being informationalised. Even questions of agriculture have much more to do with information. Questions about seeds are questions about information. So various sectors of the economy are becoming informationalised. But there cannot be a hegemony in a political sense of informational workers.
./english/375.txt:178:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 19This is crucial. The movement in Argentina is fantastic. I wrote a pamphlet on this a year ago extolling the movement. The question is that a year on people are dying of starvation in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, in the world’s second biggest meat producer people are dying of starvation. What is to be done? That is the question that Lenin raised too. You may not want to give the same answer as he gave, but the question has to be asked.
./english/375.txt:186:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 20done? And here we have to say that those people have a continuing relationship with capital. They have not disappeared. Their lives are still made miserable by capital. They are still concentrated in large workplaces. They still hate the system but do not know the system exists We have to pull these together.
./english/375.txt:193:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 21Twelfth contributor
./english/375.txt:203:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 22who refused to move munitions for the war. This is a very important development among workers in Britain. And why did they take this action. They did so because of the massive protest movement in Britain against the war. Without that protest movement, workers would not have had the confidence to stop those trains. It is not the working class or the movements, but both. The movements can give the working class that confidence, that inspiration it needs to attack the ideology of the ruling class.
./english/375.txt:213:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 23And may therein lies something to be reflected on in this false dichotomy between class struggle and the multitude.
./english/377.txt:28:To a criticism that all these alternatives do not add up to a unity, mere celebration of identities, in such diverse contexts and approaches cannot provide the basis for a challenge to the exterminator, there was an interesting reply by a feminist, who was once a member of the CPML, that it was good to be free of a unifying political theory. Belonging to such formal ideologies had been suffocating, as it quelled difference of opinion, debate and transformation. Confusion was good, as it gave the space to form new alliances, shape new formulations, design new approaches, and maybe even new theories to underpin all the alternatives. Unity can be forged, but not forced as was happening before the diverse groups got a shared space to understand their differences and shape their commonality.
./english/378.txt:27:General statements were delivered from the podiums. Successive speakers voiced delight at how many of us there were, and how young and good-looking we all were. Initiating serious debate in the halls full of thousands of people, warmed up by mass-meeting rhetoric, was impossible.
./english/379.txt:16:As the third millennium unfolds, one of the most dramatic technological and economic revolutions in history is advancing a set of processes that are changing everything from the ways that people work to the ways that they communicate with each other and spend their leisure time. The technological revolution centres on computer, information, communication and multimedia technologies. These are key aspects of the production of a new economy, described as postindustrial, post-Fordist and postmodern, accompanied by a networked society and cyberspace, and the juggernaut of globalization. There are, of course, furious debates about how to describe the Great Transformation of the contemporary epoch, whether it is positive and negative, and what are the political prospects for democratization and radical social transformation.[1]
./english/379.txt:42:What is new about computer and information technology mediated politics is that information can be instantly communicated to large numbers of individuals throughout the world who are connected via computer networks. The internet is also potentially interactive, allowing discussion, debate and on-line and archived discussion. The internet is increasingly multimedia in scope, allowing the dissemination of images, sounds, video and other cultural forms. Moreover, the use of computer technology and networks is becoming a normalized aspect of politics, just as the broadcasting media were some decades ago. The use of 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 intervention by oppositional groups, potentially expanding the scope of democratization.
./english/379.txt:54:Obviously, much of the world does not even have telephone service, much less computers, and there are vast discrepancies in terms of who has access to computers and who participates in the technological revolution and cyberdemocracy today. As a result, there have been passionate debates over the extent and nature of the ådigital divideπ between the information haves and have-nots. Critics of new technologies and cyberspace repeat incessantly that it is by and large young, white, middle- or upper-class males who are the dominant players in the cyberspaces of the present. While this is true, statistics and surveys indicate that many more women, people of colour, seniors and individuals from marginalized groups are becoming increasingly active.[3] In addition, computers may become part of the standard household consumer package in the overdeveloped world, although studies are emerging that indicate that large numbers of individuals claim that they have no intention of purchasing computers and using the internet. Yet in the light of the importance of computers for work, social life, entertainment and education, no doubt growing amounts of people will continue to go on-line. Further, there are plans afoot to wire the entire world with satellites that would make the internet and new communication technologies accessible to people who do not now even have a telephone, TV or even electricity, and wireless, interactive technologies are touted as the next stage of networked communication.[4]
./english/379.txt:104:Furthermore, the internet provided critical coverage of the event, documentation of the various groupsπ protests, and debate over the WTO and globalization. Whereas the mainstream media presented the protests as åanti-tradeπ, featured the incidents of anarchist violence against property, and minimized police brutality against demonstrators, the internet provided pictures, eyewitness accounts and reports of police viciousness and the generally peaceful and nonviolent nature of the protests. While the mainstream media framed the Seattle anti-WTO activities negatively and privileged suspect spokespeople like Patrick Buchanan as critics of globalization, the internet provided multiple representations of the demonstrations, advanced reflective discussion of the WTO and globalization, and presented a diversity of critical perspectives.
./english/379.txt:120:The new movements against globalization from above have thus placed the issues of global justice, democracy and the environment squarely in the centre of the political concerns of our time. Hence, whereas the mainstream media had failed to vigorously debate or even report on globalization until the recent past, and rarely, if ever, critically discussed the activities of the WTO, World Bank and IMF, there is now a widely circulating critical discourse and controversy regarding these institutions. Stung by criticisms, representatives of the World Bank, in particular, are pledging reform. Pressures are mounting concerning proper and improper roles for the major global institutions, highlighting their limitations and deficiencies, and the need for reforms like debt relief for overburdened developing countries to solve some of their fiscal and social problems.
./english/379.txt:156:Active citizens thus need to acquire new forms of technological literacy to intervene in the new public spheres of the media and information society. In addition to traditional literacy skills centred upon reading, writing and speaking, engaged citizens and public intellectuals need to learn to use the new technologies to engage the public and participate in democratic discussion and debate.[12] Computer and digital technologies thus expand the field and capacities of the intellectual as well as the possibilities for political intervention. During the Age of Big Media, critical-oppositional intellectuals were by and large marginalized, unable to gain access to the major sites of mass communication. With the decentralization of the internet, however, new possibilities for public intellectuals exist to reach broad audiences. It is therefore the responsibility of the active citizen to creatively work with these new technologies, as well as to critically analyze the diverse developments of the cyberculture. This requires dialectical thinking that discriminates between the benefits and the costs, the upsides and downsides, of new technologies and devising ways that the technological revolution can be used to promote positive values like education, democracy, enlightenment and ecology. Active citizens thus face new challenges, and the future of democracy depends in part on whether new technologies will be used for domination or democratization, and whether each individual will sit on the sidelines or participate in the development of new democratic public spheres.
./english/380.txt:9: Globalization appears to be the buzzword of the 1990s, the primary attractor of books, articles, and heated debate, just as postmodernism was the most fashionable and debated topic of the 1980s. A wide and diverse range of social theorists are arguing that today's world is organized by accelerating globalization, which is strengthening the dominance of a world capitalist economic system, supplanting the primacy of the nation-state by transnational corporations and organizations, and eroding local cultures and traditions through a global culture.[1] Marxists, world systems theorists, functionalists, Weberians, and other contemporary theorists are converging on the position that globalization is a distinguishing trend of the present moment.
./english/380.txt:17: Indeed, globalization is one of the most hotly debated issues of the present era. For some, it is a cover concept for global capitalism and imperialism, and is accordingly condemned as another form of the imposition of the logic of capital and the market on ever more regions of the world and spheres of life. For others, it is the continuation of modernization and a force of progress, increased wealth, freedom, democracy, and happiness. Its defenders present globalization as beneficial, generating fresh economic opportunities, political democratization, cultural diversity, and the opening to an exciting new world. Its critics see globalization as harmful, bringing about increased domination and control by the wealthier overdeveloped nations over the poor underdeveloped countries, thus increasing the hegemony of the “haves” over the “have nots.” In addition, supplementing the negative view, globalization critics assert that globalization produces an undermining of democracy, a cultural homogenization, and increased destruction of natural species and the environment.[2] Some imagine the globalization project -- whether viewed positively or negatively -- as inevitable and beyond human control and intervention, whereas others view globalization as generating new conflicts and new spaces for struggle, distinguishing between globalization from above and globalization from below (and Brecher, Costello, and Smith 2000).
./english/380.txt:25: Finally, I will raise the question of whether debates centered around the "post" (i.e. postmodernism, postindustrialism, postFordism, and so on) do or do not elucidate the phenomenon of globalization. I argue in the affirmative, claiming that discourses of the post dramatize what is new, original, and different in our current situation, but that such discourse can be and is easily misused. For the discourse of postmodernity, for example, to have any force, it must be grounded in analysis of scientific and technological revolution and the global restructuring of capital or it is just an empty buzzword (see Best and Kellner 1997 and 2001). Thus, I would suggest that to properly theorize postmodernity, one must articulate globalization and the roles of technoscience and new technologies in its construction. In turn, understanding how scientific and technological revolution and the global restructuring of capitalism are creating unique historical configurations of globalization helps one perceive the urgency and force of the discourse of the “post.”
./english/380.txt:113: In any case, the events of September 11 have promoted a fury of reflection, theoretical debates, and political conflicts and upheaval that put the complex dynamics of globalization at the center of contemporary theory and politics. To those skeptical of the centrality of globalization to contemporary experience, it is now clear that we are living in a global world that is highly interconnected and vulnerable to passions and crises that can cross borders and can effect anyone or any region at any time. The events of September 11 also provide a test case to evaluate various theories of globalization and the contemporary era. In addition, they highlight some of the contradictions of globalization and the need to develop a highly complex and dialectical model to capture its conflicts, ambiguities, and contradictory effects.
./english/380.txt:177: Furthermore, the Internet provided critical coverage of the event, documentation of the various groups' protests, and debate over the WTO and globalization. Whereas the mainstream media presented the protests as "anti-trade," featured the incidents of anarchist violence against property, while minimizing police violence against demonstrators, the Internet provided pictures, eyewitness accounts, and reports of police brutality and the generally peaceful and non-violent nature of the protests. While the mainstream media framed the protests negatively and privileged suspect spokespeople like Patrick Buchanan as critics of globalization, the Internet provided multiple representations of the demonstrations, advanced reflective discussion of the WTO and globalization, and presented a diversity of critical perspectives.
./english/380.txt:201: The new movements against capitalist globalization have thus placed the issues of global justice and environmental destruction squarely in the center of important political concerns of our time. Hence, whereas the mainstream media had failed to vigorously debate or even report on globalization until the eruption of a vigorous anti-globalization movement, and rarely, if ever, critically discussed the activities of the WTO, World Bank and IMF, there is now a widely circulating critical discourse and controversy over these institutions. Stung by criticisms, representatives of the World Bank, in particular, are pledging reform and pressures are mounting concerning proper and improper roles for the major global institutions, highlighting their limitations and deficiencies, and the need for reforms like debt relief from overburdened developing countries to solve some of their fiscal and social problems.
./english/380.txt:217: There have been widespread discussions of how the bin Laden Al Qaeda network used the Internet to plan the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., how the group communicated with each other, got funds and purchased airline tickets via the Internet, and used flight simulations to practice their hijacking. In the contemporary era, the Internet can thus be used for a diversity of political projects and goals ranging from education, to business, to political organization and debate, to terrorism.
./english/383.txt:109:contemporary enclosures debate to the problems facing the Russian agricultural communes in the
./english/383.txt:174:One of the theoretical bases for the global public goods debate.
./english/386.txt:50:Much academic debate on poverty and deprivation in India focuses on income-poverty. Current evidence suggests that income-poverty worsened in India between 1991 and 1994. Using data on consumer expenditure from recent rounds of the NSS, S.P.Gupta suggests that poverty and inequality have worsened in the 1990s. The proportion of poor households declined from 39.3% in 1987-88 to 34.3% in 1989-90 and then rose to 40.7% in 1992-93. In absolute terms, there were 310 mn persons living below the poverty line in 1987-88. By 1992-93 the number of poor had risen to 355 mn.
./english/387.txt:13:The second factor is their embrace of a national socio-political agenda. In discussions with many peasant leaders at the CLOC conference (as well as in prior meetings over the past 5 years) the fundamental issue was “self-determination,” the idea that only the farmworkers through their own organizations can liberate themselves. The FENOC in Ecuador, the MST in Brazil and the Paraguayan Peasant Federation, all of which have played a major role in shaping the national debate on agrarian reform, emerged from peasant organizing from below, developed their own structures and leaders, and were not beholden to any party.
./english/387.txt:20:In Brazil, the MST has settled over 150,000 families representing almost a million people on uncultivated lands through direct action—land occupation movements. Through actions in 21 states the MST has pushed land-reform to the center of political debate. One indicator of its success is found in recent polls in Sao Paulo (Brazil’s largest city) which indicate that over 75 percent of the population support land distribution favoring landless farm workers.
./english/388.txt:79:TP: This has come out in the International Council. There is a debate on whether the International Council should make a statement about the war on Iraq. One group argues that the forum should be a political agent, while another says no, the forum should be a pedagogical space. These are two different visions. It is a good debate to have.
./english/391.txt:12:The problem now, from my standpoint as member of the WSF International Council, is that we must begin debate on the architecture of the Forum. We must recognise that the WSF entails three equally necessary elements: mobilisation, participation, and strategies for a better possible world.
./english/391.txt:18:The third element, defining proposals and strategies hasn't been resolved yet and doesn't seem to worry most people. There were 1,714 panels and seminars in this year's WSF. Is this proof of strength? If nobody can keep track of what went on in so many debates, I have my doubts. This atomisation of dialogue means that many valuable proposals were lost.
./english/392.txt:168:that the debate and thinking, and therefore formulations and focus, have not been
./english/392.txt:312:(long−term) forum or platform for debate on civil tactical and strategic
./english/393.txt:72:1. The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate
./english/393.txt:78:1. The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of
./english/393.txt:121:representing world civil society nor to exclude from the debates it promotes those in
./english/393.txt:123:the commitments resulting from those debates.
./english/393.txt:224:12. As a forum for debate, the World Social Forum is a movement of ideas that prompts
./english/393.txt:233:11. As a forum for debate, the World Social Forum is a movement of ideas that prompts reflection,
./english/394.txt:61:during 2002, along with the main WSF Charter of Principles, for debate and discussion during the
./english/394.txt:170:stayed away. The clause was the subject of several very heated debates in India, and has arguably
./english/394.txt:176:One specific consequence of this ‘debate’ in India was that one of the civil groups that had
./english/395.txt:63:must remain to encourage and enable free and open debate and not to overtly or covertly build a
./english/395.txt:86:to building a culture of open debate across conventional walls and boundaries. The real ‘alternative’
./english/395.txt:324:Over time however, this can become problematic for the organisers. The debate presently
./english/395.txt:440:Apparently after considerable debate at its recent meeting in Miami in June 2003 about the
./english/395.txt:459:question of ruling out debate with those who hold different opinions, the Charter of Principles as it
./english/395.txt:586:the struggle and debate that continues and is sharpening in the Forum, regarding understanding the
./english/396.txt:164:Besides the monthly ‘on demand’ reports, FIRE organizes special webcasts from conferences and events where women come together to influence agendas at the local, national regional or international level. The FIRE-PLACE in Internet began in 1999 as a virtual radio station placed in the middle of any conference or meeting to open its microphones to women so that they can share with an international audience their news, reports, debates, sorrows and joys when developing advocacy and mobilizing skills and actions to influence agendas. Such webcasts are designed under a strategy of FIRE’s own creation in interaction with other women in media and media groups.
./english/396.txt:196:· Influence in the women’s media caucus in its document to governments so that the issues and strategies of women’s media in the region would be included. The main contribution of FIRE to the language of the document was that of defining the criteria of the voluntary codes of ethics of the media, based on the international framework of the human rights. This focus allowed women in media to solve a critical problem in the debate: by placing the discussion in the human rights framework we prevent arbitrary codes.
./english/396.txt:240:· Additionally, with the Regional NGO Articulación, FIRE created a special daily newscast. Under the name “Line of Impact” the special segment of the FIRE-PLACE, also feature in “Está Legal” in local radio in Costa Rica, women activists participating in the official debates came on the air every morning to share with the listeners the hottest news about the UN proceedings.
./english/396.txt:680:(From Spain): Hello women: For the 8th of March we are going to organize a special program with music, interviews, debates and connections with other radio programs, lasting about 12-13 hours. We wish to coordinate this effort with your radio program at FIRE. From Radio Contrabanda, Barcelona, Spain.
./english/399.txt:131:"A good time to be free," was how Christopher Bott described it, "Imagination was seizing power" ' The Sorbonne was transformed from an institutionalized bureaucratic conditioning centre to "a Volcano of revolutionary ideas". Everything was up for debate, everything was being challenged. Day and night every lecture hall was packed. Passionate debates on every subject went on continuously. The spirit of Arthur Rimbaud had returned. The Paris Commune had become a reality. Nothing like it had been seen before anywhere.
./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/401.txt:90:In the post-cold-war period and as a response to the more aggressive bouts of hegemonic globalization, new as yet very precarious forms of labor internationalism have emerged: the debate on labor standards; exchanges, agreements or even institutional congregation among labor unions of different countries integrating the same economic regional bloc (NAFTA, European Union, Mercosul); articulation among struggles, claims, and demands of the different labor unions representing the workers working for the same multinational corporation in different countries, etc.
./english/401.txt:166:As we know, Communist mythology has now collapsed and, as a result, ‘class unionism’ is today riven by innumerable problems and fragilities. Not only have the strikes of the working class been ‘cannibalized’ by capitalism, the administrative structures of the main trade unions have also largely become instruments of state regulatory action. The trade unions themselves have also contributed to this process, by ‘cannibalizing’ the old proposals of emancipatory action. In the midst of all this, the conquests made by workers and by the traditional trade union movement have largely given way before the pressures of co-option, and have imperceptibly entered the dynamic of the system, becoming absorbed by the rationale of regulation… However, alongside the discrediting of the ‘old’ worker- and national-based trade unionism, there are signs of revival, especially on the level of ideas and political debate. These, which occur as much in academia as in the trade union domain, point towards the emergence of a ‘new’ social trade union movement of global or international character…
./english/403.txt:7:Mass actions by networks that identify themselves as anti-capitalist have prompted both extensive mainstream media coverage and broad public interest in recent years. Nor has all of this attention been drowned out by what Matthew Fuller (2002) calls the current ‘war over the monopoly on terror’. As is proper, the anti-capitalist potential (or otherwise) of such movements has been widely debated. Amongst other things, this have involved assessment of their engagement (or otherwise) with contemporary class composition, and the risks within many of them of particular understandings of political practice: above all, the ‘activist’ syndrome (see, amongst others, Aufheben 2002; RTS 1999). Even making sense of the terrain and parameters of these movements is not always an easy task. Whilst formally constituted organisations play an integral part within them, in certain cases these movements’ experience of ‘"organising" may not take the form of "organizations" but of an ebb or flow of contact at myriad points’. Indeed, some have argued that their very confluence may lend a number of today’s movements an anti-systemic edge, to the point where ‘current struggles for particular changes are linking up into a collaboration whose impact may wind up being much larger than the sum of the individual influences’ (Cleaver 1999).
./english/403.txt:37:It is with projects such as the Indymedia network (www.indymedia.org), however, that it becomes possible to talk of the emergence of a distinctly social movement electronic communications forum. The first Indymedia site was established as part of the Seattle days of protest, where they proved effective in relaying images, audio recordings and written accounts of the mass blockade (Weingartner 2001). Since then, Indymedia sites have been formed across Western Europe, the Americas, and Australasia (Shumway 2001) — and most ecently, in the Middle East. Powered by ‘open publishing’ software that allows users both to upload materials and to offer commentaries on the stories, opinions and images provided by others, Indymedia can be seen as part of a broader Internet phenomenon of sites fuelled by ‘the creativity of their users, not [by] professional producers as was the tradition with earlier electronic media’ (Arnison 2002). At the same time, Arnison has argued, one of the issues presently being debated within the Indymedia network of web sites is precisely ‘what to do when they are not covering a major event’. One response to this dilemma has been to mentor new ventures into ‘real world media’. In Melbourne, for example, there is The Paper, a fortnightly publication that began around the S11 protests, and has since carved out its own identity independently of the local Indymedia collective.
./english/403.txt:51:Although ultimately inconclusive, a debate on information overload within social movements that took place around the Second Intercontinental Encuentro of 1997 helps throw further light on the question. The First Encuentro, held the previous year in Chiapas, had brought together some 3,000 activists from a range of circles — above all in North America and Europe — linked by a sense of affinity with the Zapatistas of Southern Mexico. One of the proposals arising from the First Encuentro was for an international network of communication, able to circulate news and views of the ‘One "Nos" and Many "Yeses" opposed to global neo-liberalism, and consideration of how best to achieve this was placed on the agenda for the follow up gathering in Spain.
./english/403.txt:53:The debate began with a long reflective piece penned primarily by Monty Neill (1997a), an editor of the US-based journal Midnight Notes. Following a considered account of the Zapatistas’ significance for other movements seeking to challenge global capitalism, Neill (1997b) turned to the specific proposal for a communications network:
./english/403.txt:61:Tim Jordan (1999: 122), at least, is sceptical that technical approaches to information overload do anything more than exacerbate the problem. This is because clearing the decks of unwanted and/or irrelevant information simply provides more space for other sources of information to take their place — much as freeway extensions or widenings commonly only increase the volume of automobile traffic. In any case, as one participant in the Encuentro debate pointed out, something like the system proposed by Wray already existed in the form of Usenet groups (Kerne 1997). On the other hand, as another list member based in the South reminded everyone, ‘Although we are living in a new era, although globalism presents us every opportunity of technology in every country, it is not for every one’ (sungu 1997).
./english/403.txt:79:‘to obtain accurate information on a given situation and then circulate it widely’; to facilitate ‘the circulation of interpretation and evaluation’ of such information through ‘discussion and debate’, so as to enable ‘various kinds of off-line activities’. Just the same, perhaps Har and Hutnyk (1999) are correct in arguing that more thought needs to be paid to our understandings of the nature of information itself. After all, the standard metaphor of the communication of information via value-free ‘conduits’ (Day 2001a: 38-46) is unable to grasp that
./english/405.txt:26:Besides providing an open space for the articulation of common action, the editions of the WSF have been important laboratories of social science, where theories of transformation are being constantly re-elaborated. This power plant of ideas has at least two remarkable characteristics. It puts all emancipatory streams into contact with each other. Marxisms, Gandhiism, feminism, liberation Christianity, Gaia theories, thirdworldism, humanism, and others all dialogue and enrich each other constantly. They are present, as theoretical influences, in the self-organised activities during the Forums, where more and more we see the common factor is the meeting of participants from diverse countries and cultures. But this is exactly the second relevant idea: the debate of ideas does not happen only at an academic level, or within political parties. The Forum breaks barriers between intellectuals and activists. Intellectuals of international importance and leaders of different
./english/405.txt:27:political streams debate, as every other participant, in the same environment, where there are no pre-established truths or leaders.
./english/408.txt:8:But there are other signs of success. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize-winner, chairman of Clintons Council of Economic Advisers and ex-chief economist of the World Bank, came to Bombay to outline the case for a more humane and regulated capitalism on the same platform as the Indian Marxist economist Prathap Patnaik, who lucidslu argued that capitalism cant be reformed, the great critic of imperialism Samir Amin, and two socialist activists, Dita Sari from Indonesia and Trevor Ngwane of South Africa. That a former senior US official came to debate with us is a real tribute to the movements power.
./english/408.txt:12:But what light did the Bombay Forum throw on the development of the global movement? First of all, the long-standing debate over the relationship between social movements and political parties was given a different modulation. In Porto Alegre the presence of the Workers Party (PT) was so all-informing that it could be taken for granted (Olivio Dutra, one of the founders of the Brazilian Forum and now Minister of the Cities in Lulas government, represented the PT in Bombay). India has the largest Communist movement in the world - two mass parliamentary parties, the quasi-Maoist Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India (pro-Moscow in the days of the USSR), plus various Marxist-Leninist (M-L) organizations that often lead very large and militant movements in different parts of the country. The WSF couldnt have happened in India without the support of
./english/408.txt:30:Beyond that, the existence of various activists assemblies is a consequence of the principle that the Forum as a space that doesnt take decisions. I think that this is a piece of metaphysics that may have helped to bring together very different forces together in the initial phases of the WSF but that doesnt make much sense now. Pace Whittaker and Cassen, the Forums live through the interplay between all the debates, seminars, workshops etc that they offer a roof to and the movements and the calls to action to which they give rise. Rather than making a fetish of organizational norms devised at a much earlier phase of the movement of movements development, we should be looking for ways that promote this interplay while maintaining our unity.
./english/408.txt:32:Much more could be said about all this, since it reflects the debates going on among activists and intellectuals involved in both the WSF and the ESF processes (and elsewhere as well, for all I know). But I want to conclude by emphasizing just what a stunning success the Bombay WSF was and by thanking all those responsible. They have thrown down a huge challenge to themselves to capitalize on their own achievement, and they have set a new standard for the rest of us to aim at.
./english/409.txt:67:With a sweeping new round of WTO negotiations set for the fall, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) being negotiated in April, these questions about process are suddenly urgent. How do we determine whether the goal is to push for "social clauses" on labor and environmental issues in international agreements or to try to shoot down the agreements altogether? This debate--academic at previous points because there was so much resistance to social clauses from business--is now very real. US industry leaders, including Caterpillar and Boeing, are actively lobbying for the linking of trade with labor and environmental clauses, not because they want to raise standards but because these links are viewed as the key to breaking the Congressional stalemate over fast-track trade negotiating authority. By pushing for social clauses, are unions and environmentalists unwittingly helping the advancement of these negotiations, a process that will also open the door to privatization !
./english/409.txt:70:There is a serious debate to be had over strategy and process, but its difficult to see how it will unfold without bogging down a movement whose greatest strength so far has been its agility. Anarchist groups, though fanatical about process, tend to resist efforts to structure or centralize the movement. The International Forum on Globalization--the brain trust of the North American side of the movement--lacks transparency in its decision-making and isnt accountable to a broad membership. Meanwhile, NGOs that might otherwise collaborate often compete with one another for publicity and funding. And traditional membership-based political structures like parties and unions have been reduced to bit players in these wide webs of activism.
./english/417.txt:124:- There has been a separation of issues form each other, and almost no transversal debate took
./english/417.txt:125:place, strategic debate happened as a representation of positions not as a debate
./english/417.txt:150:-> Transversal debates should be arranged so that people meet and talk who wouldn’t do so
./english/417.txt:216:Forum as a place for societal debates allowed especially interesting debates on migration and
./english/417.txt:239:cal debate and steps to realize campaigns
./english/417.txt:248:-> The networks have to be willing to debate with other groups
./english/417.txt:259:-> EPA should be used for political debates and real open analysis
./english/417.txt:269:-> Participation in debate needs to be encouraged, public debate as well as small group dis-
./english/417.txt:274:-> Thus, the debate about alternative strategies have to be strengthened; networks don’t own
./english/417.txt:276:and how much space should be given to overall debate.
./english/417.txt:330: Transversal debates should be arranged so that people meet and talk who wouldn’t do
./english/417.txt:336: For following EPA’s a slot should be reserved on Friday for serious political debate
./english/417.txt:340: Participation in debate needs to be encouraged, public debate as well as small group
./english/417.txt:360: should be given to networks and how much space should be given to overall debate.
./english/417.txt:372: to be outlined, in which smaller projects can be realized. The debate about alternative
./english/417.txt:374: Debates on migration and social issues have to be strengthened
./english/419.txt:19:IG. 16. There is not enough debates on Europe / European Union political strategies
./english/419.txt:31:IM. 11. Need to better prepare the seminars and self-managed areas, too many repetitions, no space for debate for the people participating, too little space for the assembly f the movements and to prepare actions at the ESF and between one and an other ESF
./english/419.txt:32:IM. 12. Increase interactivity of the debates
./english/419.txt:33:IM. 13. Debates must be centred on actions
./english/419.txt:34:IM. 14. How to make debates accessible immediately after ESF
./english/419.txt:44:IE. 6. Not yet a space during the EPAs to debate on European political issues, to confront different point of views, co-ordinate campaign and actions
./english/419.txt:78:PE. 5. We need rules for the debates in the meetings and facilitators have to ask for the respect of them (time to speak, repetitions, out of agenda…..)
./english/470.txt:75:The issues raised above and many more that other participants no doubt have on their minds must be explored and debated. New ideas need to be put forth, evaluated, refined, and implemented. Here are ten thoughts that may have some merit--but whether they do or not, certainly changes must be made.
./english/471.txt:8:They came, most evidently, to protest against the failure of neo-liberal globalisation to provide equitable and sustainable development, and to debate alternatives. The forum – in the 1,200-plus public meetings, seminars and workshops organised by movements from India and abroad – had, as its overarching themes, discussion of the forces that disfigure humanity: patriarchy, racism, caste-ism, religious sectarianism, and militarism.
./english/471.txt:10:These discussions voiced a rich variety of views from the environmental, women’s, tribal, indigenous peoples’, workers’, peasants’ and other movements, and diverse intellectual and political tendencies. Such a plurality is built into the forum and its charter, in the form of the concept of an ‘open space’ that encourages contending opinions to debate and exchange experiences. This space includes those figures (like Joseph Stiglitz and Mary Robinson) who want a reformed liberal model to replace the neo-liberal ‘Washington consensus’ that dominates the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the OECD; and more radical critics who seek anti-capitalist alternatives (like Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin and Walden Bello).
./english/471.txt:23:Yet it is precisely the combination of shared concern and frank discussion of these complexities by major intellectuals, leaders of mass movements and activists – in audiences large and small, from 50 to 50,000 – that makes the World Social Forum unique. This is the WSF’s strength and the reason why it will endure: a commitment to democratic debate founded on diversity and openness, and a recognition of the responsibility of intellectuals to question received wisdom from whatever source.
./english/472.txt:4:The size and diversity of the yearly World Social Forum are at the same time its strengths and its limitations. The Forum provides an opportunity to exchange and debate local and global strategies for social justice, but the realities of the Forum itself give rise to its own internal structural debates.
./english/472.txt:15:Economic inequality features prominently in the discussions and debates. The Forum provides participants a chance to discuss strategies and programs for collective action. Against the belief in the free market prevailing in official circles, they seek to formulate a new discourse that will help them recover the ideological offensive. Rejecting Margaret Thatcher’s oft-repeated injunction that “there is no alternative” to transnational capitalism, the Forum’s slogan insists that “Another World is Possible.”
./english/472.txt:48:After the 2003 Social Forum, many of those who had celebrated it for the first two years began to complain that the WSF was not living up to its promise to serve as a model of democratic organization. Indeed, the forum now contends with four big issues of internal debate: internal democracy, political action, global vs. local struggles and class inequality. The first two issues have been debated extensively in the forum’s councils and on the Internet. The latter two have not been so openly recognized.
./english/472.txt:54:The debate over internal democracy has largely occurred among the participants from the North, or those exposed to the debate through their international NGO network connections. It does not much affect the thousands of participants who come from smaller grassroots organizations or who simply show up on their own. Those who come moved by a single issue can give their presentations, compare notes with others who share their concerns and be satisfied. In this way, what goes on in the small workshops and in the corridors is far more important to them than the decisions made ahead of time or the large plenaries. And those who come on their own, of whom there are many, come primarily as consumers of information. They rarely seek to influence structural decisions.
./english/472.txt:56:Along with the issue of internal democracy, the Forum debates the strategic issue of its external projection: whether it can take concerted political action as a body. The Charter adopted in 2001 ruled out joint action, but many participants, including many on the International Council, want the Forum to propose and undertake worldwide political action. The political moderates, however, especially those within the NGO community, value the Forum as an opportunity for international networking and the exchange of ideas. They do not want the forum to go beyond its provision of a “space”: it should be a talking shop for civil society and should steer clear of political intervention.
./english/472.txt:66:These distinctions are visibly present at the conference. In 2003 name tags clearly labeled people in bold capital letters as “invitees,” “delegates” (those who had registered in the name of an organization) or “participants.” Invitees enjoyed a VIP lounge, while mere participants were excluded from some sessions. And most of the leadership and the visible speakers are from the white, northern (mainly European) left elite, with the debates disproportionately reflecting their issues.
./english/472.txt:72:In any case, the debates are mostly waged not at the Forum itself but in print and on the Internet before and afterward. Most participants don’t have to choose. They are happy to live the exhilarating experience of global solidarity, tangible in their interaction with others from around the world. They return home ready to fight against war and imperialism, energized to carry on the fight for social justice and popular sovereignty in their communities and in their countries.
./english/474.txt:4:The debate on whether the World Social Forum (WSF) should remain merely a space for reflection and protest or should move on to proposals for concrete action once again emerged at the sixth edition of the annual global civil society meet, taking place in the Venezuelan capital this week.
./english/474.txt:12:The debate on whether or not the Forum should move towards action is taking place this week in a country whose government proclaims itself to be revolutionary and on the path to a still-undefined "21st century socialism", and whose leader, Chávez, has been an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy.
./english/475.txt:6:This note is to ask some hard questions about the World Social Forum, with the aim of raising some debate on it in the run-up to the world meetings that are coming up later this month. I ask these questions in the assumption of agreement that the World Social Forum, with all its limitations, is still a significant world institution, in terms of world politics and even more so in terms of civil politics, and that it is something that we need to understand and critically engage with as it evolves.
./english/475.txt:12:The step, of moving from single-centric Fora to polycentric ones, is as a step in the development of the World Social Forum - as important as the holding of the Forum outside Brazil and in Mumbai, India, in January 2004. But given this significance, and behind this the significance of the World Social Forum as an emerging world institution and as an institution of civil politics, it is important, and perhaps of no small interest, that there is hardly any debate about the polycentric Forum, either as individual meetings or as a collective. Even on the official WSF website, in its Library of Alternatives, there are only two articles and then too, the two are both in Spanish, despite the fact that the three Fora are being held in
./english/475.txt:17:But within this context, there is also a need to carefully look at and debate certain specific patterns and questions :
./english/476.txt:14:But there were problems. The three biggest ones were: (1) a tension between those who insisted on retaining the formula of an open forum and those who wished to see the WSF become a "movement of movements," perhaps eventually another "International"; (2) an inadequate degree of participation from Asia, Africa, and east-central Europe; (3) debates about the internal structure and the funding of the WSF - how democratic and how independent was it as a structure? All three problems were tested at the Mumbai meeting, the first to be held other than in Porto Alegre.
./english/476.txt:24:The WSF will return to Brazil in 2005 and is planning to go to Africa in 2006. Finally, the internal structure of the WSF was a subject openly debated. An international council had been founded in 2002, with some 150 members, all co-opted. It is broadly representative, but certainly not elected. For were it to be elected, the WSF would become a hierarchical structure. But is this "democratic"? The international council makes real decisions - where the meetings are held, who will speak at the plenary sessions (the "stars"), and who may or may not be excluded from attendance. To be sure, most of the sessions are organized from the bottom up. In Mumbai, there were 50 or so such simultaneous "seminars" at every meeting-time, all in effect autonomous. In the sessions analyzing the structure of the WSF, the push was for more openness of decision-making. And all this, without turning the WSF into a hierarchical structure. Not easy, but at least publicly debated.
./english/477.txt:10:But there were problems. The three biggest ones were: (1) a tension between those who insisted on retaining the formula of an open forum and those who wished to see the WSF become a "movement of movements," perhaps eventually another "International"; (2) an inadequate degree of participation from Asia, Africa, and east-central Europe; (3) debates about the internal structure and the funding of the WSF - how democratic and how independent was it as a structure? All three problems were tested at the Mumbai meeting, the first to be held other than in Porto Alegre.
./english/477.txt:20:Finally, the internal structure of the WSF was a subject openly debated. An international council had been founded in 2001, with some 150 members, all co-opted. It is broadly representative, but certainly not elected. For were it to be elected, the WSF would become a hierarchical structure. But is this "democratic"? The international council makes real decisions - where the meetings are held, who will speak at the plenary sessions (the "stars"), and who may or may not be excluded from attendance. To be sure, most of the sessions are organized from the bottom up. In Mumbai, there were 50 or so such simultaneous "seminars" at every meeting-time, all in effect autonomous. In the sessions analyzing the structure of the WSF, the push was for more openness of decision-making, a way for participants to have input on the decisions. And all this, without turning the WSF into a hierarchical structure. Not easy, but at least publicly debated.
./english/485.txt:4:After the conclusion of the fourth WSF, held in India, the authors debate the politics about the open space that took place in Mubai and reflect about the importance of a geographical changing in this edition. They conclude the article saying that the changes show that the Forum is a process in a constant and growing movement
./english/486.txt:4:The author considers about WSF saying that it is vital to the creation of a global politic culture that is open to debates and alternatives planning. She also says that the Forum’s perspective changes at each angle, meaning that each one sees it according to their perceptions.
./english/500.txt:44:''There should be more debates on issues and some level of calls or statements that people can sign on after such forums,'' she said, adding that there could be a need for some kind of structure.
./english/502.txt:26:Besides providing an open space for the articulation of common action, the editions of the WSF have been important laboratories of social science, where theories of transformation are being constantly re-elaborated. This power plant of ideas has at least two remarkable characteristics. It puts all emancipatory streams into contact with each other. Marxisms, Gandhiism, feminism, liberation Christianity, Gaia theories, thirdworldism, humanism, and others all dialogue and enrich each other constantly. They are present, as theoretical influences, in the self-organised activities during the Forums, where more and more we see the common factor is the meeting of participants from diverse countries and cultures. But this is exactly the second relevant idea: the debate of ideas does not happen only at an academic level, or within political parties. The Forum breaks barriers between intellectuals and activists. Intellectuals of international importance and leaders of different
./english/502.txt:27:political streams debate, as every other participant, in the same environment, where there are no pre-established truths or leaders.
./english/512.txt:28:This proposal however corresponds to a way of doing politics that is different from what is experienced at the WSF as an “open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action” (2), according to the specific nature of each struggle and the type of action of each leading participant.
./english/512.txt:58:The first of these challenges arises out of the actions of those who are being called “intellectuals”, and who are invited to conferences and debates; the second stems from the so-called Assembly of Social Movements, which, at the close of the Forums, puts out appeals for mobilization in the struggle against neoliberalism and at times holds demonstrations that make its presence and strength more visible.
./english/512.txt:69:The Bandung Conference, in the struggle for economic and political independence for Third World countries, was a conference of heads of state, not of peoples – even though the former may present themselves as representatives of the latter. Its proposal thus presupposes that everything depends on governments, and that real action for change depends on taking political power. Now that is a hotly debated issue in the WSF process, which is a space for peoples to interrelate through their organisations. In that respect, the initiative taken at Bamako adds to one of the challenges coming from outside the Forum, that is, the endeavour to increase governments’ presence in its actions. Caracas offered na unparalleled opportunity to gain a vigorous ally: President Chavez, who is notorious combatant in the anti-imperialist cause, and presented by some at “the leader we were needing”.
./english/513.txt:8:The Forum was born robust, heir of historical struggles while combing new, emerging and fertile ideas, critical thinking, proposals and actions for change. By being an original, heterogeneous world-wide open space, the Forum had the virtue of enabling a great confluence and of encouraging the re-emergence of a collective awareness that changes are possible and viable, so setting off a process of inexhaustible transforming potential. Its ebullient rhythm has been such that the abundant initiatives, ideas and proposals seen over these past five, short years have produced enough material for hundreds of debates.
./english/513.txt:16:This issue is precisely one of the vital issues of debate on the Forum’s future, and is inextricably linked to its original goal of fighting neo-liberal globalisation and attempts to consolidate that struggle.
./english/513.txt:28:For some the Forum can be a permanent annual meeting point, a type of “fair of alternatives” where year after year a multiplicity of expressions, ideas and proposals are show-cased, after which everyone goes home, in some cases with a feeling that having participated in the debates and activities is per se a way of contributing towards change; others will return home dissatisfied about the gap between this reality and their expectations of moving on in the urgent task of transforming things by developing concrete proposals and actions, here and now.
./english/513.txt:35:The Forum can be what it already is and be much more besides, all of which is important and transcendental; but, we insist, its central challenge must be to follow through on the main purpose of its original convocation: resistance to neo-liberal globalisation. This can hardly be achieved by staging “a fair of alternatives” or an agenda of debates, nor by calling for mobilisations on unconnected issues; neither can it be achieved through methodological experiments for improving the Forum event, whose concretion is not unrelated to intra-Forum economic and power relations. While this goes on, the existing Neo-liberal model will quietly continue to consolidate.
./english/513.txt:44:The frequency of the Forum’s meetings is also under debate; its analysis alludes to different notions of time in the world. There is no single time; different civilisations, cultures, and even our movements and processes which are part of this process, have different concepts of time. To standardise timing and periodicity under a succession of events contradicts the Forum's pluralistic principles.
./english/513.txt:46:In fact, within the rhythms of the Forum, there is the time-frame of the events, that of struggles, of practices and of debates, which are all inter-related. The challenge lies in how to combine the timing of the processes of struggle with that of the Forum events; in how to avoid an imbalance, where the timing of the events affects that of struggles. On the contrary, they should contribute to strengthening them, taking into account that they have their own specific terrain and agendas.
./english/519.txt:28:In Bamako, the African edition of the polycentric Forum has, for the first time, introduced com-pletely the self-organized dynamics, which characterizes the Forum’s format within the continent. Ten thousand people participated in the event and hundreds of activities took place, it was a suc-cessful process, assembling the entirety of debates on pan-African tradition and its renewal and also many questions that are strongly present in the continent – from the free trade impact to Aids, from migrations to the role of international agencies. The Forum also witnessed an important effort to re-cover the anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and socialist tradition, inherited from Bandung – a seminar stimulated by Samir Amin, right before the Forum, debated the non-aligned movement’s legacy, which was born in April 1955, in Indonesia. Bamako demonstrated an improvement of the WSF process in the continent and sealed a promising direction towards Nairobi 2007.
./english/519.txt:32:The Caracas Forum was also influenced by the Evo Morales’ electoral victory in Bolivia, which is a result of the indigenous peoples’ long insurrection in that country – and the indigenous issue was a very strong point in the event. Chavez tried to capitalize the Forum taking place in Venezuela – as Lula had done in Porto Alegre, in that case to try to justify the idea of not having an alternative to neo liberalism – strengthening his presence on the continental scene as well as straiten Caracas’ re-lationship with movements from the region. This transformed the way social movements, political parties and government relate to each other in terms of an important matter regarding the Forum and has given a new value to the debate on the state-power issue.
./english/519.txt:40:Now, in Caracas, Chavez asserted – as Lula had done before, almost in the same terms, through the newspapers, before the 2005 Forum, concerning the campaign against hunger – that “a forum which does not come up with conclusions is a waste of time and will end up being a tourist fair”. As for the debates in Brazil, this same position has been reinforced by people from different positions within the left wing spectrum, from Emir Sader to the congressman Babá.
./english/519.txt:50:Some IC members see the WSF as a possible new historical subject of the 21st century’s struggle for emancipation. They think of its constitution as a similar one to the 20th century’s internationals. But the subjects (plural) of contemporary people’s struggle have already shown themselves at the WSF, uniting in a flexible manner, up to the extent in which their political understanding points to this direction. Institutionalizing the WSF as “the” subject, allowing the space to debate and articu-late in overlap with its actors, would prevent these subjects from developing, whereas these subjects should be strengthened, by getting closer to a wider number of struggles and regional, national and local movements.
./english/519.txt:73:If the leftist governments ought to be defended from the imperialist ag-gressions, we should also learn with the “real socialism” collapse and emphasize the fragility of so-cial change processes whose focus is unilaterally the state machine — and this fragility became clear to many Caracas Forum participants. This should not be seen as an antagonistic critic to the Bolivarian Revolution, but as a part of a dialogue that tries to contribute to the improvement of this process. This is the same kind of criticism that many components of the WSF process have made to castrism, from the leftist point of view, what we, the Latin American people do emphasize stressing the difficult conditions imposed by the imperialistic enclosure to the Havana regime and the Cuba people heroic resistance — approach that usually leftist sectors from outside the continent take as condescendence. On the other hand, the concrete problems of revolutionary processes in progress stimulate the debate within the WSF on the political power and the State as a changing element to-wards another world.
./english/519.txt:88:- advancing in the debates on strategies to implement our alternatives;
./english/522.txt:32:Fourth element of success, the presence of youth and the return of politics. Hundreds of youth, particularly from Karachi, participated in the forum as volunteers. For many among them, it was their first political experience - sometimes a little disconcerting, it seems, because of the changes of programme. More generally, the forum allowed a reaffirmation of the authenticity of the political terrain in the face of the military regime which sterilises it in the name of the imperatives of national security and faced with the fundamentalist movements which sterilise it in the name of religious imperatives. The forum has reopened the debate on the place of politics and it is not the least of its results.
./english/524.txt:16:In the development debate in Bamako, world trade was not high on the agenda, perhaps not surprising for a continent that has seen its share decline from 4% in the colonial era to not more than 2% today. Yet, there was a strong demand for genuine
./english/527.txt:14:The World Social Fora clearly are a formula for success. More than one hundred thousand participants in 2005 in Porto Alegre. Twenty to thirty thousand participants in Bamako in 2006. More than sixty thousand participants in Caracas. In Karachi, the forum had to be postponed because of the earth quake end of 2005. There clearly is a growing demand of such meetings, especially by young people who want more debates and more campaigns. The media however, do not follow. They are more interested in colourful festivals and in violence. They are the ones who are saying and writing that the fora have no future. In Caracas, very little media attention was given to the WSF, and most were dismissing this meeting in ‘Chavez country’.
./english/527.txt:28:Houtart’s dichotomy, then, is very useful to bring some clarity in the debates on the forum, but it is clearly not complete. Moreover, many movements have completely different objectives. The best example comes from the advocates of an ecologically sustainable development that very often go beyond the anti- or post-capitalist dividing line. This certainly is one of the weakest spots in the WSF, since there surely are very interesting analysis of all that goes wrong in our environment, but no one apparently can or dares to say how the rich countries of the North have to change their non-sustainable production and consumption patterns. Debates are organised on the privatisation of water, on the rights of indigenous peoples and on the ecological debt, but only very rarely on how the rich have to change. Little attention is paid to the dividing lines within these movements. Some are clearly post-modernists, condemning all ideas about progress and advocating a totally different development. Others are more or less openly and consciously anti-modernists, believing only in small scale economies, autarky and self-management.
./english/527.txt:30:The WSF lacks a comprehensive analysis of all different ideological stands. Certainly it has to remain an open space for debates and for networking, but that can be facilitated when everyone knows where he or she stands. Today, there are too many contradictions that are never discussed. To take just one example from my own movement, Attac. Attac is a progressive global movement, most of us support the Bolivarian revolution of Chavez, we are more post-capitalist than neokeynesian, but many do support the neoliberal poverty reduction policies of the millennium development goals, as well as the demand for an air ticket tax. This tax is not in line with our demand for a currency transaction tax that would slow down financial speculation.
./english/527.txt:36:Mostly, a rather negative analysis is made of national states, political parties and representative democracy. Though few seminars of the WSF are discussing these points, they permanently influence debates on what is possible within the WSF and what is not.
./english/527.txt:38:No one will disagree on the need for more participatory democracy. However, the question on how and if movements can ally with politicians and/or political parties is much more difficult to answer. The WSF in Caracas was a case in point, since many observers and participants feared that Chavez would try to appropriate the forum. There was quite some resistance against a possible funding of the WSF by the Venezuelan government. Civil society, it was said, has to be autonomous and cannot work with governments. This debate was sharpened by a letter from Chico Whitacker, one of the Brazilian founders of the Forum. Because of the corruption within Brazilian politics, he dismissed from the PT (Worker’s Party) and fiercely defends a politisation of society, without political parties.
./english/527.txt:40:This debate was highly favoured by the ‘horizontalists’ who believe in a self-managed and autonomous movement. Horizontalists look at states and political parties as parts of the oppressive system of capitalism. The hierarchies they conceal are said to be hindering the emancipation of people and thus have to be dismantled.
./english/527.txt:56:This is the background against which debates on the strategy of the movement take place. It is not an easy situation, since the dividing lines concerning content and process do not run in parallel. It means that some radical democrats and horizontalists can be found with the neokeynesianists and with the post-capitalists. Those who are promoting sustainable development are to be found with the advocates of strong states and with the defenders of local autonomy.
./english/527.txt:72:Once again, this has stirred a huge debate. The movements that made the proposal are being blamed for trying to impose a single programme to the movement. Their answer is a denial. Everything seems to depend on the interpretation one gives to the ‘historical subject’ they see emerging from the collective conscience that the WSF is building. Most probably, the traditional Marxist terminology that is used in the text is what disturbs most people. Samir Amin pretends that a new era of socialism is now beginning. In the same way, in Caracas, Chavez gave a new interpretation to ‘Socialism or death’. According to the Venezuelan president, we have no choice but to introduce socialism if we want to avoid that the environmental degradation kills us all.
./english/527.txt:76:The authors of the ‘Appeal of Bamako’ are also being blamed for not understanding the dynamics of the forum. They underestimate the importance of democratic processes. Last year’s text, the ‘consensus of Porto Alegre’ certainly was no consensus, but it was a clear and short document. Why has no one tried to organise a debate around it? This could have led to a new document in 2006. Now, movements are asked to sign the ‘Appeal of Bamako’, without any possibility of participation in the drafting of the text and without any possibility to amend it. This clearly is an old-fashioned top-down approach that is difficult to accept. Moreover, in Caracas the text was presented in a seminar by seven gentlemen – not one single woman – and again without any possibility for the audience to discuss it. The WSF deserves better than this hierarchical way of doing.
./english/527.txt:94:Thirdly, the WSF should organise debates on the real relevant issues for ‘another world’. Most seminars in Caracas or Porto Alegre do not directly touch these issues. I think of ecologically sustainable development, pluralism and diversity, global democracy, social justice, global public goods, global taxes, etc. If there are no movements to propose activities on these issues, the WSF can co-manage them. Some topics could even be prepared during the year with a call for written contributions or electronic debates. In that way, the WSF could be an opportunity to present and check the results. It could lead directly to more practical proposals.
./english/527.txt:96:Finally, it could be interesting to try and make a synthesis of all debates. Concerning the most relevant issues for ‘another world’, most things have been said or have been written, but no one ever tried to bring all ideas together into a coherent programme. Who can pretend that no consensus will ever be possible at all? And if we do not need a blueprint for one specific type of world, why not three, four or five different programmes that can be discussed within the open space the WSF can continue to be? This does not conflict with the principles of the charter. It could significantly improve the convergence and the strength of the movement.
./english/532.txt:99:To examine how much this ‘pretence’ is the rule within the social movement is beyond the scope of this piece. But what is clear is that each of the five characteristics of ‘openness’ described above, when subjected to scrutiny, reveal themselves as extremely compromised. The details, for example, of meetings and discussions are published and circulated, but this information is primarily received by those who are able (and often privileged to be able) to connect to certain (technological/social) networks. Likewise, the language of a ‘call’ or equivalent can determine whether a party will feel comfortable or suitable to respond to it: like PGA’s ‘hallmarks’, language and phraseology is a point of ‘soft control’, but not one that is openly discussed and studied. Furthermore, meetings may be ‘open to all’, but they can quickly become hostile environments for parties who do not or cannot observe the ‘basic’ consensus that is often tacitly agreed between long-term actors in a particular scene. This peer consensus can indeed, on occasion, so determine the movement’s ‘open’ decision-making process as to turn it into a war of attrition on difference, with divergent points of view gradually giving themselves up to peer opinion as the ‘debate’ wears on and on. The ‘block’ or ‘veto’ is in fact rarely used because of the peer pressure placed on those who would use it (‘Aw, come on, you’re not going to block, are you?’ – a common enough plaint at movement meetings). In some cases the apparently neutral ‘moderator’ role can also become bizarrely instrumentalised, giving rise to the sensation that ‘something has already been decided’, and that the meeting is just for performative purposes.
./english/534.txt:10:The Venezuela forum (also known as the second Americas Social Forum, after a similar hemispheric meeting in Quito, Ecuador two years earlier) began on January 24 with a massive rally through the streets of the capital city, Caracas. Over the next five days, delegates gathered in approximately 2000 workshops, panels, and sessions to discuss and debate a wide variety of social, economic, and political issues.
./english/534.txt:20:Holding the forum in Venezuela was controversial, and reflects long debates within the forum over the relationship between civil society and party politics. On one hand, Hugo Chavez's government is engaging in a process of social change in line with the goals of the WSF. As such, Caracas was a logical venue for a debate on how to construct a better world. On the other hand, from the beginning, the WSF was designed to be an expression of civil society that explicitly rejected the participation of political parties, armed groups, and statist solutions. These debates over the role of state structures in fostering social justice have long run through the political left, these debates within the WSF are only its most recent manifestation.
./english/534.txt:28:Chavez argued that the forum should take advantage of its momentum and build a political struggle, and that it is important to support governments like that of recently elected Evo Morales in Bolivia. He noted that the concrete advances in Venezuela would not have been possible without taking political power. Some participants resented Chavez injecting himself into one of the key debates in the forum; Chavez, however, argued that even if he were not president he would still be present, advancing these ideas. He stated, "I am just one more person like the rest of you in forum."
./english/535.txt:20:The organizers of the WSF provided some statistical information from last year’s forum in Porto Alegre to help us better understand who participates in the forum and why. They found that 49.8% of the people at the WSF said the reason they attended was for the exchange of experience among the participants. 47.9% attended because they wanted to contribute towards a fairer society. 42.4% came for the democratic debate of ideas and 20.6% came to contribute towards the formulation of alternative proposals to the neoliberal model.
./english/548.txt:9:With the slogan “another world is possible,” the forum is filled with speakers, workshops, panels, debates, marches, and cultural events. The forum provides an open platform for activists to discuss strategies of resistance to globalization and to present constructive alternatives. Although hardly known or recognized in the United States, the World Social Forum has quickly grown into the most dynamic and important political event in the world.
./english/548.txt:11:The WSF has grown so large that it becomes impossible for one person to comprehend the scope and extent of activities carried out under its umbrella. Activists use this meeting to debate many different proposals and to launch various campaigns and actions. For example, a new campaign for a Currency Transactions Tax (CTT) attempts to stop currency speculation and redirect funds toward economic development.
./english/549.txt:43:Further reforms, as in reforming the existing framework - or transformations, as in setting up something new - would then have to be prioritised following careful analysis on the state of our world. Not surprisingly, during the latest World Social Forum meeting in Porto Alegre in January 2005, 19 members of the International Council of the World Social Forum launched a 'Porto Alegre Manifesto'. The manifesto 'calls for agreement among WSF participants on a clear set of goals for world economic reform', much in line with the reforms and transformations listed above. The 'Porto Alegre Manifesto' was much criticized for the procedures according to which it was presented; all initial signatories are male, there is not much representation from younger of women's groups etc. But interestingly, as I gather, the content has not been much focus of the debate. Have you heard, or perhaps presented yourselves, comments regarding the substance of the Manifesto?
./english/553.txt:209:· What governance model is promoted when corporations from the EU or outside have privileged access to influence policy, but with no public debate?
./english/553.txt:219:We would like to invite all progressive forces in Europe and internationally, all our allies working in farmers’, workers’, consumer, women’s, environment, development and public services networks, to join us in the analysis of the EU’s trade policy and its assault on the vast majority of people and the environment. We would like to invite all these forces to prepare a space that allows us to start a Europe-wide debate for spring 2007 and to discuss how we can work together to resist this aggressive agenda and to work for alternatives that are based on human rights, solidarity and sustainable economic activity.
./english/565.txt:192:publicised, debated and fought about for years, by webs of collectives,
./english/565.txt:337:discussions, debates and practical workshops. This was to be the first
./english/565.txt:754:such as concerts, benefit parties for political causes, debates,
./english/566.txt:17:At Google, we seek that advantage. The ongoing debate about whether
./english/569.txt:13:Two issues are involved here. One is the question of principle. In our view it was a mistake to impose a ban on parties, since political organizations are inextricably intermingled with social movements and articulate different strategies and visions that are a legitimate contribution to the debates that take place in the social forums. In fact, the Porto Alegre Charter has always been circumvented, but the Lula rally has made the resulting hypocrisy absolutely flagrant. It would surely be more honest to amend or scrap this tattered ban. 1
./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/569.txt:31:4, It would be a mistake to make too much of these weaknesses. The 5th WSF was the occasion for many successes. The Anti-War Assembly, for example, marked a real step forward in cooperation among activists from different parts of the world. An alliance of environmental groups managed to launch a much needed week of action against climate change from Porto Alegre. No doubt other thematic assemblies and networks were able to take initiatives, though the general fragmentation makes it hard to tell. The final Assembly of the Social Movements, though regrettably not publicized in the WSF Programme, did provide a real sense of diverse activists converging together on a common agenda of struggles. And there were, as far as we know, some good debates.
./english/569.txt:33:And we should acknowledge that some of the difficulties are a product of political disagreements. The giant meeting that Hugo Chávez addressed towards the end of the Forum was a rallying point for the anti-imperialist left, and as such a tacit answer to the Lula rally earlier on - the implicit confrontation between the two leaders was underlined by the fact that both spoke to equally packed meetings in the same Gigantinho Stadium. We need to continue to have forums and mobilizations where the followers of Lula and Chávez - as well as those of us who have reservations about Chávez too - can comfortably work together and debate.
./english/571.txt:17:Some of the main challenges concern Article 6 of the Charter, even if it is seldom explicitly mentioned in the debates. According to the Article, “the meetings of the WSF do not deliberate on behalf of the WSF as a body… The participants in the Forum shall not be called on to take decisions as a body”. In practice, this has meant that the WSF as a body never made a declaration, for example, against the war in Iraq. According to many of its “founding fathers”, such as Chico Whitaker, making a declaration against the war would have been a violation of the Charter of Principles (4). The issue was hotly debated in meetings of the WSF International Council, especially in January 2003 in Porto Alegre, but the decision was not to issue any declaration. The question was not about whether anyone present would not have been opposed to the war, it was about the concept of space that the WSF is supposed to be.
./english/571.txt:19:Many debates have been waged in and around the WSF about whether it should be considered simply a space for these movements or could it become some kind of movement of movements itself. There are many actors who would like to see the WSF evolving into a fully-fledged political movement. The idea is that this movement should make a real political difference by altering the course of globalisation. The official line in the WSF process has, however, been that political projects that go beyond the Charter of Principles can be an attribute of the organizations that take part in the WSF but never of the WSF itself.
./english/571.txt:35:There exists no clear dividing line between the “social movements” and the “non-governmental organizations”. NGOs are founded and often small, while popular movements emerge out of heterogeneous influences and actions, including those of NGOs. However, sometimes a clear-cut dichotomy between them emerges in the debates within the WSF governance bodies. In this dichotomy, the organizations recognized as “movements” are more willing to issue statements and formulate common political goals, whereas members of the constructed “NGO community” tend to be more cautious. This division has been reflected, for example in the debates on the periodicity of the main WSF events. In the meeting of the WSF International Council on 4-7 April 2004 in Passignano, Italy, the original proposal of the Brazilian Organizing Committee was that centralized world meetings of the WSF should no longer be organized on an annual basis but every two years. This position got support from some of the key social movements, and the representative of the influential Via Campesina coalition of peasants even advocated for organizing the main WSF every three years.
./english/571.txt:43:The World Social Forum has been defined as a civil society event, but there exists a considereable debate on how the limits of this civil society should be defined. Who gets in, and who stays out? If the World Social Forum is a counter-event to the World Economic Forum, in 2004 Mumbai Resistance was the counter-event’s counter-event. Mumbai Resistance was conceived as a “truly anti-imperialist” parallel event that took place next to the World Social Forum venue in Mumbai. One of the concerns of the originators of Mumbai Resistance was that the WSF is not open to “all forms of struggle”, referring to the rule, expressed in Article 9 of the Charter of Principles, that military organizations cannot participate in the WSF (9).
./english/571.txt:45:The same article of the Charter states that representatives of political parties cannot participate in the WSF either. Since the two main communist parties were visibly involved in the organization of the forum in India, this rule caused confusion. The issue had been debated in the International Council, for example in its meeting in Miami in June 2003, and an understanding was finally reached that the parties would not be formally inside the Indian Organizing Committee or other official bodies of the WSF in Mumbai, even if representations within these bodies were in many cases allocated taking party membership considerations into account.
./english/571.txt:59:While one of the main challenges of the WSF is to change the meaning of politics, debates about its relationship to present and future political parties are waged in an overwhelmingly traditional language. In the debates on the possibility of global political parties, one should be cautious about simplistic dichotomies of political party/social movement that have been reproduced and to a certain extent useful in the national contexts. It is equally important to try to avoid the reproduction of the categories of Western national politics of the late 20th century. Political parties have often been seen as an eroding institution, which has increasingly become part of the state administration.
./english/571.txt:75:The WSF V, back in Porto Alegre in January 2005 and bigger than ever before, has also received an overwhelming amount of positive commentaries, especially by people who were already articulated within the networks that constitute the “planet of Porto Alegre”. For casual observers, the event may have seemed somewhat chaotic. For those more involved in the process it was a good (even if limited) example of the methodology that emphasized constructing processes. The particular WSF events are excellent opportunities to meet and debate, but the emphasis is increasingly in the intellectual and political activities that continue all year round.
./english/571.txt:134:(9) The debate on excluding, for example, the FARC guerrillas of Colombia had taken place many times before Mumbai Resistance existed. See e.g. Valenzuela 2002.
./english/574.txt:13:The organisational methods of the Fifth World Forum itself - the way in which the activities of the forum were decided, the spatial and political relationship between the different seminars, workshops and debates during the five days of the Forum, the way the food, the waste and the architecture of the Forum was organised according to the principles of the society we are trying to create, the 35,000 strong Youth Camp at the centre of the Forum’s riverside encampment – all provided glimpses of an answer. These innovations showed that the organisers of the WSF are trying to create a closer, more directly supportive and catalytic relationship with the campaigning movements and initiatives which are the source of the Forums extraordinary energy.
./english/576.txt:6:Five years ago, after the late-1999 Seattle protests but before the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, thousands of activists first converged on the city to discuss the challenges presented by the likes of Enron and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). With this year's fifth consecutive summit, the idea of holding a large, participatory people's assembly to contrast with the World Economic Forum--the exclusive annual gathering of economic elites in Davos, Switzerland--is no longer novel. The Social Forum has attracted virtually every personality from powerful heads of state to the most unencumbered of wandering counter-culturalists. It is possible that the most naive of the 155,000 who attended this year (according to organizers' counts) were those journalists who came to gape at the much-debated gathering as if it had emerged spontaneously and without precedent from the gaucho lowlands.
./english/576.txt:46:Whether these advances are sufficient to justify a trip into the Brazilian summer, or whether a manifesto is needed to save the Forum, is subject to continuing debate.
./english/576.txt:61:Stanford Professor and free software guru Laurence Lessig wrote on his blog of walking through the Youth Camp with Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil. Gil was alternately protested by angry young people demanding free radio (Gil relished the debate) and asked to perform songs from his pop opus (the whole crowd sang along). "Here's a Minister of the government, face to face with supporters and opponents," Lessig wrote. "There is no 'free speech zone.' No guns, no men in black uniform, no panic, and plenty of press. Just imagine."
./english/577.txt:4:As we walked through the venue for the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre at the banks of the Guaiba river, on January 23, it all seemed so familiar. The WSF was back in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where it had begun in 2001 and had gained strength in 2002 and 2003, after the interlude in Mumbai in 2004. But Porto Alegre 2005 could well have been Mumbai 2004. The same surging crowds – over 100,000 in number, the same cacophony of myriad voices, the same beating of drums, the same confusion, and the same determination on the faces of people who had come to celebrate protest and resistance. And the same determination with which people debated in over 2000 events, spread over four days, and organised in the sprawling venue of makeshift tents over about 4 kms of a green verge skirting the river.
./english/580.txt:9:The structure and format of the WSF 2004 was debated widely. Some of the concerns that were expressed and needed to be addressed included:
./english/580.txt:64:This format evolved over a period of time and spanned discussions within the programme group of the IOC, in the International Council and in meetings with Asian Groups. Here it may be mentioned that there was extensive debate in the IOC regarding the thematic content of the WSF organised events within the IOC. Ideally, this debate should have also been carried more extensively out in the IC and among the Asian Groups who formed the Asian Solidarity Group. That this could not happen is symptomatic of a weakness in the WSF structure, much of which also has to do with the difficulty in carrying out debates within a community that is dispersed across large distances.
./english/582.txt:22:Four areas of the Nesco Ground were transformed into debate corridors. Along them were raised the frameworks of the rooms: thin wooden logs, tied with sisal. Then , these frames were covered with cotton, to become lateral walls and ceilings. The earthen floor, almost always irregular, was covered with bags of jute. The same material was used for the “ front” - the external walls. These ones, more rigid, had the extra advantage of working also as permanent murals, where were fixed posters informing about what was being discussed inside. The organizers counted on the climate ( it almost never rains at this time of the year in Mumbai) and with the fortune ( a fire would have caused a tragedy)
./english/582.txt:24:There were 140 installations like this, and the Forum of the workshops and the seminars was as diverse, plural and colorful as those of Porto Alegre. Who walked 19th morning, along part of one of the corridors, could find debates about the increasing abortion of female embryos in India ( qualified as “ hidden femalecide”); about the international campaign against North – American bases (promoted by a 25 organizations network based in different countries); about Cordillera Peoples’ Alliance ( a Philippine woman explained, in English, that for many Asiatic communities, the concept individual, sees in each human being, a part of the community), about the new international relations system ( emerged from a refined critic about the lack of transparency and democracy in WTO, IMF and WB); about dwelling rights and livable cities ( a fiction in Mumbai), about the struggle against monarchy in Nepal ( besides the rounded faces and the hard eyes of the Nepalese, it attracted the attention the fact that they reached to understand each other, even if they were speaking so low, that many times the voices were replaced for the microphone of the room next door), about the impact of globalization among the “ untouchable” Indians ( the debates on these topics were always the most crowded and able to attract the street Forum).
./english/582.txt:32:Sony Kapoor was one of the attractions of the workshop promoted by fiscal auditors unions from Brazil and France, to debate the need of a new international financial architecture. He is, himself, a signal that the world can be changed. He is an Indian, that lives in the UK since many years, he dresses as a young British man, he uses gel to keep his hear combed upside. He worked for international investment banks in London City. He helped to fatten up huge fortunes, and to promote speculative attacks against the South countries currencies. He earned money, traveled around the world and…he got tired. Two years ago he left the market, and founded an NGO called Tobin Tax Network and he started to denounce the financial savagery in the global capitalism
./english/586.txt:6:The Mumbai WSF succeeded in demonstrating that the spirit of Porto Alegre, while being a universal aspiration, acquires specific tonalities in different regions of the globe. Its universality is actually a product of the very reach of neoliberal globalization, which subjects every region of the world to the same economic model and its consequences: deepening of social inequalities, demoralization of the state, destruction of the environment. In this sense, the choice of Mumbai as the venue of the 2004 WSF could not have been wiser. With its population of almost 15 million, Mumbai is the living symbol of the contradictions of capitalism in our time. An important financial and technological center and the site of India’s thriving film industry — Bollywood, producing more than 200 movies a year for an increasingly global audience — Mumbai is a city whose extreme poverty easily shocks western eyes. More than half of the population live in slums (roughly two million on the streets), whereas 73 percent of the families, usually large, live in one-room tenements. The recent spread of informal economy has turned 2 percent of the population into street vendors. In India, however, the struggle against this background of inequalities gains specific nuances that have left their mark on this Forum. First, on top of economic, sexual and ethnic inequalities there are caste inequalities, which, though abolished by the Constitution, continue to be a decisive factor of discrimination. The Dalits, one of the lower castes, formerly designated as the “untouchables,” made a very strong appearance at the Forum. Of the 100.000 participants, more than 20. 000 were Dalits, who saw in the Forum a unique opportunity to denounce the discrimination that victimizes them. Second, the religion factor, which in the West tends to carry less weight in view of the secularization of power, is in the East a crucial social and political factor. Religious fundamentalism — a plague all over Asia, including India itself with the increasing politicization of Hinduism — was a major topic for debate, as was the role of spirituality in the social struggles for a better world. Third, having taken place in Asia, the Forum could not help but pay special attention to the struggle for peace, not only because it is in the West Asia, from Iraq to Afghanistan, that US’s war aggression is strongest, but also because today South Asia (India and Pakistan) is a region full of nuclear weapons. Having all this in mind, the Social Movements Assembly called a world march against the war on March 20, the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Fourth, at the Mumbai WSF the western conception of ecological struggles gave way to broader conceptions, so as to include the struggle for food sovereignty, land and water, as well as the preservation of biodiversity and natural resources, and the defense of forests against agro-business and lumber industry.
./english/589.txt:179:[7] The succession issue was much debated in the 18th century, and later was a source of debate between Bakunin, Proudhon, and Marx.
./english/590.txt:22:In fact, in Mumbai many insisted on the need to arrive at concrete proposals for action, beyond the so-called intellectual discussions and debates or the actual “festivity”, a little bit too disengaged in the eyes of good militants and even beyond the demonstrations, which, voicing their demands, had multiplied in the roads on the terrain of the WSF at Mumbai. It is in fact necessary to constantly improve the “method of the WSF”. By the way, this preoccupation about the “method” is growing: on occasion of the 2004 session, a plenary session and a large seminar were dedicated to the innovation of the WSF as such, which represents a great step forward in comparison to the treatment of this topic in 2003, where only a little workshop had discussed it.
./english/594.txt:6:Generally, it was felt that the World Social Forum in India was a gathering of the “Left”, in a plural sort of way, not some neutral space for academic discussion, and for many people who attended, the open debate and shared experiences should result in some sort of action towards building a better world. The fact that it was acknowledged that it was “the Left”, is a welcome development when compared to the “peoples’ assemblies” in Thailand.
./english/594.txt:10:WITHIN THE WSF: There were differences of approach to the organisation of meetings. Large meetings with full platforms, which allowed for little if no time for any serious debate and discussion among ordinary delegates were of limited benefit. It was noticeable that one important concrete decision, the 20th March world wide action against the war, came out of a different kind of forum: the general anti-war assembly, which involved much more participation and discussion by activists. Also my experiences of excellent political debates with many Indian comrades came from meetings organised in seminar rooms by the International Socialist Tendency. I’m sure other delegates had other similar experiences.
./english/594.txt:12:REFORM VS REVOLUTION: This was very clear, say, in the debate between people like Joseph Stiglitz and Dita Sari over their attitudes to the WTO, IMF and the capitalist system as a whole.
./english/594.txt:20:Finally, what filled me with hope was the unity meeting of 45 left-wing organisations, Maoists and Trotskyists, which decided that we all need to work together in a concrete manner to contribute to a new socialist and non-sectarian world within the WSF process. One very important issue which the left must come to terms with is the attitude towards NGOs, especially in Asia. We must get away from narrow sectarianism and find ways to work with NGO activists in opposing neo-liberalism and imperialism, while at the same time never shying away from political debates. The failure of narrow sectarianism was clearly shown in the case of the isolated Mumbai Resistance 2004 which attracted a few thousand people compared to the 100,000 who attended the WSF.
./english/595.txt:20:1. The visibility and legibility of debates and proposals
./english/595.txt:22:The means for obtaining a global vision, to facilitate legibility sufficient to highlight the wealth of the debates and proposals, also remains a task on standby. Efforts have been made in the sectors of documentation and systematising the ideas formulated at the Forums since the first forum at Porto Alegre in January 2001. There is no nostalgia in this quest to keep archives on the forums. An amnesic movement is liable to become diluted, or else others will write its history. The work of archiving, documentation and systematisation is essential for emphasising the intercultural, social and political wealth contributed by the participants themselves. This effort permits proposing the new ideas and alternatives that social actors are implementing in order to respond to and overcome the policies dictated by the proponents of neo-liberal and neo-imperialist globalisation. The capacity to innovate to ensure that the programmes and methods of the forthcoming forums are genuinely original and participatory will be one of the key elements for continuing the alternative world movement.
./english/595.txt:36:To overcome this challenge, social forums and different civic movements in many regions of the world have launched wide-ranging debate on ideas and proposals. They can and must not only provide answers to these questions but also contribute towards immediately opening up new perspectives so that humanity can live in peace. This challenge has now become a question of life or death.
./english/600.txt:12:Pero hubo problemas. Los tres mayores fueron: 1) tensión entre quienes insistían en mantener la fórmula de un foro abierto y aquellos que buscaban que el FSM se volviera un "movimiento de movimientos", tal vez, algún día, otra "internacional; 2) una participación desigual de Asia, Africa y Europa central y del este; 3) debates por la estructura interna y el financiamiento del FSM, qué tan independiente y democrática era su estructura.
./english/600.txt:24:Finalmente, la estructura del FSM fue un punto debatido abiertamente. En 2002 se fundó un consejo internacional, en el que participan 150 miembros, todos nombrados. Es ampliamente representativo pero ciertamente no fueron elegidos ampliamente. Si fueran elegidos, el FSM se tornaría una estructura jerárquica. Pero, ¿es "democrática"? El consejo internacional es el que toma las decisiones reales, dónde serán las juntas, quién hablará en las plenarias (las "estrellas") y quién puede o no ser excluido de asistir. Es cierto que la mayor parte de las sesiones se organiza de abajo para arriba. En Mumbai, hubo unos 50 o más "seminarios" simultáneos en todo momento, y para todo efecto, autónomos. En las sesiones para analizar la estructura del FSM, se pujó por mayor apertura en la toma de decisiones, buscando formas para que todos los participantes tuvieron algo qué ver en las decisiones. Y todo esto, sin convertir el foro en una estructura jerárquica. Cosa nada fácil pero al menos sujeta a debate abierto.
./english/605.txt:57:This network hat introduced in Mumbai, through the hands of the French collective of sound artists Apo33, a new work instrument, a computer program based in free software, called Nômade, which allows instant digitalization of every speech (from the talker and the translations too).Therefore, each room equipped with the system Nômade has a computer net which plays different functions: voice transmission (digital or FM), storage and classifying of the debates, coordination of the translation and internet transmission of sound and video archives. In India, after problems in the first day, originated specially from improvised electrical installations, it has passed the test. That allows further Forum activities to be attended in real time by people all over the world in his language, if it is among the ones adopted for the simultaneous translation. This tool opens great possibilities to the internationalist movement.
./english/605.txt:59:From the methodological point of view, the Mumbai Forum went from a situation in which the effort of activities organization fall over Organizing Committees (OC) with support of the IC for a situation in which just a few activities are organized by the OC. Among the 48 activities organized to more than 4,000 people in WSF 2004, 13 were responsibility of the COI and 35 were “self-organized” (chosen among more than 200 submitted). Nevertheless, some of these great activities had a low quorum. The dynamism of debates were, more than in Porto Alegre, principally in medium-size activities, capable of attracting general participation, but not so big to obstruct dialogue with the present.
./english/605.txt:74:However, most revealing of the incidence of the global movement and of the WSF on the political recomposing processes, was the meeting carried out in January 20th in Mumbai among “radical” political parties (convoked by initiative of the European Meeting of Anti-Capitalist Parties and the political streams of Asia-Pacific, with highline to Indian Maoists engaged with support to Mumbai Forum. For the very first time, streams so distinct – from Trotskism to Maoism, from the official communist to the critic Marxist – met, debated the new situation of the left in the world and created a net to continue this dialogue.
./english/605.txt:76:Several of these parties have met in the IV World Parliament Forum, which had consolidated as the parallel event for the parliament members identified with the proposals debated in the Forum. The Parliament Forum has a different structure from the WSF, taking each year a final definition, sometimes after lots of polemics (such as the position about the USA attack in Afghanistan, which polarized the II WPF in the social-democrat formations and the others). This time, the debate of more united (see Final Declaration of the IV World Parliament Forum).
./english/605.txt:83:A first aspect seems clear: the Forum process has created spaces of encounter to the anti-systemic forces in the world – today fundamentally the annual Forum. In its very heart, took place lots of activities which have given consistency and motivated a common agenda of international mobilizations. The protests against war in January 15th 2003, as well as manifestations against OMC meeting in Cancún in September 13th, were focuses of debates in the WSF process in the years 2002 and 2003. And it came up from Mumbai activities a clear call for manifestations on March 20th 2004. Establishing a reference agenda for movements with capacity of militant convocation has been, in fact, the practical role of the assemblies in “World Net of Social Movements” and now also the “General Assembly of the Global Movement against War”.
./english/607.txt:8:The World Social Forum contends that, instead of ensuring even in the long run, equitable development, neoliberal globalization actually globalizes poverty and aggravates inequality and oppression. Globalization is not an alternative. Only a people-friendly, sustainable, egalitarian and secular development is possible. With the diversity and complexity of the world, no one alternative or model is feasible, which is why the discussion of many alternatives makes eminent sense.Looking to Europe, the WSF seeks allies - not only in like-minded movements but also in governments and the EU - to deal with such core issues as agricultural subsidies, intellectual property rights and trade-related investment measures. There is also a need to reform and reconsider the economic models presented by institutions such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund - which are so unfriendly to the South, to a degree protested even by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.Debate at the WSF focused on these issues and others: how much does the UN need to be changed? Is the expansion of its Security Council enough, or does the General Assembly need to be empowered so the opinion of members is not sidelined by the council? What are the specific policies and slogans that can ensure the unity of the South? How can democratic forces in the North be mobilized to support the suffering peoples of the South? Which are the most effective ways of combating religious fundamentalism and sectarianism when Muslims are being demonized in the course of the global war against terror? Can new ways of resisting militarism be more effective in isolating warmongers and replacing dominant concepts of national security and power as innovative strategies of peace?
./english/607.txt:10:The fact such issues and more were intensively debated by delegates from more than 90 countries and many political tendencies makes the WSF much more representative than the World Economic Forum to which it is in part a counterpoint. The activists and leaders represent the mass of their peoples and their aspirations far more than the finance ministers and CEOs that meet in Davos, representing the power and capital that dominates the world. The WSF is a significant effort to right this balance by facilitating dialogue and shared experience - and this was clear in Mumbai, where the poor and marginalized were present in depth.
./english/611.txt:42:Well, if the purpose of the WSF is to debate, assess, and help people utilize information - why cant the forum movement try to facilitate worthy and inspiring information flow all the time, and not only during the events? Why cant it put its weight behind aggressively supporting alternative media, on the one hand - and behind aggressively assaulting mainstream media, on the other hand?
./english/614.txt:5:The World Social Forum emerged as a result of the mobilizations against neoliberal globalization and as an international space for reflection and organization of those who oppose to neoliberal polices or are building alternatives to prioritize human development and the overcoming of market supremacy in each country and in the international relations and, at the same time, a space for the coordination of struggles and movements. Four years later, both the WSF development and the coordination of struggles and movements have put on the table the need for reflection on the WSF itself and its relation to the social movements. A reflection that, though it has been part of the debates at the International Council, has gained public projection both in the last European Social Forum and the WSF celebrated in Mumbai.
./english/614.txt:7:The debate on the Forum is part of a more general reflection on how to generate, from the common perspective of radical criticism to neoliberalism, spaces of inclusion that could be useful both to go deepen in the reflection and better definition of our critic, alternatives and strategy against the neoliberal model, and to make the WSF an useful tool to advance in the coordination among movements and struggles to oppose neoliberalism and war.
./english/614.txt:21:In this sense, the Conferences, seminars or debate panels, would have to combine both the reflection on the more actual issues or non-approached aspects of reality (such as the cast system this year…) form Forum to Forum, such as the confrontation on strategies and alternatives of the movements.
./english/614.txt:23:Because as much as we go forward in the confrontation with the system the debate on the alternatives, struggles strategies, building of alliances and form of action gains an urgency and a greater relevance; and the WSF can not turn its back on this reality. If we do not want the WSF to exhaust in a repetitive formula, its necessary that its activity is linked to the real dynamics of the social movements and social struggles and that is useful to advance in this areas.
./english/614.txt:25:Its not a matter of turning the WSF into a deliberative space that decides among options under debate, nor of approaching the alternatives elaboration through academic meetings that submit to WSF a proposal to conclude as a alternative paradigm, the “Porto Alegre consensus” against the “Washington consensus”, but that, preserving the open and plural character of the WSF, to begin a common reflection on the concrete problems that the struggle against neoliberalism and war faces and to move to the WSF the debates present in the real dynamics of the movements, as way to move forward in the building of alternatives in the distinct scales in which this movement is expressed: global and local.
./english/614.txt:35:In those countries where the social mobilizations have shaken the society the most, or the antiwar mobilizations, have put politics and the relation among the social and the political in the first place, and the relation among social movements and political parties and the institutions in the center of the debate. This is a reality to which one can not turn its back, but it’s necessary to approach it in a way that does not hurt the identity of the WSF.
./english/614.txt:43:But besides this debate, which points out to us the need to democratize the structure on which the World Social Forum is based, is the debate of periodicity. To this end, we’d like to point out that:
./english/614.txt:47:The second and still in the sense of what has been said in relation to the Forum structure, that we need to move forward towards a debate on alternatives and strategies and a more participatory Forum, that is capable of integrating new problems and issues – the ones that emerge from one edition to another, but also those that have not been approached yet –, to build such a Forum demands a previous work of articulation and elaboration that can not be accomplished in the present periodicity of the Forum.
./english/614.txt:55:Regarding the International Council that tutors the undertaking of the WSF with all the legitimacy granted by its history, it must not be converted neither in a private space of those who constitute it at the moment, nor in a closed space where what happens and what is to happen in the WSF is dissolved. Otherwise, after four years, it’s time to create spaces of democratic participation, both in the reflection on the future of the Forum (how to move forward in the consolidation of this process), and in the decision making process on the issues that affect it. And concerning these issues it results a contradiction that the social movements, who constitute the spine of the Forum, at the same time, except for some networks and some very concrete social movements (Via Campesina, World March of Women, CUT) are marginalized in these processes of refletion and decision making. Even more in moments when by the time that has passed and the consolidation of the WSF itself, its future is under debate and in which the International Council has been given executive functions that deeply contrast with its central role: to facilitate the accomplishment of the WSF and its development based on the criterias with which it has been created and respecting the Charter of Principles.
./english/614.txt:65:There are many aspects of this four years experience that would deserve a more specific approach and many others that refer to its future that would demand more time and space to be approched; in this contribution we wanted to focus on those three points that seem to us the most central to the immediate future. Knowing that the important is not much if we are right or wrong in the presented proposals, but that they contribute to promote the debate among the social movements and to succeed that it flows to the International Council and influences the future of the Forum.
./english/625.txt:8:The installations were precarious owing to restrictions on the resources used. A large fenced-in area was rented, where there was a former factory; that received wood and raw cotton partitions, earthen floors and plastic chairs. Simultaneous interpretation was provided by 180 interpreters and translators from Argentina, Brazil, India, USA, France, Spain, United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Korea and Palestine – but only at some of the major panel debates, which took place in plain cement-floored, wood-walled areas.
./english/625.txt:12:The main debates addressed directly the theme of war and peace, of US violence in Afghanistan and in Iraq - but the approach was completely different, making us realise how isolated we are in our western points of view. The war made a far greater impact on eastern peoples, because it took place right next door.... It was rather like imagining how it would have been for us if the North American invasion had happened in Argentina.
./english/625.txt:22:The Forum in India has confirmed the feeling left by Porto Alegre, that what makes the event is much more the small panel debates, workshops, debates in the corridors, sitting on the floor; the exchange of experience among the participants and the self-organized activities. At Mumbai, more than at Porto Alegre, the large conferences, led by intellectuals and internationally recognised leaders, were not very participatory, even though some did spark interesting debates.
./english/626.txt:20:From Bhopal gas victims to Hiroshima survivors, from Narmada dam oustees to North American peaceniks, from Dalits to disabled rights advocates, from South Korean socialists to South African AIDs activists, from Peruvian peasants to Pakistani anti-nuclear activists, from Brazilian landless workers to Bombay slum dwellers, from queer rights activists to child labour abolishers, from theologians to trade unionists, from feminists to free Palestine crusaders, from anti-Coca Cola campaigners to cotton farmers… the Forum offered space for expression, for exchange, for discussion, for disagreement, for debate, for celebration.
./english/629.txt:6:The present text intends to contribute for this debate, approaching three themes that have become fundamental for the continuity of the Forum process:
./english/629.txt:142:But if at the present moment it is useful and necessary that the barriers between different types and areas of engagement are brought down; that the articulations in the struggle against the neo-liberalism are spread all over the world and get amplified, stronger and more dense; that more movements, nets and initiatives of struggle are nurtured; that the debate of proposals and ways to overcome the domination of the capital are deepened; if this is the moment we are living in, we can be sure that the task of multiplying Forum-spaces is inestimable, irreplaceable and highly commendable, in our common engagement.
./english/643.txt:12:The problem now, from my standpoint as member of the WSF International Council, is that we must begin debate on the architecture of the Forum. We must recognise that the WSF entails three equally necessary elements: mobilisation, participation, and strategies for a better possible world.
./english/643.txt:18:The third element, defining proposals and strategies hasnt been resolved yet and doesnt seem to worry most people. There were 1,714 panels and seminars in this years WSF. Is this proof of strength? If nobody can keep track of what went on in so many debates, I have my doubts. This atomisation of dialogue means that many valuable proposals were lost.
./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/645.txt:33:We cannot turn away from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and return to the laws of the jungle, said Pierre Calame from the group Alianca por um Mundo Responsavel e Solidaire in the opening debate on globalisation.
./english/645.txt:39:Issues around human rights, diversity, equality and ethnicity were debated extensively at several meetings. Education, health and social security were discussed as matters of rights, rather than benefits.
./english/646.txt:56:A typical decision-making mechanism in IC meetings begins with the OC submitting a proposal. The IC debates the issue, presided over by the OC. (Other IC members have also been given responsibilities in the running of the council meetings.) If no clear consensus emerges, the OC will have a separate meeting and reconsider its original proposal. In some cases, it will then (typically on the second day of the two-day meeting) present a new proposal taking earlier discussion into account. Normally, the new proposal will carry the day with everyone agreeing, more or less.
./english/646.txt:58:The underlying assumption in this working method is that the World Social Forum is not a deliberative body or actor that would take political stands and that it therefore needs no rigorous decision-making procedures. Until now the system has worked relatively well, making decisions through what some Brazilian organisers call construção, constructing them in a critical debate and sometimes laborious consensus-building. The IC is not supposed to have mechanisms either for disputing representation, or for voting. The only vote ever taken was to decide whether the meeting following the first IC meeting would take place somewhere in Europe or in Dakar. The overwhelming majority voted for Dakar.
./english/646.txt:76:Others are already thinking that the number of participants and parallel events is too high for any strategically relevant debate on key issues. For Roberto Savio, long-time director of the Inter Press Service, holding 1714 panels and seminars in the WSF 2003 led to an atomisation of dialogue. Savio has proposed that in future there should be severe restrictions to the number of people allowed to participate in the event, although he has left it open who would decide.
./english/646.txt:86:Further debate ensued in Bangkok in August 2002 when the Brazilians strongly opposed the plans of the Italians to invite political parties to take part officially in the European Social Forum. According to the Charter of Principles, the WSF process is “non-party”, but the Italian delegates responded by accusing the Brazilian Organising Committee of hypocrisy, since the PT was so visibly present in all the Porto Alegre forums. The Italians claimed that the open violation of the Charter by the Brazilians had been always accepted by WSF participants and that therefore the Brazilians should not get upset when minor political parties play a small role in a regional forum.
./english/646.txt:88:Another controversy related to plans to organise a social forum event in Quito, Ecuador, in October 2002. The event was to focus on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), coinciding with a FTAA ministerial meeting. During early 2002 the Quito event made it onto the semi-official list of WSF events, but by mid-year it had been taken off. There was no visible public debate, but one of the main reasons was the insistence of some IC members that the Quito event would be too focused on one particular issue (FTAA) and with too narrow an organisational basis. Nevertheless, the event, and many of its slogans and other symbols spread the word throughout the WSF process, even if it was not in the semi-official list.
./english/646.txt:104:In at least two meetings of the WSF International Council there have been angry demands by some groups to issue a declaration on a particular topic, whether it be crises in Argentina, Palestine or Venezuela. In the Bangkok meeting in August 2002, Walden Bello and others argued that the council should produce a public statement encouraging movements around the world to take part in protests in Cancún in 2003. In the Porto Alegre meeting of the council in January 2003, various delegates argued strongly in favour of making a public statement against the imminent war in Iraq. In both cases, the apparently consensual decision of the council was not to issue any such statements. It is, however, likely that there will be more intense debates on this in the near future.
./english/646.txt:134:In order to partially overcome such dilemmas, a new form of participation was attempted in 2002 when it was decided that the WSF would have a new category of events: roundtables of dialogue and controversy. Through these roundtables, representatives of institutions banned from the list of official delegates can be invited to debate and discuss. They played little part in WSF 2003, but may be more prominent in future WSF events. Who will be invited remains unclear, some organisers thinking that representatives of some UN bodies should be invited, while those of the World Bank and IMF should be kept at bay.
./english/646.txt:136:The question of how to relate to the WSF’s original symbolic adversary has also been repeatedly debated and modified. One of the motivations for the naming and timing of the first WSF in Porto Alegre was to attract media attention. But this oppositional stance toward the World Economic Forum in Davos was always combined with a quest for critical dialogue, as reflected in the televised debate between Davos and Porto Alegre.
./english/646.txt:142:In the WSF 2003 there was, however, one particular issue that made the activists in Porto Alegre focus on Davos in passionate debate. The decision of Lula da Silva to travel to Davos immediately after the WSF 2003 in Porto Alegre raised plenty of criticism among the organisers. In his main public appearance in front of tens of thousands of admirers during WSF 2003 Lula compared his decision to travel to Davos to his decision over twenty-five years ago to get involved in trade unions. Friends had then advised him against getting involved with “dirty trade union politics”, but the fact that Brazil has a vibrant and progressive trade union movement today shows that he was right to act. Lula was, however, not explicit about whether he believed the WEF could expect similarly progressive results. At least within the IC, many remained sceptical.
./english/646.txt:148:Then there are the issues of funding. WSF events have received considerable funds from organisations such as Oxfam UK, the Ford Foundation and the Heinrich Böll Foundation. This support has not hitherto awakened any significant debates on the possible relations of dependence it could generate. But it should be taken into account, for example, that in order to get funding from the Ford Foundation, the organisers had to convince the foundation that the Workers Party was not involved in the process. Since autonomy from political parties has been important for the WSF organisers for various other reasons as well, the importance of funding conditionality should not be exaggerated. However, the organisation of WSF 2004 in India may imply more critical attitudes towards foreign funding.
./english/646.txt:160:It is frequently assumed that in the anti/alternative divide of globalisation debates, being “anti” represents more radical and revolutionary options, whereas the “alternatives” are on the side of more superficial reforms. In terms of thinking about how to democratise the world, this assumption is not very helpful. While anti-globalisation people can be pro-capitalist, pro-globalisation people may be anti-capitalist. Some of the debate and divide between the “anti” and the “alternative” is due to confused semantics or distorted categorisations. In order to fundamentally democratise the world, people who have chosen to regard globalisation as a term that has been too polluted by its dominant usage and those who think it can still be given more progressive meanings can often work together. In principle, the World Social Forum offers many opportunities for this to happen.
./english/646.txt:164:Be this as it may, one of the intellectual problems the World Social Forum poses has been the surprising lack of one debate in particular – open debate between different visions of how the world should be concretely reorganised if, as WSF’s main slogan says, another world is to be possible.
./english/651.txt:8:Like it or not, the Porto Alegre Forum has become a global reference for an emerging conviction that "another world is possible". Is that a small matter? Certainly it is not enough, but enormous creative energies are awakened by our coming to believe collectively that we are not condemned to become one super-casino at the hands of large economic and financial groups that commodify life and speculate with human beings and whole peoples. What is more, at an admittedly difficult juncture, we have restored globalization itself to the centre of world debate, thus evading the trap of the logic of terror and war into which religious and trade fundamentalists were leading us after the fateful events of September 11, 2001. One telling response by the World Social Forum to the dominant globalization was to show that diverse and emotionally charged expressions of culture, song and dance also are constitutive of the globalization we want, grounded in the ethical principles of human solidarity with freedom and equality, in the diversity of cultures and situations we live in.
./english/654.txt:15:This difference in objectives and contents lead to a difference in method, too: the main activity developed in Davos consists in conferences and debates on previously defined issues, to which the organizers invite great intellectual representatives of the neo-liberal "unique-monolithic thought", the most powerful nations political leaders and great multinationals owners or executives. In the Porto Alegre Forum an important space is also given to conferences and debates, as well as to testimonies of people with significant experiences or reflections. In order to do that, Porto Alegre, like Davos, invite people who have already reflected or are already acting in domains relevant to the issues being discussed - though in 2002, the Porto Alegre conferences have being conducted not by isolated people but by great world nets. But the most enriching activity in the World Social Forum is the one related to the workshops and seminars freely proposed and organized by the participants themselves: 400 in 2001 and 750 in 2002. In fact, it is the joyful people movement around these workshops and seminars that create the atmosphere of enthusiasm of the World Social Forum, in the corridors and gardens where the Forum is held, with a variety of sounds and colors, good spirited protests and presentations of proposals and actions, as well as unexpected performances and events - exactly the opposite of what happens in the well-bred gray of Davos. Obviously, these organizing options of the World Social Forum are not carried out without misunderstandings, pressures, deviations and even attempts at manipulation of the Forum as a whole. Its large scale induces greed and its horizontal character puts in a uncomfortable position those who are in a hurry to see changes taking place and were also brought up within the traditional paradigms of political action.
./english/658.txt:25:This is a challenge that was raised since the first Forum. Several of us have highlighted that the World Social Forum is not just a protest movement. It is, of course, but its purpose is to go further and to also be a process of elaboration of plural and diverse proposals to face and overcome neoliberalism. This year, we took a significant step by endeavoring to leave a written record of the results of the debates, not only of the conferences but also of the seminars and workshops. But a look at the page on the conferences on this Web site shows that some of the reports of the conferences of the last two days are not still available and that translations are not systematically provided. Reinforcing the teams that help to produce these written records, resulting from the debates, will be a key task for the next events. By the way, these written records are just that: written records of the different, and hopefully contradictory, exchanges -- we cannot expect them to be summaries, which would drown the diversity of opinions. But it is better to leave a written record, that to leave no record at all.
./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.