./english/147.txt:18:There is no country in Europe where, after the defeat of social democracy, there arose resistance as effective as is in Italy. The overarching mood in Italy is to try to unify workers and all marginalized groups and strata: the unemployed, the poor, industrial and intellectual workers, whites, and people of all other races, men and women, and immigrants, in a “movement of movements.” A great acceleration of efforts started in Genoa, July 2001, where the anti-corporate globalization movement resisted the G8 Summit.
./english/147.txt:101:A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism, and feudalism; all trade agreements, institutions, and governments that promote destructive globalization
./english/162.txt:9:These kinds of actions are about as far as one could imagine from a museum; yet when you approach them, you can feel something distinctly artistic. They bring together the multiplicity of individual expression and the unity of a collective will. That is their enigma, which sets up a circulation between art and solidarity, cooperation and freedom. But this enigma stretches further, into the paradoxes of a networked resistance. Because since their surprising beginnings, we have seen the movements change, we have seen them globalize. Activists from the South and the North travel across the earth in jet planes, to demonstrate next to people without money, without work, without land or papers – but who may know the same writers, the same philosophers, the same critiques of contemporary capitalism. The intensive use of Internet by the movement of movements means that dissenting messages take the pathways used by financial speculation. Sometime you wonder whether the two can even be distinguished. What are the sources of this networked resistance? And what exactly is being resisted? Is revolution really the only option – as one could read on a banner at the carnival against capital, on June 18, 1999, in the financial center of London? Or do we not become what we resist? Are the "multitudes" the very origin and driving force of capitalist globalization, as some theorists believe? (2)
./english/162.txt:52:The notion of the commons refers back to the same pre-capitalist history that Polanyi had invoked; and it does so in the context of what some are calling the "second enclosure movement," resulting in the extension of intellectual property rights, or the privatization of information. Benkler stresses that the word "commons" denotes "the absence of exclusion as the organizing feature of this new mode of production." To be sure, the examples he uses to prove the existence of voluntarily organized large-scale cultural production are strictly electronic projects like the Wikipedia encyclopedia, the Slashdot technews site, the Kuro5hin site, and so on. These are essentially situations where publicly available text plus creativity produces more publicly available text. They are also politically neutral examples, appropriate for an argumentation that aims, among other things, to influence the American legislature on the subject of copyright laws. Yet one could apply exactly the same ideas to the growing phenomenon of networked political protests. It is clear that mass access to email and the possibility to create personal web pages – both of which have been quite necessary to the world expansion of liberal capitalism – almost immediately made possible, not only a greater awareness of globalization and its effects, but also the self-organization of dissenting movements on a world scale. And the scope of the projects that have been realized in this sense has been tremendous.
./english/162.txt:56:Just reflect for a moment on what each of the major "counter-globalization" actions has involved. Collaborative research on the political, social, cultural, and ecological issues at stake. Various levels of coordination between a wide range of already constituted groups, concerning the preliminary forms of mobilization. Worldwide dissemination, through every possible channel, of the research and preliminary positions. Travel of tens or hundreds of thousands of single persons and autonomous groups to a given place. Self-organization of meeting and sleeping places. Intellectual and political cooperation on some form of counter-summit. The creation of artistic and cultural events in the spirit of the movements. A minimal agreement, worked out beforehand or in the heat of the moment, on the specific forms and places of the symbolic and direct actions to be undertaken. Legal and medical coordination in order to ensure the demonstrators' security. The installation of communications systems allowing for the transmission of precise yet exceedingly diverse coverage of the events. A social, legal, and political follow-up of the aftermath. Finally, a subsequent analysis of the new situation that results from each confrontation: in other words, a new starting-point.
./english/162.txt:60:In this sense one could say that, just like the projects of commons-based peer production, these mobilizations begin and end with the fabrication of publicly available texts. For example, the People's Summit in Quebec City in April 2001 began long in advance, with many different studies of the consequences to be expected from the future agreement on the Free Trade Area of the Americas. These studies led to the drafting of a remarkable document, "Alternatives for the Americas," which is a counter-treaty of great precision, composed through a process of knowledge exchange and political coordination on the scale of the American hemisphere. (17) It's also true that as a direct consequence of the massive demonstration that took place during the summit, the official working draft of the FTAA treaty was made public for the first time; until then it had not even been available to elected representatives of the American peoples, but only to executive negotiating teams (and scores of corporate "advisers"). In this way the counter-globalization movements constitute a public archive. And yet between the fundamental landmarks represented by these text publications, how many face-to-face debates took place, how many moments of singular or collective creation, how many acts of courage and solidarity? And how many emotions, images, memories, and desires were created and shared during the days of action in Quebec City?
./english/162.txt:75:Tucumán Arde is extremely interesting to consider from the contemporary viewpoint of tactical media practice, which in many respects has been one long effort to research, expose, and go beyond the idyllic picture of globalization being painted by the corporate media. (25) But to understand the major differences from today's situation, one must realize that Tucumán Arde was done with the support of the Argentine CGT, that is, a radical labor union, and the exhibition was shown in a union hall. In other words, to obtain the funding and distribution of practices that would not be supported by the market, the Rosario group had to collaborate with a bureaucratic structure, which is essentially an outgrowth of the capitalist firm. And that is almost impossible today, at least in the overdeveloped countries. For complex reasons which have to do both with the anti-bureaucratic bias of the New Left, and with the heightened integration of labor unions to the state after the crisis of 1968, it has become very difficult for social movements, let alone artists, to collaborate with official structures such as parties, unions, etc. The motivation just isn't there. This is why the use of carefully conceived linguistic formulas, of oriented but open signifiers, would become a far more effective means of mobilization in the late 1990s, when ideas could be distributed and constantly transformed through the proliferation of connections offered by the Internet. In this way one achieved a non-bureaucratic capacity for subversive political action on a large scale, outside any compulsory framework. A new kind of conceptualism began to emerge, in which "attitudes become forms," as the curator Harald Szeeman said in the 1960s. An idea or phrase could become a world-wide event, in which every individual performance was different. Just as in Lawrence Weiner's famous prescription, the action could be carried out by the originators of the ideas, or realized by others, or not done at all. In the late 1990s, this revolutionary promise was realized. Thirty years after experiments such as Tucumán Arde, the counter-globalization movement burst onto the world scene as the revenge of the concept.
./english/176.txt:2:Exploring the role of the internet in the ‘movement for alternative globalization’: The case of the Paris 2003 European Social Forum
./english/176.txt:8:Keywords: Social movements, internet, survey, mobilization, movement for alternative globalization, European Social Forum
./english/176.txt:10:This paper attempts to explore the role of the internet in the processes of organization and mobilization of the ‘movement for alternative globalization’, which is often characterized as an ‘internet-based movement’. It reports the findings of a survey undertaken in the Paris 2003 European Social Forum (ESF), which asked 257 respondents about the contexts that mobilized them to participate in the ESF (political/voluntary organizations, friends/relatives, workplace/university, news media), as well as the modes and methods of c72
./english/176.txt:11:Exploring the role of the internet in the ‘movement for alternative globalization’: The case of the Paris 2003 European Social Forum
./english/176.txt:15:Keywords: Social movements, internet, survey, mobilization, movement for alternative globalization, European Social Forum
./english/176.txt:17:This paper attempts to explore the role of the internet in the processes of organization and mobilization of the ‘movement for alternative globalization’, which is often characterized as an ‘internet-based movement’. It reports the findings of a survey undertaken in the Paris 2003 European Social Forum (ESF), which asked 257 respondents about the contexts that mobilized them to participate in the ESF (political/voluntary organizations, friends/relatives, workplace/university, news media), as well as the modes and methods of communication that were used in each context. The findings question the claims about the internet-based character of this movement, as face-to-face contact seems to be the predominant mode of communication. The survey also challenges the much discussed potential of the internet to mobilize politically indifferent or marginalized individuals, as a comparison between users and non-users of the internet revealed that users tended to be mobilized for the ESF through political or voluntary organizations.
./english/176.txt:19: Hailed as the medium that would revive democracy, the internet is thought to exert a stronger influence in the realm of non-mainstream politics, inhabited by loose and often marginalized groups and organizations. Nowhere has this influence been considered more prominent than in the case of the ‘movement for alternative globalization’, whose collective identity, geographical scale and organizing structure
./english/176.txt:20: are thought to be inextricably linked with its use of the internet. Hence, the ‘alter- globalization movement’ is claimed to operate as an internet-based, electronic network that is elusive and difficult to capture as it ‘swims like a fish in the net’ (Castells 2001, 142).
./english/176.txt:24:above claims by investigating the use of the internet in the mobilization for the Paris 2003 European Social Forum (ESF), one of the most important events for the European part of the ‘movement for alternative globalization’. The results derive from a survey undertaken in the Paris 2003 ESF, which asked 257 respondents about the contexts that mobilized them to participate in the European Social Forum (political/voluntary organizations, friends/relatives, workplace/university, news media), as well as the means and methods of communication that were used in each context. This paper aims to present and interpret some of the preliminary results and situate them amongst the wider context of studies in social movements and communication. On a more general note, this study is part of wider effort to restore communication analysis in its rightful place within social movement theory, which even though implicitly or explicitly recognizes the importance of contacts and interactions for the identity, ideology and organization of social movements, has thus far failed to incorporate a more detailed study of communication within its research framework.
./english/176.txt:42: The ‘movement for alternative globalization’ or ‘global social justice movement’ is an exception to this rule. This is because its characteristics are thought to be so inextricably linked with the use of new communication technologies that any study of the movement had to include from very early on a reflection on the role and impact of the internet. In the analysis that follows, I will briefly outline these claims and engage in a wider discussion about the possible effects of the internet in social movement activity. This analysis will provide the basis upon which the survey results will be assessed and interpreted. The ‘movement for alternative globalization’1 burst into the public consciousness in Seattle in late 1999 and since then has been the centre of much attention and controversy. Drawing on the broad and flexible frame of ‘alternative globalization’, this movement has managed to unite diverse and often disparate groups and organizations, from leftist political parties and charity organizations to anarchist groups of the Black Bloc. These groups seem to operate as a ‘network of networks’ constituting a prime example of ‘leaderless resistance’, as they manage to co-ordinate protests and events without a specific leader, a common programme or a centre of command (Castells 2001, 142). With its seemingly loose and flexible structure, global scale, and multi-issue politics, the ‘alter-globalization’ movement seems to represent a new type of social movements which is as much a product of the globalized world of late modernity as the problems that it tries to address.
./english/176.txt:44:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 78internet-based, electronic network. In this sense, the internet is thought to be affecting not only the way the movement communicates its goals or protests in support of its ideas, but also its scale, organizing structure and collective identity. These claims place communication in a much more central position than the one it has hitherto assumed in social movement theory, instigating a more systematic reflection on the role of the media in social movement activity. In this vein of inquiry, current research tends to consider the Internet not only as a new form of communication, but also as an organizational process in itself that is affecting the internal structure of the movement (Tarrow 2002, 15). This is because the internet seems “to constitute a social network (which is) remarkably similar to the reticular structure of social movements”, so that “it is only a short step to regarding the Internet itself as a form of organization” (Ibid). In that respect, the internet is thought to drive the ‘alter-globalization’ movement towards looser and less hierarchical modes of organization, which imitate its own loose and non-hierarchical structure. For instance, according to Klein “[w]hat emerged on the streets of Seattle and Washington was an activist model that mirrors the organic, decentralized, interlinked pathways of the Internet” (Klein 2002, 17). Contrary to the more conventional means of communication which are relatively expensive and tend ‘to foster just a few centres of communication (and often related to this, of power and decision making)’, the internet does not ‘demonstrate an inherent tendency to be concentrated and controlled in the hands of a few movement entrepreneurs’ (van de Donk et al. 2004, 9). Thus, by intensifying communication among all parts of the organization, the internet has the potential to contest the prevailing model of top-down communication (Ibid, 19). What is more, the internet seems to also affect the scale and scope of the ‘alter-globalization movement’ both in terms of organizing and in terms of the development and negotiation of a collective identity. Serving as a connecting mechanism between participants in different countries, the internet can facilitate an international division of labour both prior to and during protests (Walgrave and van Aelst 2004, 101). It can further act as ‘a channel for the geographical dispersion of the intimacy of interpersonal networks’ (Burnett and Marshall 2003, 37), expanding the geographical scale at which a collective identity, as well as interpersonal relationships of trust and solidarity can be developed. This poses a challenge to previous notions of intimacy and community as bounded within the confines of a specific locality or as associated with some kind of face-to-face communication. This scale shift in the personal connections among activists also contributes to the establishment of open and extended activist networks, whose unity does not necessarily depend upon a common ideology. Instead, the internet seems to Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 79encourage connections among
./english/176.txt:45:ideologically diverse actors, as it is ‘conducive to forging (temporary) alliances and coalitions, both vertical and horizontal, across different issues’ (van de Donk et al. 2004, 19). But if it is not a shared ideology, then what is it that keeps these networks together and prevents their internal conflicts? According to Bennett, the answer rests on the loose and non-hierarchical modes of organizing adopted by these networks which ‘allow different political perspectives to coexist without the conflicts that such differences might create in more centralized coalitions’ (2004, 134). Therefore, the ease of linking or dropping out of these digital coalitions, their loose organizational structure, as well as the geographical dispersion of interpersonal activist relations, permit the ‘alter-globalization movement’ to foster ties of solidarity and collective identity in an international scale and among diverse participants, whose ideological differences may have hitherto been considered irreconcilable.
./english/176.txt:46: What the foregoing analysis aptly demonstrates is that the extensive use of the internet by current social movements and the ‘alter-globalization movement’ in particular has led to recognition of the integral role of communication in social movement activity. However, it is not only social movement theorizing which has been challenged and transformed by the advent of the internet; it is also our perceptions of media and communication themselves and of the distinctions that we make between private and public, personal and mass communication. Since this may affect our inquiries into the relationship between social movements and communication, it is worth exploring its implications in more detail.
./english/176.txt:50: The event I decided to focus on, the European Social Forum, constitutes one of the most significant annual events for the European part of the ‘movement for alternative globalization’. Inspired by the World Social Forum, the first ESF was organized in Florence in (2002) The second one, which took place in Paris in November 2003, comprised several hundreds of seminars, workshops and plenary meetings spanning three days and reportedly attracting 40,000 participants. The main function of the ESF is to act as a space that brings different actors, organizations and individuals together to discuss the state of the world, to network and to form useful relationships. In other words, it is an event which helps this movement to define itself and what it is for, to attract new participants and also to identify, loosely and informally, its ‘membership’.
./english/176.txt:51: To an extent, this event is a reflection of the movement itself which can be better understood as a process facilitating the co-operation and networking of various actors (organizations, smaller groups and even individual activists) opposed to neoliberal globalization. And even though all social movements ‘tend to be fuzzy and fluid phenomena often without clear boundaries’ (van de Donk et al. 2004, 3), I would argue that this is even more the case for the ‘alter-globalization movement’, whose plurality and loose structure render it a fluid and mutable movement and hence a difficult object of study. In that respect, selecting a representative sample is an almost impossible task, as there is no exhaustive list of the groups or organizations involved in the movement. And even if there was, such a list would quickly become obsolete, as this movement is always in a state of flux, with existing actors withdrawing in order to focus on their specific campaigns and interests while new actors take their place. Thus, focusing on a specific event such as the European Social Forum, which is an expression of the movement as a networking and collaborative process, seemed to resolve the problems mentioned above.
./english/176.txt:125:demonstrated that mobilization through political or voluntary organizations, friends or relatives, and the workplace or the university takes place predominantly through face-to-face contact. Thus, rather than being replaced by mediated communication, face-to-face contact seems to co-exist with other modes of communication. This ubiquitous presence of face-to-face contact urges us to rethink and clarify our notion of the ‘alter-globalization movement’ as an internet-based movement. In this respect, the fact that internet communications are not prevalent among participants in the European Social Forum does not necessarily entail a rejection of these claims. Rather, it may be an indication that the changes brought by the internet are qualitative, not quantitative. Therefore, far from disproving these claims, the survey results call for a more in-depth understanding of possible qualitative changes and for a clearer definition of what we mean by ‘internet-based movement’. Does ‘internet-based’ signify a movement communicating predominantly through the internet? Or is it more the case of a movement with an electronic spine – in terms of the connections among key activists across different countries – but whose day-to-day organizing and mobilization takes place locally and through face-to-face communication? In any case it is worth keeping in mind that email comes second to face-to-face contact in all of the mobilization contexts where they were used in tandem.
./english/176.txt:128:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 92In terms of social movement research, this also highlights the necessity to distinguish between the different internet applications and examine their effects separately, as they favor different modes of communication. Thus, email tends to foster interpersonal communication, while the web adheres more to a broadcast model of communication. Email lists fall somewhere in-between, facilitating the narrowcasting of messages and information. Therefore, bundling up all these applications under the category ‘Internet’ cannot adequately capture the role of new communication technologies in social movement activity. Another major inference provided by this study concerns the possible relationship between internet use and the respondents’ political experience or degree of involvement in politics. The basis for this assumption is supplied by the associations between internet use and the respondents’ age, as well as the context through which they were mobilized. In that respect, the survey results showed that older participants tend more than the younger ones to be mobilized through the email lists or websites of political or voluntary organizations. On the other hand, younger participants tend to be mobilized more through face-to-face contact with friends or relatives. To an extent, this seems as a counter-intuitive result. It can however be explained, if we consider that older activists may refrain from participating in the day-to-day meetings of the political or voluntary organizations they belong to, but still choose to stay in touch and follow the latest news through email lists and the organizations’ websites. For younger activists, on the contrary, participation in a social movement may constitute an opportunity for or be a result of face-to-face socialization with friends and relatives. The interpretation of these results would be aided significantly, if information about the respondents’ political experience and prior participation in the ‘alter-globalization’ or other movements was available. For instance, a study of participants in the anti-war demonstration of the 15th of February 2003 both in Europe and in the USA has revealed that more experienced activists tended to get their political information online, contrary to first-time demonstrators (Bennett, Givens and Willnat 2004, page numbers not available). In my study, even though the respondents’ age can be considered as an indication of their political experience, it is far from conclusive. To address this gap, more information about the political experience of the respondents is being sought through a follow-up study to the 2003 survey. As for the relationship between internet use and mobilization context, the results have revealed that respondents who have used at least one internet application in any mobilization context tend to be mobilized more through political or voluntary organizations than non-users of the internet. On the other hand, respondents who Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 93were mobilized by face-to-face contact in
./english/176.txt:133:1 Emerging as a direct reaction against the process of neoliberal globalization, this movement was initially dubbed as the ‘anti-globalization movement’. However, this label seemed to spur too much confusion and misunderstanding, as the movement was identified with its most extreme anti-capitalist part. Thus, evolving from its initial outburst in Seattle in 1999 the movement came to define and call itself the ‘altermondialiste movement’ (in French), translated in English as the ‘alter-globalization movement’ or the ‘movement for alternative globalization’. The name ‘global social justice movement’ is also used, particularly by its trade justice/development part. This ‘alter-globalization’ label indicates more clearly that anti-globalization protesters are not opposed to globalization per se, but to the way it is shaped by neoliberal concerns, disregarding human rights and environmental issues (Walgrave and van Aelst 2004, 99). The change of name also points to the constant negotiations and re-negotiations of the movement’s identity, in its effort to accommodate and unite disparate groups and organizations.
./english/176.txt:137: Klein, N. (2002) Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, Great Britain: Flamingo.
./english/176.txt:144: Walgrave, S. and P. van Aelst. (2004) ‘New media, new movements? The role of the internet in shaping the ‘anti-globalization’ movement’, in W. van de Donk, B.D. Loader, P.G. Nixon and D. Rucht (eds.) Cyberprotest: New media, citizens and social movements, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 97-122.
./english/187.txt:20:The ESC has emerged from a social movement that is challenging capitalist globalization and its neoliberal policies, and can be situated within three broad Contexts:
./english/187.txt:41:A clear rejection of capitalist globalization and the lack of democracy and grassroots participation associated with it.
./english/192.txt:27:The ESF in London was smaller than its predecessors in Florence and Paris, which each attracted around 50,000 people. This is hardly surprising: the altermondialiste movement first began to take shape in Europe with the formation of ATTAC in France in 1998; since Genoa the movement has been strongest in Italy. In Britain there has been a very strong anti-war movement, but only a widespread, but diffuse anti-globalization consciousness.
./english/192.txt:34:But there is more involved here. The war in Iraq is also the dominant issue in world politics. This is not simply because of the divisions that it has provoked among the major powers. The Bush administration's unilateral assertion of military power, the brutality of the occupation, its accompaniment by the imposition of the full neo-liberal economic programme on Iraq - all of this for many activists sums up what is wrong with corporate globalization.
./english/192.txt:35:Others - and they are particularly influential in France - disagree. They believe there is no necessary connection between the Bush war drive and neo-liberal globalization. I think they are mistaken, and that every day that passes underlines the importance of understanding the links between economic and military power that are at the heart of modern imperialism. This is a substantive political disagreement with which we are going to have to learn to live while working together in the same movement.
./english/228.txt:8:Our goal is that the 4th ESF in spring 2006 in Athens becomes a major political event and a process for the Greek and European movement against neoliberal capitalist globalization. We will attempt to widen the already open space of Forums for all social movements, campaigns, acts of resistance, organizations and collectives in Greece , the Balkan area and Europe . We aim to connect this process with mobilizations on specific matters those days on which the 4rth ESF will take place, so in this way we can have a strong grassroots emphasis to the Forum.
./english/228.txt:21:2. Contacting again political spaces that do not participate today in the European Movement against Globalization; like antiauthotarian collectives and the left that has harsh relations with the Forum process. Of course we must bring back to normal our relation with the activists and groups that work together with us through “Autonomous Spaces”
./english/243.txt:13:Systematic political education is clearly underdeveloped among emancipatory movements struggling for another globalization . Although there are a significant number of critical analyses written for an academic audience, materials and methods of knowledge transfer for people's education are rare. Additionally, at the Social Forums the seminars often remind you very much of university lectures – and they are about as inspiring as them. Yet, even if you are the type of person that is into the academic style, have you ever wondered why you did not read an essay by this person instead of listening to him or her for hours, whilst sitting on an uncomfortable chair?
./english/266.txt:108:Third World Network: Covers globalization , trade, environment, human and women's rights among other issues. An international network based in Malaysia.
./english/266.txt:110:Focus on the Global South: Does policy research, analysis and action on globalization and other corporate-related issues. Based in Thailand.
./english/275.txt:131:Massimo de Angelis identifies a similar process in the emergence of a ‘new internationalism’ through the activities of the alter-globalization movement: that is, he identifies a process of ‘formation of social subjects, interconnected individuals who are in the process of developing shared visions of social transformation’ due to ‘practical necessity by different movements in their reciprocal interaction within the context of the global economy and their struggles’.57 He develops the comparative notion of ‘old and new internationalism’ according to two criteria: ‘the relation between national and international dimensions of struggle; the relation between labour and other movements’.58 The old internationalism is characterized as follows:
./english/275.txt:144:This process can be seen in two ways. One, ‘bottom-up’ approach is to explore the dialectic of universalism and particularity in the movements of the last four decades. In so doing, of course, we are questioning the uniqueness implied by de Angelis for the alter-globalization movement – but simultaneously placing it within a sphere of human practice which can be argued over, struggled for, and won or lost.
./english/275.txt:160:We attempt to do some of this in analyzing the crisis and restructuring of capital in the current phase of neo-liberal globalization as a social movement from above – and looking for ways of naming the system, its associated offensives of economic fundamentalism and ‘war on terror’ – in ways that help us to understand and counter it effectively. But this perspective also needs to be brought to bear on the movement of movements, understood as a response from below to this crisis – and in turn raising the question of the practical ‘way forward’ for the movement, and what theory can bring back to activism.
./english/275.txt:187:De Angelis, Massimo 2000 ‘Globalization, New Internationalism and the Zapatistas’, Capital and Class, 70: 9-36.
./english/281.txt:5:3) What is your assessment of the current status of capitalism and the class struggle? BARBARA BIGLIA: I am not a political theorist and I feel uncomfortable dishing out a general ‘prescription’ on this issue. So the best I can do is to give an impressionistic account. Firstly, I believe that ethnographic differences are really important. Even if oppression is globalized, it does not hurt people in the same manner. We live within different zones of capitalism, which subjects us to a differentiated system of domination. In some areas there still exists a certain class-consciousness that seems to have died out elsewhere. The presence or absence of social networks underline cultural differences. Today the class struggle represents an interesting and potentially subversive factor in certain areas of the planet. However, in other areas we need to take onboard non-class issues in order to fight oppression imaginatively. Finally, I am pessimistic about the anti-globalization movement, which in my view is rapidly becoming a reformist project with a radical mask.
./english/281.txt:53:the students sat at the back of the room and remained silent throughout. In contrast, the lecturers occupied the front row and monopolised the ‘discussion’. When I complained that if we want to change the authoritarian dynamics of academia we have to make an effort to create a space in which everyone feels free to talk, one of the lecturers retorted, ‘here everybody can talk freely and if student don’t feel free it is their problem’. At this stage one student did say that it was difficult to talk under such conditions, but he was ignored. What I am trying to say is that this ‘TAZ’ frequently becomes a closed ghetto that tends to produce a static critique- a critique that can be ‘easily’ reabsorbed by mainstream academic discourse. Our inability or unwillingness to be self-critical tends to normalise our contribution. At the same time not-so-critical academics see the autonomous zones created as an opportunity to acquire power. It seams that having acquired an academic position most criticals start to feel tired of fighting and prefer to maintain their little privileges and end up becoming auto-referential and a bit pathetic. Having analysed some of the limitations and negatives influences of academic discourse, I want to end by returning to the question posed by the editors of ARCP. It seems to me that in both academia and the ‘anti-globalization’ movement the ‘radicalising’ process mainly consists in emptying the content of criticism. Given this situation, is a cross-fertilisation between critical psychology and the anti-capitalist movement possible? I feel the only positive fertilisation possible is achieved through being a person- I mean the voluntary performing of ourselves and our bodies and not our professional ‘persona’. That doesn’t mean we cannot bring to the University ethics and practices developed by us as militants. Moreover, we can serve our activism through knowledge gained in academia and the privileges of our status. But we have to be careful not to instrumentalize Radical Social Movement practices and theories for the benefit of academics nor engage with the Radical Social Movement with a superior attitude. I believe if we want to be useful to the Radical Social Movement we should not aim to do something for RSM as academics, but instead work within them and act as activists. Perhaps the best thing Critical Psychology, as a ‘theoretical group’, could do is to let the anti-capitalist movement get on with its work without interference. As persons with a psychological background and a critical attitude we can use our knowledge within RSM
./english/282.txt:99:Although there is a sense in which we can see academic intellectuals forming 'schools of thought,' the chief focus falls on individuals and their career achievements. However, in movements, while the 'intellectual function' (Gramsci) may be played by a notable individual, it is commonly played by an activist group, a 'cadre organization' (Piven and Cloward 1977). If we ask, who gets 'cited' as the source of a movement argument or idea, it is commonly not so much named persons like 'Dave Spart' or 'Moon Blossom' or 'Naomi Klein' as movement organizations like 'SNCC', 'Earth First!,' 'the SWP,' or movement media like Green Anarchist or 'the Manifesto group' or even 'the anti-globalization movement' etc. Such groups possess and develop their own internal structures and divisions of labour, and their activist members regularly engage in ongoing discussions about the form and content of the ideas they should argue for within the wider movement, about the most effective means of their presentation (what Snow and Benford term 'framing'), and about appropriate forms of activity. Such groups typically engage in mutual monitoring of the movement's responses to itself as a means of checking its own performance. Movements in turn validate such groups' collective outputs of ideas and their shared practice, rather than simply their individual performances; at the same time, of course, the individual performances of group members reflect on the general credit of the group.
./english/282.txt:135:Arguably Starr pursues a double purpose in Naming the Enemy. On the one hand, she attempts to use her activist knowledge and background as a resource to achieve recognition within academia - and the fact that her book is the first work by a sociologist on the 'anti-globalization movement' is likely to stand her in good stead in this process. On the other hand, and more interestingly, she also uses the apparatus of academic research to argue for particular positions within the movement and against others. (15) However, we have yet to see any evidence of success in this. (Perhaps the book's strong defence of fundamentalist responses to globalization may explain something of the silence that has settled over it since September 11th.) Nevertheless, it is worth signaling both that some academics do try to break out of the 'contemplative' mode and that they are not necessarily very successful in doing so.
./english/284.txt:71:Spivak’s call for a deep engagement with the subaltern leads to a strong epistemological shift. She insists on the persistence of the “epistemic violence” product of the colonial process where Europe is erected as the undetermined Subject holding the explanatory power, and the colonized are relegated to be the Others –the Objects waiting to be explained- whose voice and agency have been stolen. Through recognizing the international division of labor and power, one is able to perceive its impact on the current ‘epistemological world order’. She is offering an epistemology that takes the subaltern into account not only as a case study, but as a source of knowledge and ‘expert’ production-the subaltern must be heard. Among global resistance movements in North America and Europe there is a lot of internal discussion about this topic. Mainly due to the mass media, the ‘spearheading role of southern social movements has been obscured, portraying the ‘anti-globalization movement’ as a negligible affair of ‘white-US and European-middle class kids’. However, in much movement discourse there exists an explicit attempt to recognize the role of grassroots communities from ‘poor’ countries as referential examples of movement building –from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, to the unemployed/piqueteros in Argentina, to peasant women in India- showing a similar effort to revert the canons of expertise. In this process, civil society from Europe and the US become the ‘students’ of their southern ‘teachers’ challenging colonial patterns.
./english/284.txt:107:Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. (2002) “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference” in Inda, J.X. and Rosaldo, R (eds.) The Anthropology of Globalization. A Reader, Blackwell Publishing
./english/291.txt:41:The social context that we live in today is the network-society. The factory has overflowed and has invaded the social, changing it into the principal lever of production. The wave of struggles in the 1960s and 1970s, on one hand, and the saturation of markets, along with the high levels of competition that introduced the process of globalization, on the other, obligated firms to develop techniques and technologies to make themselves more mobile and flexible and also more resistant to conflictivity and crisis: their survival depended, on one hand, on their capacity to detext (and take advantage of) the politico-institutional and social conditions and of the supply of most optimum raw materials, software, and machinery and work force; on the other hand firms' survival depended on their ability to respond within very brief time spans to oscilations of demand, thus in order to create (with a whole set of identification of needs/desires/forms of life and production of signs) the demand for a product even before manufacturing it. The key thus was in the multiplication of contacts and in a flexible and network organization that allowed a maximum fluidification of the circulation of information about local and international markets and an immediate production response to this information. In this manner, externalization, dislocalization and flexibilization became the slogan and communicative and relational work became the essential pivot, the active interface, of this ever more networked production.
./english/299.txt:105:Another significant fact is that Spanish prostitutes and prostitutes from Western Europe in general are being progressively substituted by immigrants from Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Sex work is a feminine survival strategy inseparably joined to present migrations, and together with other escapes such as marriage or sexual tourism it shapes the new circuits of globalization.[18] Sex work is a flexible kind of work which could be, and in some cases is, autonomously managed, unregulated and intermittent. In this sense, it is an opportunity for many people who find their access to a decent income and basic resources restricted on the one hand by the State (immigration laws) and on the other by the labor market. Nevertheless, this same flexible and alegal character of sex work may deepen not only the stigma but also the precariousness that weighs upon workers.
./english/300.txt:10:It would be difficult for a political activist entering the ‘trade’ of geography to not be enthused or at least interested by the radical tradition in the discipline, more so in a time when political activism itself seems to be taking on more and more spatial thinking as a way to conceive of globalization. For different reasons though, one can often see that the development of radical geography did not necessarily develop alongside activism- often the two walk different paths. Yet at different moments and in different places, activism and the academy have ‘met’ and challenged each other in fruitful and paradigm-shifting ways.
./english/303.txt:4:Movements against Corporate Globalization
./english/303.txt:10:This paper explores militant ethnography as research method and political praxis based on my experience as activist and researcher among anti-corporate globalization movements in Barcelona. What is the relationship between ethnography and political action? How can we make our work relevant to those with whom we study? Militant ethnography is a politically engaged and collaborative form of participant observation carried out from within rather than outside of grassroots movements. Traditional objectivist perspectives fail to grasp the concrete logic of activist practice, leading to inadequate accounts and theoretical models of little use to activists themselves. Meanwhile, the classic figure of the organic intellectual has become increasingly undermined, as contemporary activists produce and circulate their own analyses through global communication networks in real time.
./english/303.txt:12:Militant ethnography breaks down the distinction between observer/intellectual and activist/practitioner. By organizing protests and gatherings, facilitating meetings, participating in strategic and tactical debates, and putting one’s body on the line during mass direct actions, militant ethnographers can better understand complex movement dynamics, while remaining active political subjects. Rather than generate sweeping political directives, collaboratively produced ethnographic knowledge aims to facilitate ongoing activist (self-) reflection about movement goals, tactics, strategies, and organizational forms. At the same time, there is often a marked contradiction between the moment of research and the moment of academic writing, publishing, and distribution, which involve vastly different systems of rewards and incentives. Indeed, the horizontal networking logic associated with anti-corporate globalization movements represents a serious challenge to the institutional logic of academia itself. Militant ethnographers must constantly negotiate such dilemmas, while moving back and forth among different sites of writing, teaching, and research.
./english/303.txt:30:My own research explores the cultural logic and politics of transnational networking among anti-corporate globalization activists based in Barcelona. I am interested in how transnational networks like Peoples Global Action or the World Social Forum are built and constructed, and how activists generate emotional energy, while physically representing alternative networks through embodied political praxis during mass direct actions. Through militant ethnography I hope to shed light on the concrete processes through which activists can build more effective and sustainable movement networks. My specific project thus involved long-term participant observation with the international working group of the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance (MRG), a broad network involving squatters, Zapatista support activists, anti-debt campaigners, radical ecologists, and other collectives. Between June 2001 and September 2002, I actively participated in action planning and coordination around mobilizations in Barcelona, Genoa, Brussels, Madrid, and Seville, while I had previously taken part in mass actions in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Prague. Moreover, since MRG was a European convener of PGA and many activists were also actively involved in the Social Forum process, I was also able to help organize PGA and WSF-related gatherings in Barcelona, Leiden, and Porto Alegre.
./english/303.txt:32:A concrete example from my field notes can help shed light on the meaning and practice of militant ethnography. At the end of a July 1 march against police brutality in Barcelona, a Milan-based activist from the Italian White Overalls took the microphone and announced the coming siege of the G8 summit. After describing the Genoa Social Forum and the pact that had been made with the city, he enthusiastically called on all Catalan and Spanish activists to make the trip, exclaiming in the spirit of musician and anti-globalization favorite Manu Chao, “Next Stop: Genoa!” Tend days later, two Americans, an Israeli, 7 Catalans and I were discussing our police evasion strategy on a regional train we had skipped through southern France. As we pulled into Genoa, the Italian police were out patrolling in force. Although we had done nothing wrong, our hearts began to pound when we left the train. The paranoid feeling of being under constant surveillance would remain with us during our entire time in Italy.
./english/303.txt:41:At the same time, the overwhelming campaign of low-level state terror unleashed by the Italian state also points to some of the potential limitations of the “diversity of tactics” logic. If rather than dividing and conquering, the state pursues and indiscriminate strategy of physical repression it becomes impossible to safely divide up the urban terrain. In particular contexts, such as the upcoming RNC protests in New York, for example, it might make sense to actively dissuade other activists from using militant black block styles and tactics. However, blanked condemnations of protests “violence,” including the widely circulated statements by Susan George after Gothenburg and Genoa, are not likely to produce the desired effect largely because they violate the basic networking logic at the heart of contemporary anti-corporate globalization movements. Rather, it I sonly through dialogue and immanent critique based on solidarity and respect that such contentious issues can be resolved. At its best, militant ethnography can thus provide a mechanism for shedding light on contemporary networking logics and politics, while also making effective interventions into ongoing activist debates.
./english/303.txt:52:For the militant ethnographer the issue is not so much the kind of knowledge produced, which is always practically engaged and collaborative, but rather, how is it presented, for which audience, and where is it distributed? These questions go to the very heart of the alternative network-based cultural logics and political forms more radical anti-corporate globalization activists are generating and putting into practice. Addressing them responds not only to the issue of ethical responsibility toward one’s informants, colleagues, and friends; it also sheds light on the nature of contemporary movements themselves.
./english/303.txt:54:Part of the issue has to do with how we understand the figure of the intellectual. Barker and Cox (2002) have recently explored differences between academic and movement theorizing. These authors present a critique of traditional objectivist theories that are about rather than for movements, partly explaining the differences in terms of the distinction between “academic” and “movement” intellectuals, which corresponds to Gramsci’s “traditional” and “organic” varieties: the former operate according to the interests of dominant classes, while the latter both emerge from within and work on behalf of subordinate groups. However, not only does this distinction often break down in practice, which the authors recognize; beyond that, it seems to me that the relationship between activists and intellectuals within contemporary anti-corporate globalization movements is more complex. Indeed, when nearly everyone engages in theorizing, self-publishing, and instant distribution through global networks, the traditional function of the organic intellectual- providing strategic analysis and political direction- is undermined. In this sense, militant ethnography does not offer programmatic directives about what activists should or should not do. Rather, by providing critically engaged and theoretically informed analyses generated through collective practice, militant ethnography can provide tools for ongoing activist (self-) reflection and decision-making, while remaining relevant for broader academic audiences.
./english/303.txt:67:Finally, the question remains as to the most appropriate context for practicing militant ethnography and how to distribute the results. One obvious place is the academy, which despite increasing corporate influence and institutional constraints, continues to offer a critical space for collective discussion, learning, and debate. Indeed, as Scheper-Hughes (1995) suggests, those of us within the academy can use academic writing and publishing as a form of resistance, working within the system to generate alternative politically engaged accounts. Moreover, as Routledge (1996: 400) points out, there are no “pure” or “authentic” sites, as academia and activism both “constitute fluid fields of social action that are interwoven with other activity spaces.” Routledge thus posits an alternative “third space,” “where neither site, role, or representation holds sway, where one continually subverts the other.” The more utopian alternative is suggested by the rise of multiple networks of autonomous research collectives and free university projects, including the “activist research” conference cited above. In my own case, by examining the cultural logics, networking activities, and utopian imaginaries within contemporary anti-corporate globalization movements, I hope to contribute to both academic and activist spheres through exploring, as the Argentine Colectivo Situaciones puts it, “the emerging clues of a new sociability within concrete practices (2001: 39).”
./english/303.txt:87:Juris, Jeffrey S. 2004. Digital Age Activism: Anti-Corporate Globalization and the Cultural Politics of Transnational Networking. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.
./english/306.txt:41:The point of departure, of encounter, of crossing paths of which we speak is in the neighborhood of Lavapies, Calle Embajadores number 40. A feminist social center occupied there in 1996. In these almost sevens years la Karakola has been a daily experiment in constant creation and action, and with its comings and goings, with its limitations and its changes, it has housed an infinitude of projects: we speak about work and precariousness, about war and globalization, about ‘making city’ and urbanism, about sexist aggressions and the abuse of women, about autonomy and selfmanagement among women, about cooperation and the circulation of knowledge, about lesbian visibility and identities, about migration and borders… Meetings, assemblies, workshops, encounters, movies, videos, talks, actions…, but above all a gamble made, a bet placed decisively upon the collective, upon cooperation and subversion of the established lifestyles which bind us, which must be again resituated, again disemboweled in order to be able to begin, perhaps, to reinvent nature.
./english/306.txt:327:-Brah, Avtar (2002): “Global Mobilities, local predicaments: globalization and the critical imagination,” Feminist Review 70.
./english/307.txt:4:What is and isn’t PUSM? PUSM is not a school for training cadres or leaders of NGOs and social movements. Although PUSM is clearly oriented towards action for social transformation, its aim is not to offer the kinds of skills and training that are usually provided by such schools. Nor is PUSM a think tank of NGOs and Social Movements. Although it highly values strategic research and reflection, PUSM rejects the distance that one and the other usually keep vis-à-vis collective action. The major objective of PUSM is to help make knowledge of alternative globalization as global as globalization itself, and, at the same time, to render actions for social transformation better known and more efficient, and its protagonists more competent and reflective. To meet its goals PUSM will have to be more international and intercultural than similar existent initiatives. Rationale The movement for an alternative globalization is a new political fact focused on the idea that the current phase of global capitalism, known as neoliberal globalization, requires new forms of resistance and new directions for social emancipation. From within this movement, made up of a large number of social movements and NGOs, new social agents and practices are emerging. They operate in an equally new framework, networking local, national, and global struggles. Present theories of social change cannot adequately deal with this political and cultural novelty. This gap between theory and practice has negative consequences both for genuinely progressive social movements and NGOs, and the universities, where theories have traditionally been produced. Both leaders and activists of social movements and NGOs feel the lack of
./english/307.txt:8:between teacher and pupil – thus creating contexts and moments for reciprocal learning. Recognition of reciprocal ignorance is its starting point. Its final point is the shared production of knowledges as global and diverse as the globalization processes themselves. Beyond the gap between theory and practice, PUSM intends to tackle two problems that currently permeate all movements for an alternative globalization. First, the scarcity of reciprocal knowledge that still exists between movements and organizations active in the same thematic area and operating in different parts of the globe. Social forums have been powerful instruments in arousing this need and showing the importance of reciprocal knowledge. However, given their sporadic nature and short duration, they have been unable to fulfill this need. Without this reciprocal knowledge, it is impossible to increase the density and complexity of movement networks. Without this expansion it is not possible to augment significantly the efficacy and consistency of transformational actions beyond what has been achieved so far. The other problem is the lack of shared knowledge among movements and organizations active in different thematic areas and their respective struggles. This gap is even wider than the previous one, and bridging it is equally important. Because it is impossible and undesirable to have a general theory globally encompassing all movements and practices in all thematic areas, we need to create conditions for reciprocal intelligibility among movements through methodologies akin to translation. Methodologies, that is, capable of detecting what is common and what is different among different themes, movements, and practices, in order to identify the points and modes of articulation where links can be made – without any of these movements and practices losing their identity or autonomy. What is at stake, in a word, is to find out what is common and what is different between the indigenous and the ecological
./english/307.txt:10:movements, between any of them and the feminist and labor movements, between any of the previous movements and the peace and human rights movements, or finally between any of the above-mentioned and the movements and associations dedicated to popular education through the arts - dance, drama, literature, the plastic arts, and so on and so forth. This knowledge and the articulations that it can be translated into are the essential condition further to enhance the density and complexity of the movements’ network for an alternative globalization. Activities PUSM is constituted of three principal activities: pedagogical activities, activities of research-action for social transformation, and activities for spreading capabilities and tools for inter-thematic, international, and intercultural translation. Pedagogical Activities PUSM will be structured on the basis of workshops, attended by a limited number of activists/movement leaders, and social scientists/scholars/artists. Each workshop will last two weeks on a full-time basis, alternating periods for discussion, study and reflection, and leisure. Each workshop will have about 10 sessions for discussions. Activists/movement leaders and social scientists/scholars/artists will take turns in preparing and running these sessions. Study materials will be of various kinds: oral narratives and documents presented by movements and organizations, and theoretical and analytical texts proposed by social scientists/scholars, dramatic plays (for example, The Theater of the Oppressed, the methodology proposed by Augusto Boal and used today in 70 countries) and art objects and activities proposed by artists.
./english/307.txt:15:methodology could be the one developed by the Institute of Liberation Philosophy (Brazil) after Paulo Freire’s pedagogy). Activities for Diffusion of Translation Capabilities and Tools These activities consist in the divulgation of the translation or capability value of all the items of inter-knowledge and articulation developed by the other two activities: knowledges, designations, concepts, principles and methodos of collective action, etc. For example, the concepts of democracy, direct action, social emancipation, socialism, nonviolence, sagacity, Satyagraha, swaraj, multiculturalism, strike, hunger, revolution, and so on, and so forth. Every one of these items is less global than alternative globalization. Some are of current usage within a given regional or thematic ambit, but totally unknown within others. Some are valorized positively by given movements or ONGs, but rejected by others. Different items are adequate in different ways for different scales of action (local, national, global). Based on the analysis of the final reports of the workshops, the Translation Coordination will propose criteria to assess the limits and potentialities of each item for inter-thematic, international, and intercultural usage. Such proposals will be organized according to two large groups: the Lexicons and the Manifestos. The Lexicons concern items that are mainly discursive: designations, concepts, knowledges, classifications, etc. The Manifestos concern items that are predominantly performative: principles and methodologies of action, instances of successful articulations among practices, etc.
./english/307.txt:17:The proposals will be refined through the PUSM Network as well as through the set of networks that make up alternative globalization, namely those participating in the World Social Forum. Organization PUSM comprises two operative units: PUSM-Headquarters and PUSM-Network. PUSM-Headquarters PUSM-Headquarters will operate in a country of intermediate development (Brazil, India, South Africa, Mexico, etc.). It includes the Coordinating Committee, the Translation Coordination, and the Executive Committee. The first workshops will take place at the headquarters. PUSM-Network will be managed here as well. The Coordinating Committee is constituted of representatives of all the movements and NGOs that are part of PUSM-Network. Its job is to coordinate the activities of PUSM and select the Translation Coordination and the Executive Committee. The functions of the Translation Coordination are: 1. select workshops and its participants; 2. supervise the activities, both pedagogical and of research-action for change; 3. fulfill activities for diffusion of translation capabilities and tools; 4. grant scholarships to activists/leaders and social cientists/scholars/artists that are not self-funded. Any one of these tasks may be managed by sub-committees.
./english/313.txt:12:The common will on these searchers is the political commitment, the volunteer on contribute to the social transformation process, being part of the critical network to the Neoliberal globalization. And also the criticism to any theory that want to speak from a neutral place, from where you can see everything. Instead it is recognized that the thought is always situated.
./english/313.txt:115:There are many research groups keeping awake on the globalizations mechanism on the political institutions, like the reach develop by State Watch and also putting the accent into economical aspects, like Corporate European Observatory CEO, or the effects of the GMO, convening campaigns with the research, like ASEED, or the research for the denounce of regions doing very hard structural violence.
./english/313.txt:157:Juris, J, 2004, Practicing Militant Ethnography within Movements against Corporate Globalization. SSSP Annual Meeting.
./english/316.txt:76:Mario Pianta (2001), from Italy, considering the movement in ‘global civil society’ terms, divides responses to neo-liberal globalisation into ‘supporters of current arrangements’, ‘reformists’, ‘radical critics favoring another globalization’, ‘alternatives outside the mainstream’, and ‘nationalist rejectionists’.
./english/320.txt:13:This essay engages with the collective political agency of dominant and subaltern groups in the era of global neoliberal capitalism from three different angles. The first part of the essay outlines the basic framework of a Marxist theory of social movements, which proposes that the collective political agency of dominant and subaltern groups be conceptualized in terms of social movements from above and below. Moreover, the argument is made that the making and unmaking of historically specific social organizations of human practice are fundamentally animated by the dialectical relationship of conflictual process between the two. The second part of the essay applies this framework in a prolegomenon to an analysis of, on the one hand, the implementation, consolidation and globalization of neoliberal restructuring since the 1970s, and, on the other hand, the transition from defensive to offensive struggles against neoliberalism and the emergent crystallization of a new political subject in the form of the movement of movements. The third part discusses the role and relevance of normative ideals of rights and justice for the movement of movements, and argues for the development of an ethics of praxis through which new universalisms can be articulated. The essay concludes with some reflections on the role of activist research vis-à-vis these processes.
./english/320.txt:127:slogan such as “Our World is Not for Sale” testifies to a refusal to submit to the intensive expansion of capitalism, while “Another World is Possible” constitutes an insistence that alternative ways of socially organizing human practice are within reach. Klein has labelled the former refusal as resistance to ‘the privatization of every aspect of life, and the transformation of every activity and value into a commodity’ which amounts to ‘a radical reclaiming of the commons’ (2001: 82). Sousa Santos (2003) conceives of the latter insistence as a 'critical utopia'. The utopian dimension consists, basically, in rejecting the ‘conservative utopia’ of neoliberalism and ‘its radical denial of alternatives to present-day reality’ and 'in claiming the existence of alternatives to neoliberal globalization' (ibid.: 6, 7).
./english/320.txt:138:Paper for the “Navigating Globalization” conference,
./english/325.txt:3:The connection between the squatter-, queer- and alterglobalization movement. The many diversities of multiculturalism
./english/325.txt:47:In the past few years years queer culture has become a global phenomenon. ‘The globalization of capitalism and the economic forces that sustain it have necessarily led to globalization of queer culture’ (Kirsch 2000: 77). Since 1998 in this international movement ‘Queeruption’ is organized, an annual festival of queer culture. While some queeruption gatherings have been more communal and others more spread out, some held in the city and others rurally, the overall effect is one of building radical queer community, both within the local scene and internationally. Ongoing discussions within the community include topics of race, class and cultural exclusivity, ableism [discrimination in favour of the able-bodied], gender binarism/transphobia and the reproduction of oppressive sexual norms within radical communities (http://www.queeruption.nl/index2.htm).
./english/325.txt:78:The contemporary alterglobalization movement has different parts. You can roughly distinguish the Do-it-Yourself-activists, the more formal Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO’s) and all kinds of socialists.iv In spite of the troubles between the three parts of the movement, till now they work together on a reasonable basis, in this way respecting diversity, which is really a new phenomenon in the history of social movements. However, because only the Do-it-Yourself (DiY) approach has clear connections with ‘the’ (squatters-) and queer-movement, I will concentrate on this part of the alterglobalization movement.
./english/325.txt:81:Analysing their own publications, you can distinguish as characteristics of the DiY-part of the alterglobalization movement:
./english/325.txt:85:-personal change; politics starts in daily life. The rejection of collective identities doesn’t mean that identities are not important any longer. Is does matter whether you are a woman, a coloured person, homo or lesbian, what economic situation you have. Although the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ is used in the alterglobalization movement and DiY is described as ‘personal’ politics (Kingsnorth 2003: 327), till for a short time ago not so much attention is given to feminism and the gay-queer movement. Only some alterglobalist men recognize feminism as their forerunner: ‘The feminist movement tried to show us new insights and practices but we have generally managed to ignore them’ (de Marcellus, 2003: 6). But by the emphasis on personal politics, things are changing: ‘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 action’ (Subbuswamy and Patel 2001: 543). However, the activists recognize that they too are influenced by ‘the system’: ‘we have to eliminate all forms of oppression and domination within our own circles’ (Abramsky 2001: 562). Therefore they emphasis: politics starts in daily life.
./english/325.txt:95:-Their emphasis on fun and the ‘struggle against the theft of the public by the private. (Kingsnorth 2003: 319). The importance of fun you can recognize in their language, their cloths (during actions mostly pink and silver, see Evans 2003) and their music playing. Tactival frivolity is considered by them as an important strategy. The importance of the public sphere you can already see in the actions of the adbusters who protested against the pollution of the public places by billboards and in those of the ‘Reclaim-the-Street’-activists who want to show that the street can be used for all kinds of activities. You can describe the alterglobalization movement as ‘a struggle to reclaim space’ (Kingsnorth, 2002: 319).-- In this way the alterglobalists plea for the same as Hekma (2004) does for the sexual culture: a public sexual culture would be pleasant and good for the safety of the citizens and for the integration of different groups.--
./english/325.txt:96:To sum up: The DiY-activists of the alterglobalization movement try to create something new themselves, independent from government institutions and without commercials, organized from below. They network between a multitude of projects in the North and the South, projects consisting of ‘free places’ in which non-capitalist ways of thinking and acting are stimulated by story telling, imagination building, helping each other, making fun, rejecting securities, reclaiming public spaces for more than traffic only and respecting the autonomy of the different groups. According to me this working in affinity groups in which unity is not prescribed, diversity and a plurality of alternatives are emphasised and personal politics are practicized, you can consider as an endeavour to be really multicultural, because they want to accept all kinds of ‘otherness’.
./english/325.txt:103:In the United States the queer movement started in 1990 with Queer Nation, after a long battle with the gay and lesbian movement to accept transsexuals and transgenders. This battle shows how important it is not to fight for tolerance, acceptance and equal rights for your ‘own’ (deviate) identity only and how important affinity politics is. The queer movement added a new category, one that criticizes all existing, fixed categories. With the globalization of capitalism, queer culture was globalized and late years all kinds of international queer festivals are organized.
./english/325.txt:105:In the publications of the DiY-part of the alterglobalization movement only recently much attention is given to the queer movement. Yet in their criticizing collective identities, in their emphasis of imagination, their struggle to reclaim public places for fun, the deepening of relationships between people, their pink and silver clothes during actions, their tactical frivolity and emphasis on personal politics, the alterglobalization movement shows all kinds of connections with the aims of the queer movement. And also the other way around, like the queer slogan: ‘Queer, the privilege to imagine more’ and the description of Jackson (2003: 70): ‘Queer are those who knowingly occupy a marginal location’. The close connection is also expressed in the announcement of the international Queeruption festivals: queeruption is climbing over the artificial boundaries of sexuality, gender, nation, class, against racism, capitalism, patriarchy and binary gender repression; queeruption is non-commercial, is Do-it-Yourself!
./english/325.txt:107:In my opinion you can state that the queer movement and the alterglobalization movement have much in common, especially when the globalists started discussing sexuality and the queer movement started to criticize the social structures and material social practices and to express their feeling of solidarity with other oppressed groups. The question remains, however, whether the ‘free places’ of both movements are open enough to people unknown with anarchist ideas of ‘Do-it-Yourself’. If both movements really want ‘to queer the culture’ they have to accept all kinds of ‘otherness’ of people, to accept the many diversities of non-dominant cultures.v It seems the Zapatistas try to be as open as possible to these diversities. Therefore I want to end this paper with a repetition of their invitation of 1994 and 1996, directed to: leftist activists, youngsters, women, gays and lesbians, people of colour, immigrants, workers, farmers around the world. These invitation was not meant to unite them all, but to discuss new ways of thinking about power, resistance and globalization, to learn from each other and to respect their differences and autonomy.
./english/341.txt:10:One day before the beginning of the 4th ESF, ETUC carried out a meeting concerning the consequences of globalization for the workers and all the European Confederations that are its members participated in it.
./english/342.txt:7:1.Solidarity Fund (S.F.). The Solidarity fund motivated all those people who wished to participate but were unable to do so, either because they lacked the financial means or because they could not find the necessary funds. There were no criteria (political or of any other kind) for the financial support of delegations and individuals, who wished to be included in the solidarity fund. Every person who asked us to cover the expenses —either full or by half— of their transport, accommodation (in hotels or in other spaces) and free feeding within the Forum was included in the S.F. Furthermore, there was provision for free feeding and accommodation for those people who arrived at the forum and were not included in the delegations or in those who had already registered. The total ammount that was allocated to these delegations was 69,280 euros (Eastern/ Central European countries) and about 20,000 euros to the participants from the Middle East. Undoubtedly, the undertaking of the S.F. has a long way to go. It is crucial to investigate and to systematize the raising of resources, not only in view of a ESF; such a practice should be the constant concern of a movement, avoiding though the financial involvement of state. Moreover, it is worthwhile to find ways to make the S.F. widely known so that not only those who have participated in the Forum process know about it. Finally, through the process of exchange and mingling with our companions it would be advisable to transfer the message that the “western organizing committees” are not committees of the “financially robust”, but of ordinary activists against the neo-liberal globalization.
./english/342.txt:8:2.Meetings in the countries of Eastern Europe, Turkey and Middle East. The organizations of ESF meetings and events with the collaboration of the local forums or other movements in the above-mentioned countries, apart from the political and personal benefits that provided to those who participated, are major and decisive steps towards the relative success of the following: a. The connection of the local resistances with the European mobilizations against neo-liberal globalization. b. The essential political dialogue and the effort to lay out common political initiatives among countries that have followed different paces and courses of integration in E.U. and among movements with different political traditions. Of course, such an effort of compatibility and accord in a political level seems extremely difficult even to the movements of “Western Europe”.
./english/344.txt:27:All too often, official trade union practice seems implicitly to accept that internationalism is an elite concern, that it is safer if the membership does not learn too much of policies which they might perhaps oppose. In some unions, certainly, international issues are given reasonable prominence in internal communications and education; I fear that this is far >from typical, though openness may be increasing as unions struggle to find a response to ‘globalization’. In any event, since effective international solidarity is impossible without a ‘willingness to act’ on the part of grassroots trade unionists, it is unattainable without an active strategy by union leaders and activists to enhance knowledge, understanding and identification of common interests cross-nationally. This means engaging in what might be termed an ‘internal social dialogue’. (Hyman 2005)
./english/344.txt:80:Beijing Consensus. 2004. ‘Beijing Consensus: International Forum on Economic Globalization and Trade Unions’, October 11, 2004. http://www.acftu.org.cn/Consensus.htm
./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/359.txt:22:Moreover, by all evidence, the forums worldwide cause even disagreeing activists to congregate, to hear one another, to develop new ties, and to take seriously economic, political, gender, race, culture, ecology, globalization, and international goals and strategies. Some local forums excellently generate shared program and actions among subsets of participants. But even short of that, by at least enhancing solidarity and enlarging vision, all the local forums powerfully aid movements.
./english/360.txt:22:Moreover, by all evidence, the forums worldwide cause even disagreeing activists to congregate, to hear one another, to develop new ties, and to take seriously economic, political, gender, race, culture, ecology, globalization, and international goals and strategies. Some local forums excellently generate shared program and actions among subsets of participants. But even short of that, by at least enhancing solidarity and enlarging vision, all the local forums powerfully aid movements.
./english/361.txt:24:What about the good trajectory of contemporary anarchism, less visible in the media? This seems to me to be far more uplifting and inspiring. It is the widely awakening impetus to fight on the side of the oppressed in every domain of life, from family, to culture, to state, to economy, to the now very visible international arena of "globalization," and to do so in creative and courageous ways conceived to win improvements in people's lives now even while leading toward winning new institutions in the future. The good anarchism nowadays transcends a narrowness that has often in the past befallen the approach. Instead of being solely politically anti-authoritarian, as often in the old days, nowadays being an anarchist more and more implies having a gender, cultural, and an economic, as well as a politically-rooted orientation, with each aspect taken on a par with and also informing the rest. This is new, at least in my experience of anarchism, and it is useful to recall that many anarchists as little as a decade back, perhaps even more recently, would have said that anarchism addresses everything, yes, of course, but via an anti-authoritarian focus rather than by simultaneously elevating other concepts in their own right. Such past anarchists thought, whether implicitly or explicitly, that analysis from an overwhelmingly anti-authoritarian angle could explain the nuclear family better than an analysis rooted as well in kinship concepts, and could explain race or religion better than an analysis rooted as well in cultural concepts, and could explain production, consumption, and allocation better than an analysis rooted as well in economic concepts. They were wrong, and it is a great advance that many modern anarchists know this and are broadening their intellectual approach in accord so that anarchism now highlights not only the state, but also gender relations, and not only the economy but also cultural relations and ecology, sexuality, and freedom in every form it can be sought, and each not only through the sole prism of authority relations, but also informed by richer and more diverse concepts. And of course this desirable anarchism not only doesn't decry technology per se, but it becomes familiar with and employs diverse types of technology as appropriate. It not only doesn't decry institutions per se, or political forms per se, it tries to conceive new institutions and new political forms for activism and for a new society, including new ways of meeting, new ways of decision making, new ways of coordinating, and so on, most recently including revitalized affinity groups and original spokes structures. And it not only doesn’t decry reforms per se, but it struggles to define and win non-reformist reforms, attentive to people’s immediate needs and bettering people’s lives now as well as moving toward further gains, and eventually transformative gains, in the future.
./english/364.txt:23:Porto Alegre Social Summit Sets Stage for Counteroffensive against Globalization
./english/364.txt:31:Yet Porto Alegre, site of the World Social Forum (WSF) last year and again this year, has become the byword for the spirit of the burgeoning movement against corporate-driven globalization. Galvanized by the slogan "Another world is possible," some 70,000 people are expected to flock to this coastal city from January 31 to February 4. This figure is nearly six times that for last year.
./english/364.txt:35:And the place will be graced by personalities who have come to exemplify the diversity of the movement against corporate-driven globalization—among others, activist-thinker Noam Chomsky, Indian physicist-feminist Vandana Shiva, Canadian people’s advocate Maude Barlow, and Egyptian intellectual Samir Amin.
./english/364.txt:63:The anti-establishment forces gather in Porto Alegre after a tumultuous year. Perhaps the apogee of the anti-globalization movement came during Group of Eight Meeting in Genoa in the third week of July, when some 300,000 people marched in the face of police tear-gas attacks. Shortly after the Genoa clashes, in which one protester was killed by police, there was speculation in the world press that elite gatherings in non-authoritarian countries might no longer be possible in the future.
./english/365.txt:28:Various theorists have discussed the transformation of social structures and identity processes associated with economic globalization in the so-called post industrial
./english/365.txt:56:In the American case, the model for activist issue campaigns can be traced to “corporate” campaigns pioneered by labor unions in the early 1980s (Manheim 2001). These corporate campaigns have now spread throughout activist and advocacy circles, being adopted by environmental, health, human rights, as well as by anti-globalization and sustainable development groups and coalitions. For example, a small global network of NGOs stopped Monsanto’s plans to develop genetically engineered seed with a successful media campaign labeling the sterile seed strain “The Terminator.” And the small human rights organization Global Witness successfully targeted the diamond giant De Beers, which ultimately agreed to limit the market for the bloody “conflict” diamonds that motivated mercenary armies to establish regimes of terror in crumbling African states (Cowell 2001).
./english/365.txt:105:While many activist issue campaigns have secured remarkably favorable media coverage, disruptive public demonstrations -- the other major power lever of protest politics -- have generally received fairly negative coverage. The interesting exception is the Battle in Seattle, which produced fairly extensive coverage of activist messages about globalization (Rojecki, 2001). The relatively more favorable coverage of Seattle was due, in my estimation, to a combination of factors: its size and consequence took journalists by surprise, President Clinton made a public statement admitting the protesters had some
./english/365.txt:107:Beyond the characterizations of the activists, the predominant news framing of the overall protest movement is also negative, as in “anti-globalization.” This is clearly a news construction that is at odds with how many of the activists think of their common cause. If movement media framing could be put to a vote among activists, I suspect that “democratic globalization” would win over “anti-globalization” by a wide margin. For example, here is how American labor John Sweeney put it: “It's clear that globalization is here to stay. We have to accept that and work on having a seat at the table when the rules are written about how globalization works." (Greenhouse, 2002) In another account, Susan George (one of the founding members of the French global social justice organization ATTAC) rejects the “anti-globalization” framing as an insultingly poor account of global activism. In explaining the inadequacies of the “anti-globalization” frame, she also reveals why better accounts are unlikely to be written by news organizations bent on producing simple narratives: “The movement itself is, however, multi-focus and inclusive. It is concerned with the world: omnipresence of corporate rule, the rampages of financial markets, ecological destruction, maldistribution of wealth and power, international institutions constantly overstepping their mandates and lack of international democracy.” (George, 2001).
./english/365.txt:121:Beck, U. (2000) What is globalization? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
./english/365.txt:134:George, S. (2001) “The Global Citizen’s Movement: A New Actor for a New Politics”. Conference on reshaping globalization. Central European University. Budapest. October. (Posted on the World Social Forum site www.portoalegre2002.org )
./english/367.txt:60:Anti-globalization and Different Responses
./english/367.txt:65:The degree of insularity is best understood by looking at the early stages of the anti-globalization struggles. At the time of Seattle, there were very few public demonstrations on the day in India. During the Prague events in 2000, in Calcutta, Protest Initiative, a left regroupment effort involving the Inquilabi Communist Sangathan (West Bengal State Committee) (the ICS is the Indian Section of the Fourth International), the Majdoor Mukti Committee, the Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha (Forum Against Oppression of Women), the Sramajeevi Mahila Samity (Women Workers’ Association), the Indian Rationalist Association, and others organized a daylong program. But the mainstream left did not mobilize; nor did the CPI(ML) Liberation, which claims to be the real pole for an alternative left but which in fact is shifting simply to occupy the left reformist spot vacated by the CPI(M) as it becomes a servant of capitalist neoliberalism.
./english/367.txt:77:Mobilizations over globalization saw a similar divide. For the mainstream left, ensconced in power for over a quarter of century in the province of West Bengal, it is not capitalist globalization per se that is bad, but the effort by imperialism to corner the gains of this globalization. In consonance with this stance, the mainstream left parties, notably the CPI(M), have welcomed private sector investments and have sought to show that they are capable of playing a balancing role between labor and capital. But the reality is one of surrender to globalization disguised under much rhetoric. Government funding for education and health, never a fantastic amount, has declined, including in West Bengal.
./english/367.txt:83:In hospitals, free services have been drastically cut, and the quality of the remaining free services have become such that they can lead to the demise of the recipient. Though the population of Calcutta has grown massively, in 25 years of Left Front rule no new government hospital has been opened. The government has also been moving slowly but definitely toward curbing dissent. It has freely used the terrorist tag against its opponents. And it has displayed its commitment to globalization by turning against even reformist trade union struggles for concessions for the workers, even while at the all-India level the CPI(M) continues to mouth platitudes about the rights of workers. Government efforts on environmental protection show the same upper class orientation. Several thousand people were driven out of their “illegal” shantytown dwellings, and in one case the entire massive shantytown was “accidentally” set on fire. Activists of the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, as well as other organizations like those fighting for the ousted residents, were arrested. In rural West Bengal, in the name of combating Maoism and “separatism,” a horrifying level of violence has been unleashed, justified before the bourgeois media, and thereby substantially hushed up.
./english/367.txt:85:Nonetheless, the CPI(M) despite its rightward-moving trajectory, cannot simply turn its back on the working class. Its main electoral and social base remains the working class and the rural poor. So it has adapted to the anti-globalization struggles. It was one of the key players in organizing the Asian Social Forum at Hyderabad. Formally the party was absent. But with a plethora of party-controlled mass fronts packing the arrangements, there was no problem with CPI(M) leaders getting ample space at the Forum. At the same time, by taking a stand supporting the exclusion of parties, they made sure that smaller left parties did not get much space.
./english/367.txt:93:An ideological think tank connected to some Maoist groups in India has come out with a publication asserting that the WSF is a creation of imperialism. In a nutshell, the following is a summary of the points made by the publication entitled “The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum: Lessons for the Struggle against ‘Globalization’” by the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE):
./english/367.txt:109:“Globalization,” a misleading word for the current onslaught by imperialism, can be resisted, and even defeated, by a combination of struggles at various levels, in various countries, in various forms; and forces fighting “globalization” will need to join hands in struggle against it. However, a careful analysis reveals that the World Social Forum is not an instrument of such struggle. It is a diversion from it.
./english/372.txt:21:One might argue this is because anarchism itself has made such small inroads into the academy. As a political philosophy, anarchism is going through veritable explosion in recent years. Anarchist or anarchist-inspired movements are growing everywhere; anarchist principles--autonomy, voluntary association, self-organization, mutual aid, direct democracy--have become the basis for organizing within the globalization movement and beyond. As Barbara Epstein has recently pointed out, at least in Europe and the Americas, it has by now largely taken the place Marxism had in the social movements of the '60s: the core revolutionary ideology, it is the source of ideas and inspiration; even those who do not consider themselves anarchists feel they have to define themselves in relation to it. Yet this has found almost no reflection in academic discourse. Most academics seem to have only the vaguest idea what anarchism is even about; or dismiss it with the crudest stereotypes ("anarchist organization! but isn't that a contradiction in terms?") In the United States--and I don't think is all that different elsewhere--there are thousands of academic Marxists of one sort or another, but hardly anyone who is willing to openly call herself an anarchist.
./english/372.txt:55:The historical relations between political and artistic avant gardes have been explored at length by others. For me though the really intriguing questions is: why is it that artists have so often been so drawn to revolutionary politics to begin with? Because it does seem to be the case that, even in times and places when there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary change, the one place on is most likely to find one is among artists, authors, and musicians; even more so, in fact, that among professional intellectuals. It seems to me the answer must have something to do with alienation. There would appear to be a direct link between the experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being (individually or collectively)--that is, the experience of certain forms of unalienated production--and the ability to imagine social alternatives; particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity. Which would allow us to see the historical shift between seeing the vanguard as the relatively unalienated artists (or perhaps intellectuals) to seeing them as the representatives of the "most oppressed" in a new light. In fact, I would suggest, revolutionary coalitions always tend to consist of an alliance between a society's least alienated and its most oppressed. And this is less elitist a formulation than it might sound, because it also seems to be the case that actual revolutions tend to occur when these two categories come to overlap. That would at any rate explain why it almost always seems to be peasants and craftspeople - or alternately, newly proletarianized former peasants and craftspeople - who actually rise up and overthrow capitalist regimes, and not those inured to generations of wage labor. Finally, I suspect this would also help explain the extraordinary importance of indigenous people's struggles in that planetary uprising usually referred to as the "anti-globalization" movement: such people tend to be simultaneously the very least alienated and most oppressed people on earth, and once it is technologically possible to include them in revolutionary coalitions, it is almost inevitable that they should take a leading role.
./english/379.txt:1:åGlobalization, Technopolitics and Revolutionπ
./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:20:In this paper, I will engage some issues involving globalization, technological revolution and the alleged rise of a new economy, networked society and cyberspace in relationship to the problematic of revolution and the prospects for a radical democratic or socialist transformation of society. Globalization and the rise of a new computer and information technology-based economy and society is interpreted in both popular and academic literature as a revolution in which new technologies are transforming every mode of life from how individuals do research to how people communicate and interact socially. There is some truth in this notion, but it is also true that the technological revolution perpetuates the interests of the dominant economic and political powers, intensifies divisions between haves and have nots, and is a defining feature of a new and improved form of global technocapitalism.
./english/379.txt:24:Yet even as I argue that there are novelties and discontinuities in the current configuration of economic, political, social and cultural constellations that constitute the contemporary moment, there are also continuities with the previous forms of åmodernπ society to be noted. In particular, the ånewπ economy exhibits crucial features of the åoldπ capitalism such as the driving forces of capital accumulation, competition, commodification, exploitation and the business cycle. From this perspective, globalization and technological revolution are best theorized as forms of the global restructuring of capitalism in which technological development and a turbulent socio-economic transformation are intrinsically interconnected.
./english/379.txt:28:As to whether globalization renders revolution in the classical Marxian tradition obsolete, I would argue that much significant political struggle today, especially resistance to globalization, is mediated by technopolitics. The use of computer and information technology is becoming a normalized aspect of politics, just as the broadcasting media were some decades ago. Deploying computer-mediated technology for technopolitics, however, opens new terrains of political struggle for voices and groups excluded from the mainstream media and thus increases potential for resistance and intervention by oppositional groups. Hence, if revolution is to have a future in the contemporary era it must incorporate technopolitics as part of its strategy, conceiving of technopolitics, however, as an arm of struggle and not an end in and of itself.
./english/379.txt:32:Consequently, in this paper, I focus on the ways that an oppositional politics can use new technologies to intervene within the global restructuring of capitalism to promote democratic and anti-capitalist social movements aiming at radical structural transformation. I would argue that globalization and technological revolution are in some ways inevitable -- barring an apocalyptic collapse of the global economy -- but the forms that they take are not. That is, I think that the trends toward a more global economy and culture, a networked society, and the continued flow of commodities, images, cultural forms, technology and people across the globe will continue apace, as will intense technological revolution. Both take the form of what Schumpeter called åcreative destructionπ and guarantee that the next decades will be highly turbulent, contested and full of struggle and conflict. But the forms that globalization and technological revolution will take are neither fixed nor determined. Hence, I would argue that it is perfectly reasonable to oppose corporate capitalist globalization and its market model of society, its neoliberal laissez-faire ideology and its putting profit, competition and market logic before all other aspects of life. I will accordingly focus on the ways that technopolitics can and are being used for anti-capitalist contestation, while noting the limitations of this conception.
./english/379.txt:38:Significant political struggles today against globalization are mediated by technopolitics, that is the use of new technologies such as computers and the internet to advance political goals. To some extent, politics in the modern era have always been mediated by technology, with the printing press, photography, film, radio and television playing crucial roles in politics and all realms of social life, as McLuhan, Innis, Mumford and others have long argued and documented. In representative democracies participation is mediated by technology, as the disastrous failure of voting machines and the voting-counting process in the US 2000 presidential election dramatized (see Kellner forthcoming).
./english/379.txt:78:Thus, using new technologies to link information and practice and to advance oppositional politics is neither extraneous to political battles nor merely utopian. Even if immediate gains are not won, often the information circulated or the alliances formed can have material effects. There are, moreover, striking examples of how internet-centred organizing campaigns effectively worked against the institutions and corporations of capitalist globalization. Successful struggles against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1995-1998 involved websites and e-mail campaigns against the US-supported effort to develop binding rules on how states treat foreign investors and list-serves linking the groups struggling against the åagreementπ. Obviously, the internet alone did not defeat this initiative for capitalist globalization, but it enabled the non-government organizations fighting against it to circulate information, share resources and link their struggles (see Smith and Smythe 2000).
./english/379.txt:96:The global movement against capitalist globalization
./english/379.txt:100:One of the more instructive examples of the use of the internet to foster global struggles against the excesses of corporate capitalism occurred in the protests in Seattle and throughout the world against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in December 1999, and the subsequent emergence of a worldwide anti-globalization movement in 2000-2001. Behind these actions was a global protest movement using the internet to organize resistance to the institutions of capitalist globalization, while championing democratization. In the build-up to the 1999 Seattle demonstrations, many websites generated anti-WTO material and numerous mailing lists used the internet to distribute critical material and to organize the protest. The result was the mobilization of caravans from throughout the United States to take protestors to Seattle, as well as contingents of activists throughout the world. Many of the protestors had never met and were recruited through the internet. For the first time ever, labour, environmentalist, feminist, anticapitalist, animal rights, anarchist and other groups organized to protest aspects of globalization and to form new alliances and solidarities for future struggles. In addition, demonstrations took place throughout the world, and a proliferation of anti-WTO material against the extremely secret group spread throughout the internet.[9]
./english/379.txt: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:108:The Seattle protests had some immediate consequences. The day after the demonstrators made good on their promise to shut down the WTO negotiations, Bill Clinton gave a speech endorsing the concept of labour rights enforceable by trade sanctions, thus effectively making impossible any agreement during the Seattle meetings. In addition, at the World Economic Forum in Davos a month later there was much discussion of how concessions were necessary on labour and the environment if consensus over globalization and free trade were to be possible. Importantly, the issues of overcoming divisions between the information-rich and the information-poor, and improving the lot of the disenfranchised and oppressed, bringing these groups the benefits of globalization, were also seriously discussed at the meeting and in the media.
./english/379.txt:112:More important, many activists were energized by the new alliances, solidarities and militancy, and continued to cultivate an anti-globalization movement. The Seattle demonstrations were followed by April 2000 struggles in Washington, D.C., to protest the World Bank and IMF, and later in the year against capitalist globalization in Prague and Melbourne; in April 2001, an extremely large and militant protest erupted against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quebec City. It was apparent that a new worldwide movement was in the making capable of uniting diverse opponents of capitalist globalization throughout the world. The anticorporate globalization movement favoured globalization from below, which would protect the environment, labour rights, national cultures, democratization and other goods from the ravages of an uncontrolled capitalist globalization (see Falk 1999 and Brecher, Costello and Smith 2000).
./english/379.txt:116:The movement against capitalist globalization used the internet to organize mass demonstrations and to disseminate information to the world concerning the policies of the institutions of capitalist globalization. The events made clear that the protestors were not against globalization per se, but were against neoliberal globalization, opposing specific policies and institutions that produce intensified exploitation of labour, environmental devastation, growing divisions among social classes and the undermining of democracy. The emerging anti-globalization from above movements are locating these problems in the context of opposition to a restructuring of a neoliberal market capitalism on a worldwide basis for maximum profit with zero accountability. The anti-capitalist movements, by contrast, have made clear the need for democratization, regulation, rules and globalization in the interests of people and not profit.
./english/379.txt: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:124:Hence, to capital's globalization from above, cyberactivists have been attempting to carry out globalization from below, developing networks of solidarity and propagating oppositional ideas and movements throughout the planet. To the capitalist international of transnational corporate-led globalization, a Fifth International, to use Waterman's phrase (1992), of computer-mediated activism is emerging that is qualitatively different from the party-based socialist and communist Internationals. Such networking links labour, feminist, ecological, peace and other anticapitalist groups, providing the basis for a new politics of alliance and solidarity to overcome the limitations of postmodern identity politics (see Dyer-Witheford 1999 and Burbach 2001).
./english/379.txt:130:A key to developing a robust technopolitics is articulation, the mediation of technopolitics with real problems and struggles, rather than self-contained reflections on the internal politics of the internet.[10] The Zapatista movement in Chiapas is addressing problems of survival and transforming social, cultural, political and economic conditions, using new technologies as an instrument of political struggle. Likewise, the campaigns against major capitalist corporations and the institutions of capitalist globalization are attempting to advance progressive political agendas and to engage key issues of the day.
./english/379.txt:160:I have not discussed the ways that technopolitics could be used to struggle not only against capitalism, but for socialism. I would argue that socialist ideas are still relevant to the politics of the contemporary era and that in particular Karl Marx's ideas, for from being obsolete, are still essential in developing critical theories of globalization, technology and capitalism in the current conjuncture (see Kellner 1995). It could be that only a socialist politics could overcome the digital divide, making accessible to all the benefits of the technological revolution. A socialist government could provide wireless communications in underdeveloped societies making possible access to the internet and use of new communications and information technology even to societies that are not yet wired, or whose telephone systems extend only to the privileged. Interestingly, societies like Korea, Japan and the Philippines make more extensive use of wireless communications than the US, with wireless messaging systems and internet access made use of by the working classes as forms of popular communication.
./english/379.txt:164:This study has suggested that in the era of globalization and the internet political struggles are at once local and global, that there are continuities and discontinuities with struggles and movements of the past, and that we can therefore continue to draw on the most progressive ideas of the modern tradition while also developing new concepts of politics and new strategies for social transformation. A revolution of the future needs to articulate models and ideals of a post-capitalist economy, a radical democratic polity, an egalitarian and socially just multicultural society, and diverse, free and open culture. Ideals of the past can and no doubt will enter into revolutionary thought of the future, but new ideals, values and forms of everyday life will no doubt emerge. The future of revolution is thus open and requires new theory and practice as well as appropriation of the best progressive heritages of the past.
./english/379.txt:172:[1] This study and the concepts of globalization and technological revolution developed here are grounded in the studies of Best and Kellner, forthcoming. By årevolutionπ, I am assuming a concept of fundamental economic, political, social and cultural transformation, such as was developed in the works of Herbert Marcuse. See Kellner 1984 and the six volumes of Marcuse's collected and largely unpublished papers that I am publishing with Routledge.
./english/379.txt:210:Brecher, J., T. Costello and B. Smith (2000) Globalization From Below, Boston: South End Press.
./english/379.txt:214:Burbach, R. (2001) Globalization and Postmodern Politics: From Zapatistas to High-Tech Robber Barons, London: Pluto Press.
./english/379.txt:230:Falk, R. (1999) Predatory Globalization, London and Cambridge: Blackwell.
./english/379.txt:254:Smith, P. J. and E. Smythe (2000) åGlobalization, citizenship and technology: the MAI meets the internetπ, International Studies Association, Los Angeles (March).
./english/380.txt:1:Theorizing Globalization
./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:13:Moreover, advocates of a postmodern break in history argue that developments in transnational capitalism are producing a new global historical configuration of post-Fordism, or postmodernism as an emergent cultural logic of capitalism (Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Jameson 1991; and Gottdiener 1995). Others define the emergent global economy and culture as a "network society" grounded in new communications and information technology (Castells 1996, 1997, and 1998). For others, globalization marks the triumph of capitalism and its market economy (see apologists such as Fukuyama 1992 and Friedman 1999 who perceive this process as positive, while others portray it as negative, such as Mander and Goldsmith 1996; Eisenstein 1998; and Robins and Webster 1999). Some theorists see the emergence of a new transnational ruling elite and the universalization of consumerism (Sklair 2001), while others stress global fragmentation of “the clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996). Driving “post” discourses into novel realms of theory and politics, Hardt and Negri (2000) present the emergence of “Empire” as producing emergent forms of sovereignty, economy, culture, and political struggle that open the new millennium to an unforeseeable and unpredictable flow of novelties, surprises, and upheavals.
./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:21: I wish to sketch aspects of a critical theory of globalization that will discuss the fundamental transformations in the world economy, politics, and culture in a dialectical framework that distinguishes between progressive and emancipatory features and oppressive and negative attributes. This requires articulations of the contradictions and ambiguities of globalization and the ways that globalization is both imposed from above and yet can be contested and reconfigured from below. I argue that the key to understanding globalization critically is theorizing it at once as a product of technological revolution and the global restructuring of capitalism in which economic, technological, political, and cultural features are intertwined. From this perspective, one should avoid both technological and economic determinism and all one-sided optics of globalization in favor of a view that theorizes globalization as a highly complex, contradictory, and thus ambiguous set of institutions and social relations, as well as involving flows of goods, services, ideas, technologies, cultural forms, and people (see Appadurai 1996).
./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:29:Globalization, Technological Revolution, and the Restructuring of Capitalism
./english/380.txt:33: For critical social theory, globalization involves both capitalist markets and sets of social relations and flows of commodities, capital, technology, ideas, forms of culture, and people across national boundaries via a global networked society (see Castells 1996, 1997, and 1998 and Held, et al 1999). The transmutations of technology and capital work together to create a new globalized and interconnected world. A technological revolution involving the creation of a computerized network of communication, transportation, and exchange is the presupposition of a globalized economy, along with the extension of a world capitalist market system that is absorbing ever more areas of the world and spheres of production, exchange, and consumption into its orbit. The technological revolution presupposes global computerized networks and the free movement of goods, information, and peoples across national boundaries. Hence, the Internet and global computer networks make possible globalization by producing a technological infrastructure for the global economy. Computerized networks, satellite-communication systems, and the software and hardware that link together and facilitate the global economy depend on breakthroughs in microphysics. Technoscience has generated transistors, increasingly powerful and sophisticated computer chips, integrated circuits, high-tech communication systems, and a technological revolution that provides an infrastructure for the global economy and society (see Gilder 1989 and 2000; Kaku 1997; and Best and Kellner 2001).
./english/380.txt:37: From this perspective, globalization cannot be understood without comprehending the scientific and technological revolutions and global restructuring of capital that are the motor and matrix of globalization. Many theorists of globalization, however, either fail to observe the fundamental importance of scientific and technological revolution and the new technologies that help spawn globalization, or interpret the process in a technological determinist framework that occludes the economic dimensions of the imperatives and institutions of capitalism. Such one-sided optics fail to grasp the coevolution of science, technology, and capitalism, and the complex and highly ambiguous system of globalization that combines capitalism and democracy, technological mutations, and a turbulent mixture of costs and benefits, gains and losses.
./english/380.txt:49: There are positive and negative models of technological determinism. A positive discourse envisages new technologies as producing a new economy interpreted affirmatively as fabricating a fresh wealth of nations. On this affirmative view, globalization provides opportunities for small business and individual entrepreneurs, empowering excluded persons and social groups. Technophiles claim that new technologies also make possible increased democratization, communication, education, culture, entertainment, and other social benefits, thus generating a utopia of social progress.
./english/380.txt:61: In addition to technologically determinist and reductive postindustrial accounts of globalization, there are economic determinist discourses that view it primarily as the continuation of capitalism rather than its restructuring through technological revolution. A large number of theorists conceive globalization simply as a process of the imposition of the logic of capital and neo-liberalism on various parts of the world rather than seeing the restructuring process and the enormous changes and transformations that scientific and technological revolution are producing in the networked economy and society. Capital logic theorists, for instance, portray globalization primarily as the imposition of the logic of capital on the world economy, polity, and culture, often engaging in economic determinism, rather than seeing the complex new configurations of economy, technology, polity, and culture, and attendant forces of domination and resistance. In the same vein, some critical theorists depict globalization as the triumph of a globalized hegemony of market capitalism, where capital creates a homogeneous world culture of commercialization, commodification, administration, surveillance, and domination (Robins and Webster 1999).
./english/380.txt:65: From these economistic perspectives, globalization is merely a continuation of previous social tendencies; i.e. the logic of capital and domination by corporate and commercial interests of the world economy and culture. Defenders of capitalism, by contrast, present globalization as the triumph of free markets, democracy, and individual freedom (Fukuyama 1998 and Friedman 1999). Hence, there are both positive and negative versions of economic and technological determinism. Most theories of globalization, therefore, are reductive, undialectical, and one-sided, either failing to see the interaction between technological features of globalization and the global restructuring of capitalism, or the complex relations between capitalism and democracy. Dominant discourses of globalization are thus one-sidedly for or against globalization, failing to articulate the contradictions and the conflicting costs and benefits, upsides and downsides, of the process. Hence, many current theories of globalization do not capture the novelty and ambiguity of the present moment that involves both innovative forms of technology and economy -- and emergent conflicts and problems generated by the contradictions of globalization.
./english/380.txt:69: In particular, an economic determinism and reductionism that merely depicts globalization as the continuation of market capitalism fails to comprehend the new forms and modes of capitalism itself which are based on novel developments in science, technology, culture, and everyday life. Likewise, technological determinism fails to note how the new technologies and new economy are part of a global restructuring of capitalism and are not autonomous forces that themselves are engendering a new society and economy which breaks with the previous mode of social organization. The postindustrial society is sometimes referred to as the "knowledge society," or "information society," in which knowledge and information are given roles more predominant than earlier days (see the survey and critique in Webster 1995). It is now obvious that the knowledge and information sectors are increasingly important domains of our contemporary moment and that therefore the theories of Daniel Bell and other postindustrial theorists are not as ideological and far off the mark as many of his critics on the left once argued. But in order to avoid the technological determinism and idealism of many forms of this theory, one should theorize the information or knowledge "revolution" as part and parcel of a new form of technocapitalism marked by a synthesis of capital and technology.
./english/380.txt:73: Some poststructuralist theories that stress the complexity of globalization exaggerate the disjunctions and autonomous flows of capital, technology, culture, people, and goods, thus a critical theory of globalization grounds globalization in a theory of capitalist restructuring and technological revolution. To paraphrase Max Horkheimer, whoever wants to talk about capitalism, must talk about globalization, and it is impossible to theorize globalization without talking about the restructuring of capitalism. The term "technocapitalism" is useful to describe the synthesis of capital and technology in the present organization of society (Kellner 1989a). Unlike theories of postmodernity (i.e. Baudrillard), or the knowledge and information society, which often argue that technology is the new organizing principle of society, the concept of technocapitalism points to both the increasingly important role of technology and the enduring primacy of capitalist relations of production. In an era of unrestrained capitalism, it would be difficult to deny that contemporary societies are still organized around production and capital accumulation, and that capitalist imperatives continue to dominate production, distribution, and consumption, as well as other cultural, social and political domains.[3] Workers remain exploited by capitalists and capital persists as the hegemonic force -- more so than ever after the collapse of communism.
./english/380.txt:89: Globalization also is constituted by a complex interconnection between capitalism and democracy, which involves positive and negative features, that both empowers and disempowers individuals and groups, undermining and yet creating potential for fresh types of democracy. Yet most theories of globalization are either primarily negative, presenting it as a disaster for the human species, or as positive, bringing a wealth of products, ideas, and economic opportunities to a global arena. Hence, I would advocate development of a critical theory of globalization that would dialectically appraise its positive and negative features. A critical theory is sharply critical of globalization’s oppressive effects, skeptical of legitimating ideological discourse, but also recognizes the centrality of the phenomenon in the present age. And it affirms and promotes globalization’s progressive features (such as the Internet, which, as I document below, makes possible a reconstruction of education and more democratic polity, as well as increasing the power of capital), while noting contradictions and ambiguities.
./english/380.txt:93:The Contradictions of Globalization
./english/380.txt:97: The terrorist acts on the United States on September 11 and subsequent Terror War dramatically disclose the downsides of globalization, the ways that global flows of technology, goods, information, ideologies, and people can have destructive as well as productive effects. The disclosure of powerful anti-Western terrorist networks shows that globalization divides the world as it unifies, that it produces enemies as it incorporates participants. The events disclose explosive contradictions and conflicts at the heart of globalization and that the technologies of information, communication, and transportation that facilitate globalization can also be used to undermine and attack it, and generate instruments of destruction as well as production[k1] .[4]
./english/380.txt:101: The experience of September 11 points to the objective ambiguity of globalization, that positive and negative sides are interconnected, that the institutions of the open society unlock the possibilities of destruction and violence, as well as democracy, free trade, and cultural and social exchange. Once again, the interconnection and interdependency of the networked world was dramatically demonstrated as terrorists from the Middle East brought local grievances from their region to attack key symbols of American power and the very infrastructure of New York. Some saw terrorism as an expression of “the dark side of globalization,” while I would conceive it as part of the objective ambiguity of globalization that simultaneously creates friends and enemies, wealth and poverty, and growing divisions between the “haves” and “have nots.” Yet, the downturning of the global economy, intensification of local and global political conflicts, repression of human rights and civil liberties, and general increase in fear and anxiety have certainly undermined the naïve optimism of globaphiles who perceived globalization as a purely positive instrument of progress and well-being.
./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:117: Consequently, I want to argue that in order to properly theorize globalization one needs to conceptualize several sets of contradictions generated by globalization's combination of technological revolution and restructuring of capital, which in turn generate tensions between capitalism and democracy, and “haves” and “have nots.” Within the world economy, globalization involves the proliferation of the logic of capital, but also the spread of democracy in information, finance, investing, and the diffusion of technology (see Friedman 1999 and Hardt and Negri 2000). Globalization is thus a contradictory amalgam of capitalism and democracy, in which the logic of capital and the market system enter ever more arenas of global life, even as democracy spreads and more political regions and spaces of everyday life are being contested by democratic demands and forces. But the overall process is contradictory. Sometimes globalizing forces promote democracy and sometimes inhibit it, thus either equating capitalism and democracy, or simply opposing them, are problematical. These tensions are especially evident, as I will argue, in the domain of the Internet and the expansion of new realms of technologically-mediated communication, information, and politics.
./english/380.txt:121: The processes of globalization are highly turbulent and have generated new conflicts throughout the world. Benjamin Barber (1998) describes the strife between McWorld and Jihad, contrasting the homogenizing, commercialized, Americanized tendencies of the global economy and culture with traditional cultures which are often resistant to globalization. Thomas Friedman (1999) makes a more benign distinction between what he calls the "Lexus" and the "Olive Tree." The former is a symbol of modernization, of affluence and luxury, and of Westernized consumption, contrasted with the Olive Tree that is a symbol of roots, tradition, place, and stable community. Barber (1997), however, is too negative toward McWorld and Jihad, failing to adequately describe the democratic and progressive forces within both. Although Barber recognizes a dialectic of McWorld and Jihad, he opposes both to democracy, failing to perceive how both generate their own democratic forces and tendencies, as well as opposing and undermining democratization. Within the Western democracies, for instance, there is not just top-down homogenization and corporate domination, but also globalization-from-below and oppositional social movements that desire alternatives to capitalist globalization. Thus, it is not only traditionalist, non-Western forces of Jihad that oppose McWorld. Likewise, Jihad has its democratizing forces as well as the reactionary Islamic fundamentalists who are now the most demonized elements of the contemporary era, as I discuss below. Jihad, like McWorld, has its contradictions and its potential for democratization, as well as elements of domination and destruction (see Kellner, forthcoming).
./english/380.txt:125: Friedman, by contrast, is too uncritical of globalization , caught up in his own Lexus high-consumption life-style, failing to perceive the depth of the oppressive features of globalization and breadth and extent of resistance and opposition to it. In particular, he fails to articulate contradictions between capitalism and democracy, and the ways that globalization and its economic logic undermines democracy as well as circulates it. Likewise, he does not grasp the virulence of the premodern and Jihadist tendencies that he blithely identifies with the Olive tree, and the reasons why globalization and the West are so strongly resisted in many parts of the world.
./english/380.txt:129: Hence, it is important to present globalization as a strange amalgam of both homogenizing forces of sameness and uniformity, and heterogeneity, difference, and hybridity, as well as a contradictory mixture of democratizing and anti-democratizing tendencies. On one hand, globalization unfolds a process of standardization in which a globalized mass culture circulates the globe creating sameness and homogeneity everywhere. But globalized culture makes possible unique appropriations and developments all over the world, thus proliferating hybridity, difference, and heterogeneity.[5] Every local context involves its own appropriation and reworking of global products and signifiers, thus proliferating difference, otherness, diversity, and variety (Luke and Luke 2000). Grasping that globalization embodies these contradictory tendencies at once, that it can be both a force of homogenization and heterogeneity, is crucial to articulating the contradictions of globalization and avoiding one-sided and reductive conceptions.
./english/380.txt:133: My intention is to present globalization as conflictual, contradictory and open to resistance and democratic intervention and transformation and not just as a monolithic juggernaut of progress or domination as in many discourses. This goal is advanced by distinguishing between "globalization from below" and the "globalization from above" of corporate capitalism and the capitalist state, a distinction that should help us to get a better sense of how globalization does or does not promote democratization. "Globalization from below" refers to the ways in which marginalized individuals and social movements resist globalization and/or use its institutions and instruments to further democratization and social justice. While on one level, globalization significantly increases the supremacy of big corporations and big government, it can also give power to groups and individuals that were previously left out of the democratic dialogue and terrain of political struggle. Such potentially positive effects of globalization include increased access to education for individuals excluded from entry to culture and knowledge and the possibility of oppositional individuals and groups to participate in global culture and politics through gaining access to global communication and media networks and to circulate local struggles and oppositional ideas through these media. The role of new technologies in social movements, political struggle, and everyday life forces social movements to reconsider their political strategies and goals and democratic theory to appraise how new technologies do and do not promote democratization (Kellner 1997 and 1999b).
./english/380.txt:137: In their magisterial book Empire, Hardt and Negri (2000) present contradictions within globalization in terms of an imperializing logic of “Empire” and an assortment of struggles by the multitude, creating a contradictory and tension-full situation. As in my conception, Hardt and Negri present globalization as a complex process that involves a multidimensional mixture of expansions of the global economy and capitalist market system, new technologies and media, expanded judicial and legal modes of governance, and emergent modes of power, sovereignty, and resistance.[6] Combining poststructuralism with “autonomous Marxism,” Hardt and Negri stress political openings and possibilities of struggle within Empire in an optimistic and buoyant text that envisages progressive democratization and self-valorization in the turbulent process of the restructuring of capital.
./english/380.txt:141:Many theorists, by contrast, have argued that one of the trends of globalization is depoliticization of publics, the decline of the nation-state, and end of traditional politics (Boggs 2000). While I would agree that globalization is promoted by tremendously powerful economic forces and that it often undermines democratic movements and decision-making, I would also argue that there are openings and possibilities for both a globalization from below that inflects globalization for positive and progressive ends, and that globalization can thus help promote as well as undermine democracy.[7] Globalization involves both a disorganization and reorganization of capitalism, a tremendous restructuring process, which creates openings for progressive social change and intervention. In a more fluid and open economic and political system, oppositional forces can gain concessions, win victories, and effect progressive changes. During the 1970s, new social movements, new non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and new forms of struggle and solidarity emerged that have been expanding to the present day (Hardt and Negri 2000; Burbach 2001; and Foran, forthcoming).
./english/380.txt:145: The present conjuncture, I would suggest, is marked by a conflict between growing centralization and organization of power and wealth in the hands of the few contrasted with opposing processes exhibiting a fragmentation of power that is more plural, multiple, and open to contestation than was previously the case. As the following analysis will suggest, both tendencies are observable and it is up to individuals and groups to find openings for political intervention and social transformation. Thus, rather than just denouncing globalization, or engaging in celebration and legitimation, a critical theory of globalization reproaches those aspects that are oppressive, while seizing upon opportunities to fight domination and exploitation and to promote democratization, justice, and a progressive reconstruction of the polity, society, and culture.
./english/380.txt:149: Against capitalist globalization from above, there have been a significant eruption of forces and subcultures of resistance that have attempted to preserve specific forms of culture and society against globalization and homogenization, and to create alternative forces of society and culture, thus exhibiting resistance and globalization from below. Most dramatically, peasant and guerrilla movements in Latin America, labor unions, students, and environmentalists throughout the world, and a variety of other groups and movements have resisted capitalist globalization and attacks on previous rights and benefits.[8] Several dozen people's organizations from around the world have protested World Trade Organization policies and a backlash against globalization is visible everywhere. Politicians who once championed trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA are now often quiet about these arrangements and at the 1996 annual Davos World Economic Forum its founder and managing director published a warning entitled: "Start Taking the Backlash Against Globalization Seriously." Reports surfaced that major representatives of the capitalist system expressed fear that capitalism was getting too mean and predatory, that it needs a kinder and gentler state to ensure order and harmony, and that the welfare state may make a come-back (see the article in New York Times, February 7, 1996: A15).[9] One should take such reports with the proverbial grain of salt, but they express fissures and openings in the system for critical discourse and intervention.
./english/380.txt:153: Indeed, by 1999, the theme of the annual Davos conference was making globalization work for poor countries and minimizing the differences between have and have nots. The growing divisions between rich and poor were worrying some globalizers, as were the wave of crises in Asian, Latin American, and other developing countries. In James Flanigan's report in the Los Angeles Times (Feb. 19, 1999), the "main theme" is to "spread the wealth. In a world frightened by glaring imbalances and the weakness of economies from Indonesia to Russia, the talk is no longer of a new world economy getting stronger but of ways to 'keep the engine going.'" In particular, the globalizers were attempting to keep economies growing in the more developed countries and capital flowing to developing nations. U.S. Vice-President Al Gore called on all countries to spur economic growth, and he proposed a new U.S.-led initiative to eliminate the debt burdens of developing countries. South African President Nelson Mandela asked: "Is globalization only for the powerful? Does it offer nothing to the men, women and children who are ravaged by the violence of poverty?"
./english/380.txt:157:The Global Movement Against Capitalist Globalization
./english/380.txt:161: As the new millennium opened, there was no clear answer to Mandela’s question and with the global economic recession and the Terror War erupting in 2001, the situation of many developing countries has worsened. Yet as part of the backlash against globalization over the past years, a wide range of theorists have argued that the proliferation of difference and the shift to more local discourses and practices define the contemporary scene. In this view, theory and politics should shift from the level of globalization and its accompanying often totalizing and macro dimensions in order to focus on the local, the specific, the particular, the heterogeneous, and the micro level of everyday experience. An array of theories associated with poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, and multiculturalism focus on difference, otherness, marginality, the personal, the particular, and the concrete over more general theory and politics that aim at more global or universal conditions.[10] Likewise, a broad spectrum of subcultures of resistance have focused their attention on the local level, organizing struggles around identity issues such as gender, race, sexual preference, or youth subculture.
./english/380.txt:165: It can be argued that such dichotomies as those between the global and the local express contradictions and tensions between crucial constitutive forces of the present moment, and that it is therefore a mistake to reject focus on one side in favor of exclusive concern with the other (Cvetkovich and Kellner 1997). Hence, an important challenge for a critical theory of globalization is to think through the relationships between the global and the local by observing how global forces influence and even structure an increasing number of local situations. This requires analysis as well of how local forces mediate the global, inflecting global forces to diverse ends and conditions, and producing unique configurations of the local and the global as the matrix for thought and action in the contemporary world (see Luke and Luke 2000).
./english/380.txt:169: Globalization is thus necessarily complex and challenging to both critical theories and radical democratic politics. But many people these days operate with binary concepts of the global and the local, and promote one or the other side of the equation as the solution to the world's problems. For globalists, globalization is the solution and underdevelopment, backwardness, and provincialism are the problem. For localists, globalization is the problem and localization is the solution. But, less simplistically, it is the mix that matters and whether global or local solutions are most fitting depends on the conditions in the distinctive context that one is addressing and the specific solutions and policies being proposed.
./english/380.txt:173: For instance, the Internet can be used to promote capitalist globalization or struggles against it. One of the more instructive examples of the use of the Internet to foster movements against the excesses of corporate capitalism occurred in the protests in Seattle and throughout the world against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in December 1999. Behind these actions was a global protest movement using the Internet to organize resistance to the WTO and capitalist globalization, while championing democratization. Many web sites contained anti-WTO material and numerous mailing lists used the Internet to distribute critical material and to organize the protest. The result was the mobilization of caravans from throughout the United States to take protestors to Seattle, many of whom had never met and were recruited through the Internet. There were also significant numbers of international participants in Seattle which exhibited labor, environmentalist, feminist, anti-capitalist, animal rights, anarchist, and other groups organized to protest aspects of globalization and form new alliances and solidarities for future struggles. In addition, protests occurred throughout the world, and a proliferation of anti-WTO material against the extremely secret group spread throughout the Internet.[11]
./english/380.txt: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:181: The Seattle protests had some immediate consequences. The day after the demonstrators made good on their promise to shut down the WTO negotiations, Bill Clinton gave a speech endorsing the concept of labor rights enforceable by trade sanctions, thus effectively making impossible any agreement and consensus during the Seattle meetings. In addition, at the World Economic Forum in Davos a month later there was much discussion of how concessions were necessary on labor and the environment if consensus over globalization and free trade were to be possible. Importantly, the issue of overcoming divisions between the information rich and poor, and improving the lot of the disenfranchised and oppressed, bringing these groups the benefits of globalization, were also seriously discussed at the meeting and in the media.
./english/380.txt:185: More importantly, many activists were energized by the new alliances, solidarities, and militancy, and continued to cultivate an anti-globalization movement. The Seattle demonstrations were followed by April 2000 struggles in Washington, D.C., to protest the World Bank and IMF, and later in the year against capitalist globalization in Prague and Melbourne; in April 2001, an extremely large and militant protest erupted against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quebec City and in summer 2001 a large demonstration took place in Genoa.
./english/380.txt:189: In May 2002, a surprisingly large demonstration took place in Washington against capitalist globalization and for peace and justice, and it was apparent that a new worldwide movement was in the making that was uniting diverse opponents of capitalist globalization throughout the world. The anticorporate globalization movement favored globalization-from-below, which would protect the environment, labor rights, national cultures, democratization, and other goods from the ravages of an uncontrolled capitalist globalization (see Falk 1999; Brecher, Costello, and Smith 2000; and Steger 2002).
./english/380.txt:193: Initially, the incipient anti-globalization movement was precisely that - anti-globalization. The movement itself, however, was increasingly global, was linking together a diversity of movements into global solidarity networks, and was using the Internet and instruments of globalization to advance its struggles. Moreover, many opponents of capitalist globalization recognized the need for a global movement to have a positive vision and be for such things as social justice, equality, labor, civil liberties and human rights, and a sustainable environmentalism. Accordingly, the anti-capitalist globalization movement began advocating common values and visions.
./english/380.txt:197: In particular, the movement against capitalist globalization used the Internet to organize mass demonstrations and to disseminate information to the world concerning the policies of the institutions of capitalist globalization. The events made clear that protestors were not against globalization per se, but were against neo-liberal and capitalist globalization, opposing specific policies and institutions that produce intensified exploitation of labor, environmental devastation, growing divisions among the social classes, and the undermining of democracy. The emerging anti-globalization-from-above movements are contextualizing these problems in the framework of a restructuring of capitalism on a worldwide basis for maximum profit with zero accountability and have made clear the need for democratization, regulation, rules, and globalization in the interests of people and not profit.
./english/380.txt: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:205: To capital's globalization-from-above, cyberactivists have thus been attempting to carry out globalization-from-below, developing networks of solidarity and propagating oppositional ideas and movements throughout the planet. To the capitalist international of transnational corporate-led globalization, a Fifth International, to use Waterman's phrase (1992), of computer-mediated activism is emerging, that is qualitatively different from the party-based socialist and communist Internationals. Such networking links labor, feminist, ecological, peace, and other anticapitalist groups, providing the basis for a new politics of alliance and solidarity to overcome the limitations of postmodern identity politics (see Dyer-Witheford 1999 and Burbach 2001).
./english/380.txt:236: And so, to paraphrase Foucault, wherever there is globalization-from-above, globalization as the imposition of capitalist logic, there can be resistance and struggle. The possibilities of globalization-from-below result from transnational alliances between groups fighting for better wages and working conditions, social and political justice, environmental protection, and more democracy and freedom worldwide. In addition, a renewed emphasis on local and grassroots movements have put dominant economic forces on the defensive in their own backyard and often the broadcasting media or the Internet have called attention to oppressive and destructive corporate policies on the local level, putting national and even transnational pressure upon major corporations for reform. Moreover, proliferating media and the Internet make possible a greater circulation of struggles and the possibilities of new alliances and solidarities that can connect resistant forces who oppose capitalist and corporate-state elite forms of globalization-from-above (Dyer-Witheford 1999).
./english/380.txt:240: In a certain sense, the phenomena of globalization replicates the history of the U.S. and most so-called capitalist democracies in which tension between capitalism and democracy has been the defining feature of the conflicts of the past two hundred years. In analyzing the development of education in the United States Bowles and Gintis (1986) and Aronowitz and Giroux (1986) have analyzed the conflicts between corporate logic and democracy in schooling; Robert McChesney (1996 and 1999), myself (Kellner 1990, 1992, 2001, and forthcoming), and others have articulated the contradictions between capitalism and democracy in the media and public sphere; while Joel Cohen and Joel Rogers (1983) and many others are arguing that contradictions between capitalism and democracy are defining features of the U.S. polity and history.
./english/380.txt:244: On a global terrain, Hardt and Negri (2000) have stressed the openings and possibilities for democratic transformative struggle within globalization, or what they call Empire. I am arguing that similar arguments can be made in which globalization is not conceived merely as the triumph of capitalism and democracy working together as it was in the classical theories of Milton Friedman or more recently in Francis Fukuyama. Nor should globalization be depicted solely as the triumph of capital as in many despairing anti-globalization theories. Rather, one should see that globalization unleashes conflicts between capitalism and democracy and in its restructuring processes creates new openings for struggle, resistance, and democratic transformation.
./english/380.txt:248: I would also suggest that the model of Marx and Engels as deployed in the "Communist Manifesto" could also be usefully employed to analyze the contradictions of globalization (Marx and Engels 1978: 469ff). From the historical materialist optic, capitalism was interpreted as the greatest, most progressive force in history for Marx and Engels, destroying a backward feudalism, authoritarian patriarchy, backwardness and provincialism in favor a market society, global cosmopolitanism, and constant revolutionizing of the forces of production. Yet in the Marxian theory, so too was capitalism presented as a major disaster for the human race, condemning a large part to alienated labor, regions of the world to colonialist exploitation, and generating conflicts between classes and nations, the consequences of which the contemporary era continues to suffer.
./english/380.txt:252: Marx deployed a similar dialectical and historical model in his later analyses of imperialism arguing, for instance, in his writings on British imperialism in India, that British colonialism was a great productive and progressive force in India at the same time it was highly destructive (Marx and Engels 1978: 653ff). A similar dialectical and critical model can be used today that articulates the progressive elements of globalization in conjunction with its more oppressive features, deploying the categories of negation and critique, while sublating (Aufhebung) the positive features. Moreover, a dialectical and transdisciplinary model is necessary to capture the complexity and multidimensionality of globalization today that brings together in theorizing globalization, the economy, technology, polity, society and culture, articulating the interplay of these elements and avoiding any form of determinism or reductivism.
./english/380.txt:256: Theorizing globalization dialectically and critically requires that we both analyze continuities and discontinuities with the past, specifying what is a continuation of past histories and what is new and original in the present moment. To elucidate the later, I believe that the discourse of the postmodern is useful in dramatizing the changes and novelties of the mode of globalization. The concept of the postmodern can signal that which is fresh and original, calling attention to topics and phenomena that require novel theorization, and intense critical thought and inquiry. Hence, although Manuel Castells has the most detailed analysis of new technologies and the rise of what he calls a networked society, by refusing to link his analyses with the problematic of the postmodern, he cuts himself off from theoretical resources that enable theorists to articulate the novelties of the present that are unique and different from the previous mode of social organization.[13]
./english/380.txt:260: Consequently, although there is admittedly a lot of mystification in the discourse of the postmodern, it signals emphatically the shifts and ruptures in our era, the novelties and originalities, and dramatizes the mutations in culture, subjectivities, and theory which Castells and other theorists of globalization or the information society gloss over. The discourse of the postmodern in relation to analysis of contemporary culture and society is just jargon, however, unless it is rooted in analysis of the global restructuring of capitalism and analysis of the scientific-technological revolution that is part and parcel of it.[14]
./english/380.txt:264: As I have argued in this study, the term "globalization" is often used as a code word that stands for a tremendous diversity of issues and problems and that serves as a front for a variety of theoretical and political positions. While it can function as a legitimating ideology to cover over and sanitize ugly realities, a critical globalization theory can inflect the discourse to point precisely to these deplorable phenomena and can elucidate a series of contemporary problems and conflicts. In view of the different concepts and functions of globalization discourse, it is important to note that the concept of globalization is a theoretical construct that varies according to the assumptions and commitments of the theory in question. Seeing the term globalization as a construct helps rob it of its force of nature, as a sign of an inexorable triumph of market forces and the hegemony of capital, or, as the extreme right fears, of a rapidly encroaching world government. While the term can both describe and legitimate capitalist transnationalism and supranational government institutions, a critical theory of globalization does not buy into ideological valorizations and affirms difference, resistance, and democratic self-determination against forms of global domination and subordination.
./english/380.txt:268: Globalization should thus be seen as a contested terrain with opposing forces attempting to use its institutions, technologies, media, and forms for their own purposes. There are certainly negative aspects to globalization which strengthen elite economic and political forces over and against the underlying population, but, as I suggested above, there are also positive possibilities. Other beneficial openings include the opportunity for greater democratization, increased education and health care, and new opportunities within the global economy that open entry to members of races, regions, and classes previously excluded from mainstream economics, politics, and culture within the modern corporate order.
./english/380.txt:284: Hence, a critical theory of globalization presents globalization as a force of capitalism and democracy, as a set of forces imposed from above in conjunction with resistance from below. In this optic, globalization generates new conflicts, new struggles, and new crises, which in part can be seen as resistance to capitalist logic. In the light of the neo-liberal projects to dismantle the Welfare State, colonize the public sphere, and control globalization, it is up to citizens and activists to create new public spheres, politics, and pedagogies, and to use the new technologies to discuss what kinds of society people today want and to oppose the society against which people resist and struggle. This involves, minimally, demands for more education, health care, welfare, and benefits from the state, and to struggle to create a more democratic and egalitarian society. But one cannot expect that generous corporations and a beneficent state are going to make available to citizens the bounties and benefits of the globalized new information economy. Rather, it is up to individuals and groups to promote democratization and progressive social change.
./english/382.txt:29:For some, the hijacking of the forum is proof that the movements against corporate globalization are finally maturing and "getting serious." But is it really so mature, amidst the graveyard of failed, left political projects, to believe that change will come by casting your ballot for the latest charismatic leader, then crossing your fingers and hoping for the best? Get serious.
./english/383.txt:186:deleterious effects of neo-liberalism and globalization. The authors argue that this ‘globalization
./english/385.txt:7:In the vast acreage of published analysis about the splendid victory over the World Trade Organization last November 29-December 3, it is almost impossible to find anyone wondering why the 40-50,000 demonstrators were overwhelmingly Anglo. How can that be, when the WTO's main victims around the world are people of color? Understanding the reasons for the low level of color, and what can be learned from it, is absolutely crucial if we are to make Seattle's promise of a new, international movement against imperialist globalization come true.
./english/385.txt:64:Armed with such knowledge, we can educate and organize people of color. As Jinee Kim said at a San Francisco report-back by youth of color, "We have to work with people who may not know the word 'globalization' but they live globalization."
./english/388.txt:15:openDemocracy: What were your reasons for editing a book (Another World Is Possible: Popular Alternatives to Globalization at the World Social Forum published by Zed Books in March 2003) about the World Social Forum (WSF)?
./english/390.txt:11:In many countries, Empire has sprouted other subsidiary heads, some dangerous byproducts — nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism and, of course terrorism. All these march arm in arm with the project of corporate globalization.
./english/390.txt:13:Let me illustrate what I mean. India — the world’s biggest democracy — is currently at the forefront of the corporate globalization project. Its "market" of one billion people is being prized open by the WTO. Corporatization and Privatization are being welcomed by the Government and the Indian elite.
./english/390.txt:17:The dismantling of democracy is proceeding with the speed and efficiency of a Structural Adjustment Program. While the project of corporate globalization rips through people’s lives in India, massive privatization, and labor "reforms" are pushing people off their land and out of their jobs. Hundreds of impoverished farmers are committing suicide by consuming pesticide. Reports of starvation deaths are coming in from all over the country.
./english/390.txt:35:As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows, the fight to corner resources is intensifying. To push through their "sweetheart deals," to corporatize the crops we grow, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the dreams we dream, corporate globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies.
./english/390.txt:37:Corporate Globalization — or shall we call it by its name? — Imperialism — needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice.
./english/390.txt:51:In India the movement against corporate globalization is gathering momentum and is poised to become the only real political force to counter religious fascism.
./english/390.txt:53:As for corporate globalization’s glittering ambassadors — Enron, Bechtel, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson — where were they last year, and where are they now?
./english/392.txt:271:responsible for a great part of what we call the WSF globalization, that is, [for the WSF]
./english/393.txt:103:capitalist globalization commanded by the large multinational corporations and by the
./english/393.txt:105:They are designed to ensure that globalization in solidarity will prevail as a new stage in
./english/393.txt:111:globalization commanded by the large multinational corporations and by the governments and
./english/393.txt:113:national governments. They are designed to ensure that globalization in solidarity will prevail
./english/393.txt:229:globalization currently prevalent is creating or aggravating, internationally and within
./english/393.txt:237:inequality that the process of capitalist globalization with its racist, sexist and environmentally
./english/396.txt:459:· Globalization of the economy, centered in the power of the information.
./english/397.txt:70:Julian Garcia Gonzales, representing 32 ports in Spain, spoke of globalization and the way ‘five or six major shipping consortia dictate to governments what policies they want to operate in ports’. The Labour Government in Britain is now the largest shareholder in MDHC, but so far has shown little interest.
./english/397.txt:74:The Liverpool dockers, the Women on the Waterfront and their children have travelled a long way since that day in September 1995 when the men refused to cross a picket line. Without fear of dreaming they have pursued an internationalist vision. They have shown that there is no law of nature that makes globalization unchallengeable. A small local community has sparked a global movement and ignited a sense of recognition – that strangers are just like us. They have broken down the barriers between North and South, between unions, environmentalists and the dispossessed.
./english/398.txt:6:At a panel discussion on Sunday as leaders and ideologues of the anti-globalization movement addressed these issues the questions from the audience flew thick and fast.
./english/398.txt:10:'The alternative is not civil society but civil disobedience' said Naomi Klein, activist and author of the acclaimed 'No Logo', who in a hard-hitting articulate speech warned about attempts being made to turn the WSF into 'yet another big meeting' bereft of any impact on the real world. Dismissing critical arguments that the anti-globalization movement did not have any specific goals she said 'there are so many alternatives evident at the WSF that they are spilling onto the streets'.
./english/398.txt:12:Klein said that the 'either you are with us or against us' approach of the global elites should be rejected because there was no one truth and there were many approaches possible any of the problems facing the world today. It is the nature of nature to want to spread' she said calling upon the anti-globalization movement to ' cross all borders and climb all fences'.
./english/398.txt:16:Questions about the role and relevance of trade unions to the anti-globalization movement came up several times with a delegate from the Korean Congress of Trade Unions (KCTU) saying that there was a tension between trade unions and global civil society groups evident at the WSF. 'Trade unions have been at the forefront of struggles against neo-liberal globalization on a day-to-day basis in many southern economies' he said calling upon the WSF to adopt a clearer stand on the issue.
./english/398.txt:22:The issue of recurring incidents of violence at various anti-globalization protests such as at Seattle and Genoa also came in for animated discussion. Several delegates in the audience asked why the big NGOs, who were part of the movement, objected so strongly to the use of violent methods by anarchists and other small groups, when all they were doing was 'to counter the violence perpetrated by states pushing neo-liberal policies onto a helpless population'.
./english/398.txt:24:In reply, Vittorio Agnelotto, of the Genoa Social Forum from Italy said that the kind of violence carried out by the anarchists of the 'Black Bloc' at the G-8 Genoa meet last year was counterproductive and harmful to the entire movement. Such acts of violence he alleged gave an opportunity to the police and even neo-fascist groups to infiltrate the anti-globalization protests with dubious agendas of their own.
./english/400.txt:117:Carr, B. (1999) Globalization from below: labour internationalism under NAFTA, International Social Science Journal 51(1) pp.49-59
./english/400.txt:153:Marshall, J. (1997) Globalization from Below: The Trade Union Connections in Walters, S. (Ed) Globalization, Adult Education and Training: Impacts and Issues, Zed Books, London pp. 56-67
./english/400.txt:159:Moghadam, V. (2000) Transnational Feminist Networks: Collective Action in an Era of Globalization, International Sociology 15(1) pp57-85
./english/400.txt:177:Tarrow, S. (2000) Beyond Globalization: Why Creating Transnational Social Movements is So Hard and When is it Most Likely to Happen available on the Global Solidarity Dialogue web site at: http://www.antenna.nl/~waterman/tarrow.html [viewed 18 November 2000]
./english/401.txt:50:We think it important…not to forget the utopian tendencies that have always accompanied the progression toward globalization, even if these tendencies have continually been defeated by the powers of modern sovereignty. The love of differences and the belief in the universal freedom and equality of humanity proper to the revolutionary thought of Renaissance humanism reappear here on a global scale. This utopian element of globalization is what prevents us from simply falling back into particularism and isolationism in reaction to the totalizing forces of imperialism and racist domination, pushing us instead to forge a project of counterglobalization, counter-Empire. This utopian moment, however, has never been unambiguous. It is a tendency that constantly conflicts with sovereign order and domination. (Hardt and Negri 2000:115)
./english/401.txt:57: If it is true, as some critical left intellectuals and radical-democratic activists believe (see overviews in Breitenfellner 1997, Munck Forthcoming, O'Brien 2000a,b, Waterman 1998), that it is only with globalization that a single world of labor is at last coming into (admittedly uneven and problematic) existence, then it should be possible to see or create a new labor internationalism (NLI) within, or out of, contemporary evidence and ideas on labor inter/nationally. Here then, is an experiment in re-thinking the NLI, based on what is suggested by the project on 'Reinventing Social Emancipation' (RSE). The project provides us with two major elements for reflection: on the one hand some notion of emancipation revealed by the proposal as a whole; on the other, the papers contributed to its theme on the New Labor Internationalism (NLI). Whilst this is an evidently restricted base, RSE has the major advantage of articulating labor internationalism with and within the project of social emancipation. Which is, after all, where the idea of labor internationalism began in one small part of the contemporary world, almost two hundred years ago. After carrying out this 'here and now' exercise, I may will refer to other literature, and even to past writings of my own.
./english/401.txt:70:Discussions about counter-hegemonic globalization…rarely focus…on the economic…that is, on local/global initiatives consisting in non-capitalist production and distribution of goods and services, whether in rural or urban settings: cooperatives, mutualities, credit systems, farming of invaded land by landless peasants, water systems, fishing communities, ecological logging, etc. These initiatives are those in which local/global linkages are most difficult to establish, if for no other reason because they confront more directly the logic of global capitalism behind hegemonic globalization, not only at the level of production but also at the level of distribution...They mobilize social and cultural resources that make inter-thematic linkages a necessary condition of their success.
./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:111:· Rob Lambert and Eddie Webster on the Southern Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights (L&W, Sigtur).
./english/401.txt:124: In considering his case and coming to the above conclusions Costa takes recourse to discussion on what may be called the dialectics of emancipation, as represented by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1995) in particular. From this and other sources Costa draws the notion that there are multiple globalizations, or globalizations in multiple spheres, as well as multiple spheres or dimensions of emancipation. As applied to the EWCs, this means recognizing their contradictory aspects – the regulatory and the emancipatory. As applied to the relationship between the national and the international, it means recognizing that, for labor, the international terrain allows for the development of 'cosmopolitan coalitions', though these, too, are marked by continuing ambiguity. Finally, Costa remarks on the problems of trade unions in producing an emancipatory discourse that is adequate, effective and singular (held in common?). Whilst these notions might seem to lead to skepticism, they nonetheless lead Costa to the modest optimism quoted above.
./english/401.txt:126:Mello e Silva/Brazil and Mercosur. MeS focuses on the possibility of a new working-class internationalism in relation to the cross-national union activities within the developing common market in the Southern Cone of Latin America, the Mercosur. Here he focuses primarily upon the case of Brazil and the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT, or United Workers Center). He considers the role played by unions there, as an agent of democratization, and of the conflicts that arose as their institutional practices became more radical and general. These national union practices, he argues, actually undermine the classical labor movement dichotomies - defensive/offensive, reformist/ revolutionary, negotiation-oriented/mobilization-oriented (as well, he suggests, as national/international). MeS extends his argument to the regional and then to the hemispheric level, suggesting that the globalization of union contacts between Northern and Southern regional blocks could prove more an opportunity for, than an obstacle to, internationalism by helping to overcome the corporatist and authoritarian culture deeply rooted in Latin American labor movements. Combined with such internationalism is the possibility of a new relationship between the union movement and social movements, this reinforcing the emancipatory potential within the world of work.
./english/401.txt:128:MeS suggests that after a long march through the period of monopoly capitalism, the classical demand and expectation that workers of the world will unite, is reviving under globalization:
./english/401.txt:130:The conditions for solidarity among labor movements of various countries around the world based on their class situation, however 'universal' or great the expansion of capitalist relationships around the globe might be, changed noticeably since their most famous formulation. The reasons for such a dramatic change are varied, though well articulated: the crisis of super-accumulation and dysfunction among the sectors, the search for new levels of productivity and innovation in the way in which work is organized, the shift from a competitive model to a monopolistic model, etc. Historically, this has usually taken place during the transition from deregulated capitalism to regulated capitalism. However, the extension of capitalistic relationships has continued to grow unchecked, increasingly and incontestably. In that sense, at least one part of the predictions made by socialist theoreticians showed itself to be on target and the wave of financial capital valorization that can be observed in the present form of market globalization confirms those forecasts.
./english/401.txt:144: Oliveira notes the beginning of a new direction (a fourth period?), in which diverse phenomena are appearing. The first is that of the internationalism of workers within the same company, under the impact of privatization and foreign takeovers (e.g. Spanish-Brazilian bankworker internationalism). The second is the increasing relationship of North American and other unionism with the anti-globalization movement. Oliveira proposes that these latter movements have to be understood rather in terms of 'citizenship and survival' than in terms of the common material interests of industrial workers. Whilst the latter kind of internationalism can be found in the development of Mercosur unionism, such efforts 'are weak in terms of counter-hegemonic projects'.
./english/401.txt:148: In his reflections on his subject, Oliveira draws on Gramsci and Critical Sociology, as well as on labor historian Edward Thompson, and on contemporary radical-democratic theorists of democracy and globalization.
./english/401.txt:150: Véras/Brazilian Metalworkers. This is another paper focused on the industrial and national struggles of Brazilian auto/metalworkers, and concerned with their efforts to re-assert themselves nationally in the face of a neo-liberal globalization that has profoundly changed the socio-political weight of the industrialized and unionized working class in that country. Véras concentrates on the mobilization of workers for a national-level collective contract for the auto sector in Brazil (see Oliveira above). He refers to the attempts to develop a union presence within the Mercosur and union activity in relation to the Free Trade Areas of the Americas (FTAA, see Mello e Silva above). He also mentions the activities of the CUT to create new alliances at local, national and international levels. The CUT has been active in relation to the environment, children's rights, citizenship and education, and against the neo-liberalism of the Cardoso government:
./english/401.txt:164:Estanque/New Challenges. This study of a shoe and leatherworker's union in Sao João de Madeira, Portugal suggests that a union of workers, in a traditional industry, in one provincial community, can nonetheless confront globalization in both a practical manner and in an emancipatory and internationalist spirit. The Union of Footwear, Bags etc, of the Districts of Aveiro and Coimbra (henceforth: Footwear Union) comes out of a particular history of union-community-international relations. Estanque first reveals the general conjuncture within which this union finds itself:
./english/401.txt:171:The emancipatory orientation of this perspective is based, therefore, not only upon the construction of platforms and local alliances, but also upon expansion to the global level of intervention; and this has been the strategy underlying the actions of this union and its leadership over the last decade. In other words, it is a strategy that brings together the concerns of both the ‘old’ and new types of internationalism, which then act as a vehicle for a kind of worker solidarity of the ‘revolutionary’ type and also for a sentiment drawn from experiences that are not restricted to union militancy. It is useful to bear in mind here that the main union leader was in the past very active in party politics and other associations involving cultural intervention…and membership of parties of the extreme left…not to mention an identification with [shopfloor] union currents…It is not surprising therefore, that his stance combines a ‘culturalist’ and [‘grassroots' orientation] with a great opening up in the face of present movements of global solidarity. This is evident in his discourse, which contains both radical criticism of capitalist globalization and the profound conviction that nothing is achieved without the hard work of organization and mobilization. It is thus a discourse that basically links an updated and open form of ideological radicalism with a pragmatic sense of immediate action.
./english/401.txt:175:the footwear workers’ union could put into practice new forms of trans-nationalization and extend the international solidarity networks to which it belongs, it could become the main mediator between the local and the global, in a counter-hegemonic sense. In this way, trade union action and the local movements with which it means to ally itself would effectively function as brakes to the present rationale of hegemonic globalization (be it under the form of localized globalism or of globalized localism), opposing it with a new rationale of global solidarity promoted through new emancipatory dynamics and new colligations and alliances, oriented towards the defense of the dignity of work and the recognition of the community.
./english/401.txt:183:Beyond India, the movement has had to find itself in relationship to inter-state organizations (particularly the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization – FAO), with their opposite numbers in countries as different as Senegal, Brazil and Canada, and with (foreign-funded?) international/ist support NGOs. Within India their movement has been an active member of the National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM), a body that is itself playing an active role within the anti-globalization movement. D&N, activists long present within the local-national-international fishworkers and allied movements, handle the complexities of this case study by drawing selectively on theories/strategies from Marxism, Feminism, Environmentalism and other sources. They conclude:
./english/401.txt:189: Lambert and Webster/Southern Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights. This paper deals with a particular attempt to create a new kind of union internationalism, originating in and primarily oriented toward the South. ('South' is here defined not geographically but politically, as a common project of 'some of the world's most exploited working classes, many…denied basic ILO…rights') SIGTUR is a network of old and new left or radical-nationalist unions, 'which would still claim to be fighting for a socialist transformation'. Under the provocation of neo-liberal globalization, it is taking direct and common action across, or regardless of, particular party-political affiliations locally, or international affiliations globally. Rooted in the left and internationalist traditions of Perth/Fremantle, in Western Australia, it began life around 1990, as an Indian Ocean network. It was, and is, most effectively linked at this ocean's two extremes, the other one being Durban, South Africa. However, the network has expanded, with growing links to Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea. And then, with a link to the Brazilian CUT (which has its own warm relations with South Africa's COSATU), it adopted its present name. It has seen a series of effective solidarity campaigns, including those of the South African and Indian with Australian workers and unions. The network claims to combine the old (union institutions) with the new (networking, campaigning, computer communication). L&W – both of them academics long-involved with the South African and/or West Australian and international unionism – set up an opposition between the Old Labor Internationalism (hierarchical, centralized, bureaucratized, formal, diplomatic in orientation, workplace-focused, etc) with the New Labor Internationalism (networked, decentralized, de-layered, oriented to mobilization, focused on coalitions with new social movements and 'Southern'). SIGTUR is presented as exemplifying the latter. Despite earlier opposition from the ICFTU internationally, and from rightwing unionists or neo-liberal governments nationally, SIGTUR evidently meets a common desire for leftwing unions confronted with globalization and aware of the ineffectiveness of the existing internationals. Recognizing, on the one hand, the severity of the neo-liberal offensive, on the other the commonly weakened condition of unionism, SIGTUR is working out a modest and practical alternative:
./english/401.txt:193: L&W establish the credentials of SIGTUR by reference to the classical socialist values of international labor solidarity and social emancipation, to its chequered history, and to recent social theorizing on globalization, the discontents it creates and the movements it provokes. It is the last of these sources – or discussions - that is most challenging since it leads them to criticize a common 'infatuation with new information systems' in such theorizing, and to argue for the necessity of the new networked, global and social movement to be based on, or grow within, the historical union institutions. L&W also favor a 'grounded' approach to globalization and opposition to such, which seems to mean a focus on 'globalization from below', as it expresses itself where people live and work. They see this as both justifying their approach and expressed by SIGTUR itself.
./english/401.txt:200:I would like to consider these sometimes very different, sometimes overlapping papers as a common database and then to search within this pool for issues. There are reasons for this strategy. One has to do with the fact that whilst all the papers are written 'in the light of globalization', they may not refer directly to the RSE Project as a whole, nor focus centrally on labor and/or union internationalism (not synonyms, as we will see). Another has to do with my own 15-year engagement with labor internationalism, during which I have obviously developed certain positions (which L&W directly challenges) and a consequent desire to a) avoid polemic and b) attempt to rethink internationalism/emancipation in the light of RSE.
./english/401.txt:230:Oliveira:Brazilian unions & internationalism Trade union Brazil National to International Urbanindustrial Gramsci, Critical sociology and globalization
./english/401.txt:231:Véras: BrazilianMetalworkers' contract struggles Trade union Brazil National Urban industrial Labor studies,Critical globalization
./english/401.txt:234:Lambert & Webster: Southern trade union internationalism(Sigtur) New international union network South National to Regional Urbanindustrial Marxism,Socialism,Critical globalization
./english/401.txt:237:What is here absent or under-represented (in relation to a concern with labor internationalism and emancipation under conditions of globalization)?
./english/401.txt:264:Finally, a new labor internationalism. An awareness of the shortcomings of the old internationalism(s), and the possibility of a new one, is present in the papers to a greater or lesser extent. There is considerable reference to new levels of international union action (regional), to new inter/national alliances (with other social collectivities in the anti-globalization movement), to the actuality or potential of such forces or fora in protecting or extending national/local union action. There is also awareness of the contradictory nature of the new extra-national (regional) institutions, as well as possible contradictions between national or regional unionisms. What this awareness points to is the necessity for an understanding (critical, innovatory), and an ethic (solidarity), that might allow for the negotiation and settlement of such differences. But this necessity rec
./english/403.txt:185:Starr, A. (2000) Naming the Enemy: Anti-corporate movements confront globalization. Sydney: Pluto Press.
./english/405.txt:48:capitalist globalization: during the colonial expansion that took place from the 16th to the 18th century and during the world colonisation that started in 1980. We are happy to see that, in one of these continents, institutional resistances are starting to also appear, maybe as important as the liberation revolutions that resulted in the birth of the Latin-American national states in the 19th century or, to use a more recent example, the national development plans that were put into action in the period between 1940-1970.
./english/409.txt:12:If Seattle was, for many people, the coming-out party of a resistance movement, then, according to Soren Ambrose, policy analyst with 50 Years Is Enough, "Porto Alegre is the coming-out party for the existence of serious thinking about alternatives." The emphasis was on alternatives coming from the countries experiencing most acutely the negative effects of globalization: mass migration of people, widening wealth disparities, weakening political power.
./english/409.txt:16:Though the conference was locally organized, it was, in part, the brainchild of ATTAC France, a coalition of unions, farmers and intellectuals that has become the most public face of the antiglobalization movement in much of Europe and Scandinavia. (ATTAC stands for Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens, which, admittedly, doesnt work as well in English.) Founded in 1998 by Bernard Cassen and Susan George of the socialist monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, ATTAC began as a campaign for the implementation of the so-called Tobin Tax, the proposal by Nobel laureate James Tobin to tax all speculative financial transactions. Reflecting its Marxist intellectual roots, the group has expressed frustration with the less coherent focus of the North American anticorporate movement. "The failure of Seattle was the inability to come up with a common agenda, a global alliance at the world level to fight against globalization," says Christophe Aguiton of!
./english/409.txt:21:The result of the gathering was something much more complicated--as much chaos as cohesion, as much division as unity. In Porto Alegre the coalition of forces that often goes under the banner of antiglobalization began collectively to recast itself as a pro-democracy movement. In the process, the movement was also forced to confront the weaknesses of its own internal democracy and to ask difficult questions about how decisions were being made--at the World Social Forum itself and, more important, in the high-stakes planning for the next round of World Trade Organization negotiations and the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City at the end of April.
./english/409.txt:40:In workshops and on panels, globalization was defined as a mass transfer of wealth and knowledge from public to private--through the patenting of life and seeds, the privatization of water and the concentrated ownership of agricultural lands. Having this conversation in Brazil meant that these issues were not presented as shocking new inventions of a hitherto unheard-of phenomenon called "globalization"--as is often the case in the West--but as part of the continuum of colonization, centralization and loss of self-determination that began more than five centuries ago.
./english/409.txt:44:In response to this democratic crisis, the forum set out to sketch the possible alternatives--but before long, some rather profound questions emerged. Is this a movement trying to impose its own, more humane brand of globalization, with taxation of global finance and more democracy and transparency in international governance? Or is it a movement against centralization and the delegation of power on principle, one as critical of left-wing, one-size-fits-all ideology as of the recipe for McGovernment churned out at forums like Davos (cut taxes, privatize, deregulate and wait for the trickle-down)? Its fine to cheer for the possibility of another world--but is the goal one specific other world ("our" world, some might say) or is it, as the Zapatistas put it, "a world with the possibility of many worlds in it?"
./english/409.txt:52:Perhaps by transforming the anticorporate, antiglobalization movement into a pro-democracy movement that defends the rights of local communities to plan and manage their schools, their water and their ecology. In Porto Alegre, the most convincing responses to the international failure of representative democracy seemed to be this radical form of local participatory democracy, in the cities and towns where the abstractions of global rule become day-to-day issues of homelessness, water contamination, exploding prisons and cash-starved schools. Of course, this has to take place within a context of national and international standards and resources. But what seemed to be emerging organically out of the World Social Forum (despite the best efforts of some of the organizers) was not a movement for a single global government but a vision for an increasingly connected international network of very local initiatives, each built on direct democracy.
./english/409.txt:58:But there were sometimes sixty of these workshops going on simultaneously, while the main-stage events, where there was an opportunity to address more than 1,000 delegates at a time, were dominated not by activists but by politicians and academics. Some gave rousing presentations, while others seemed painfully detached: After traveling eighteen hours or more to attend the forum, few needed to be told that "globalization is a space of dispute." It didnt help that these panels were dominated by men in their fifties, too many of them white. Nicola Bullard, deputy director of Bangkoks Focus on the Global South, half-joked that the opening press conference "looked like the Last Supper: twelve men with an average age of 52." And it probably wasnt a great idea that the VIP room, an enclave of invitation-only calm and luxury, was made of glass. This in-your-face two-tiering amid all the talk of people power began to grate around the time the youth campsite ran out of toilet paper.
./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/410.txt:6:According to its charter of principles, the World Social Forum is designed to provide an "open meeting space for … groups that are opposed to neo-liberalism and the domination of the world by … any form of imperialism." Furthermore, it aims to contribute to building a "planetary society," which should lead to just and well-balanced forms of globalization. In that manner, the gathering is not opposed to globalization as such, but only to particular incarnations thereof. Generally, the attending groups shared the idea that reducing the public sector and liberalizing trade will not ultimately benefit poor countries and disadvantaged people. Against neo-liberal globalization they advocate alternative globalizations or the new slogan of "alter-globalization."
./english/410.txt:8:The Forum indeed offered plenty of opportunity to hear about the alternative globalization from prominent intellectuals such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Leonardo Boff, and Antonio Negri. Other events were characterized by the sharp rhetoric of large international activist groups, such as the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC). One could attend information sessions by international trade unions from Latin America, East Asia, Europe, and other parts of the world. Or one could talk to smaller NGOs and projects, ranging from Third World Foundations to groups such as the Coalition for a World Parliament.
./english/416.txt:13:The G8 meeting and the parallel mobilization concern the whole anti-globalization and antikapitalist/-antiimperialist movement and especially those who are involved in the antirepression work. It was common opinion that it was very important for us to take part at the preparations and at the demonstrations against the summit.
./english/467.txt:35:Structural adjustment policies (SAPs), which set the stage for the accelerated globalization of developing country economies during the 1990’s, created the same poverty, inequality, and environmental crisis in most countries that free-market policies did in Chile, minus the moderate growth of the post-Friedman-Pinochet phase. As the World Bank chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains so slow in coming.” So discredited were SAPs that the World Bank and IMF soon changed their names to “Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers” in the late 1990’s.
./english/470.txt:13:Moreover, by all evidence, the forums worldwide cause even disagreeing activists to congregate, to hear one another, to develop new ties, and to take seriously economic, political, gender, race, culture, ecology, globalization, and international goals and strategies. Some local forums excellently generate shared program and actions among subsets of participants. But even short of that, by at least enhancing solidarity and enlarging vision, all the local forums powerfully aid movements.
./english/472.txt:7:Since 2001, activists from around the world who are opposed to neoliberal corporate globalization have gathered annually at the World Social Forum (WSF). The Forum brings together tens of thousands of people from the world’s social movements and nongovernmental organizations in pursuit of varied agendas: for women’s rights, small-scale worker-controlled enterprises, public health, community-controlled schools and a host of other causes. In the words of Naomi Klein, it’s a movement of “one no and many yeses.”1 The phrase captures the pluralism and diversity of the movement, but at the same time makes clear that there is a core of unity about what it opposes. It also shows why it is difficult to analyze the movement.
./english/472.txt:9:The central point of unity in the movement is its opposition to the neoliberal model promoted by international financial institutions (IFIs) and transnational corporations. The IFIs condition loans to the governments of developing countries on a fiscal austerity that requires those governments to limit spending on their people’s needs. And the corporations invest in manufacturing plants for export, driving down wages as they threaten to move their investments in search of cheaper labor. In the eyes of their critics, IFIs and transnational corporations perpetuate poverty in the Third World, while increasing the steadily growing riches of the First. Indeed, the Forum’s “Charter of Principles” broadly states that the WSF is “opposed to neoliberalism and to the domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism…. The alternatives proposed at the World Social Forum stand in opposition to a process of globalization commanded by the large multinational corporations and by the governments and international institutions at the service of those corporations’ interests, with the complicity of national governments.”2
./english/472.txt:29:As they conceived it, the meeting would be a starting point for creating proposals that would go beyond the growing protest actions against the neoliberal model whose promoters met in Davos. They drew on two broad currents of activism: the direct action movement that has mounted massive demonstrations against international summit meetings (notably against the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle), and the emergent worldwide civil society, embodied mainly in the nongovernmental organizations that have mushroomed throughout the world since the 1980s. These forces have been dubbed the “antiglobalization movement” by much of the press, but they generally reject the label. They favor a unified world, but one unified around common human values and respect for diversity rather than trade.
./english/476.txt:8:There are three moments of origin in this story. The first was the very successful mass protests at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in November, 1999. A large group of mostly U.S. protestors - an unlikely coalition of AFL-CIO trade-unionists, environmental activists, and anarchists - succeeded in scuttling the meeting. Two months later, in January, 2000 at Davos, a group of some 50 intellectuals from around the world tried a different tactic, organizing an "anti-Davos at Davos," seeking to get anti-neoliberal arguments a world press. And in February, 2000, two Brazilian leaders of popular movements, Chico Whitaker and Oded Grajew, went to Paris to talk to Bernard Cassen, a journalist and the president of the anti-globalization organization called Attac-France. The two Brazilians suggested to Cassen that they join forces and launch a world meeting that would combine mass protest and intellectual analysis. They convened this in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the same time as the 2001 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. They called this the World Social Forum, and Cassen said the object was to "sink Davos."
./english/480.txt:15:resistance for this particular moment of crisis (in the meaning of neo-liberal globalization – of
./english/480.txt:16:anti-globalization movement is part and parcel). I also affirm the value of a political praxis which
./english/488.txt:4:The author analyses among WSF, global justice and solidary movements and says that the Forum was created in the recent protest waves known as anti-globalization.
./english/489.txt:4:The author analyses among WSF, global justice and solidary movements and says that the Forum was created in the recent protest waves known as anti-globalization.
./english/502.txt:48:capitalist globalization: during the colonial expansion that took place from the 16th to the 18th century and during the world colonisation that started in 1980. We are happy to see that, in one of these continents, institutional resistances are starting to also appear, maybe as important as the liberation revolutions that resulted in the birth of the Latin-American national states in the 19th century or, to use a more recent example, the national development plans that were put into action in the period between 1940-1970.
./english/519.txt:6:The world-wide context remains marked by the consequences of the militari-zation of international relations imposed by Bush’s government after the attacks of september 11th, which started a new phase of neo liberal globalization, and by a continuous and diffuse contestation of neo liberalism’s legitimacy, without a clear alternative. World economy’s growth rates show that the crisis linked to the collapse of the 1990’s speculative bubble was left behind and even some pe-ripheral countries (such as China and India) have found their space within the current economic configuration – paying, of course, a high social price for it. But for the ones who fight for a progres-sioninst alternative to neo liberalism and imperial domination, the general situation is better than in previous phases – be it in its initial phase, in the 1980’s, in which the new pattern was aggressively established, under Reagan and Thatcher, or in the phase that started after Soviet Union’s collapse, with its multilateral emphasis marked by the suffocating predominance of a “single thought”, under Clinton, in the 1990’s.
./english/519.txt:10:Due to the high level of confrontation, the global movement (or alter-globalization), which struc-tured itself as from the Seattle protests, is facing – since mobilizations against the Iraq invasion on February 15th, 2003 – difficulties regarding political initiatives and is aware that international initia-tives, which structure the movement, are dispersed. Mobilizations that are centralized for “counter-summits” such as the ones that occurred parallel to the WTO in Cancun (August, 2003) and Hong Kong (December, 2005) were very limited and had little effect on the events’ dynamics; the same occurred during the 4th Summit of the Americas, in Mar del Plata (November, 2005). The evalua-tion of the protests that took 250 people to the streets against the G8 in Edinburgh is an ambiguous one, but it does not repesent the Seattle-Geneva cycle’s recovery. The result brought by these meet-ings was determined by disputes among governments and groups of governments.
./english/519.txt:46:The socialist projects in the 20th century were, due to different reasons, defeated by capitalism. A great number of evaluations emphasizes the authoritarian, vertical and state-oriented characteristics of these projects or of their execution. Some others accentuate its link to a national or nationalist ho-rizon. Besides, neo liberal reorganization of capitalism has diffused in almost every country, the fordist period’s great concentration of workers, eliminating the basis of the industrial workforce’s previous protagonism, preventing them from intending to be the socialist movement’s center of gravity. And neo liberal globalization has engulfed peripheral states and corroding their market-control tools, conditioning the politics adopted by the government and frustrating citizen-oriented initiatives that fight for alternatives to neo liberalism.
./english/524.txt:19:The WSF is not intended to design a common program for the complete nongovernmental world, but to offer space for an exchange of insights and experiences. The focus concerns endeavors towards renewal from bottom-up as well as cooperation in a commitment for equitable globalization. Bamako fully reflected this end. Striking was the sympathetic ambiance that the leadership of the forum in Mali managed to create, with full cooperation from their government. This is in complete contrast to the total isolation from ordinary women and men that is so typical for the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.
./english/524.txt:21:Yet the WEF tends to draw the attention of the major global media that the World Social Forum, since its inception in 2001, has failed to allure. More and more this attention revolves around celebrities and in Bamako that was limited to Danielle Mitterrand, widow of the former President of France. With her empathic attitude and spontaneous reactions, she did indeed impress. “ What do we teach our children?” she wondered. “To be beautiful, to become rich …! As a result, our world gets more and more polarized, full of people competing with each other and excluding others. Let us on the contrary start from the hope with which every child in whatever poor conditions born, arrives on this earth. In that hope lies the basis for a humane kind of globalization.”
./english/524.txt:23:This voice is perhaps not so far removed from the remarkable plea of the Chair of the Netherlands Employers’ Organization, Bernard Wientjes, for an open, internationally oriented, tolerant and progressive society. If the drive really is for an open, equitable and tolerant globalization, Davos might learn from Bamako.
./english/529.txt:10:The language of dissent has widely permeated into the farthest regions of the world, and farmers, tribals, fisherfolk, and others at the low eschalons of the class cline have been well-familiarized with concepts like globalization, gender-equity, environmental degradation, militarism, GWB and the USA global hegemony project, Peak Oil, GMO’s, and the evils of the WTO and the IMF. Similarly, the Pakistani street is, I would say much more aware of global geo-politics than are their CANWEST-Global-benumbed counterparts in Canada. There were many accomplished public speakers, but there were also just as many who faced the mike for the first time. It was wonderful to see tribal women get up on stage, and with hearts-in-mouth, make their case. Inevitably, after their initial stage-fright, they were able to relax and speak their piece.
./english/534.txt:18:Setting the tone for the forum, and reflecting its central issues, the leading slogan at the opening march was "no to war, no to imperialism, another world is possible, another America is possible." The dominant discourse at the forum, however, has radicalized. Rather than talking about war and globalization, the language increasingly shifted to one of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. Reflecting this, the volunteers who greeted delegates at the airport sported shirts with the slogan, "a better world is possible, if it is socialist." Another common slogan proclaimed "another world is necessary, and with you it is possible."
./english/535.txt:12:Originally, the purpose of the WSF was to serve as an alternative to the World Economic Forum held by the powerful institutions of globalization, like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. But, a dialog has emerged at the WSF asking if it is enough to simply bring everyone together for five days of discussions and networking or should the forum attempt to develop a strategy to confront globalization and to build a more just world? This question was discussed at some of the meetings but there is no definitive answer yet.
./english/535.txt:24:It is interesting that 10.2% of the participants at the 2005 WSF in Porto Alegre disagree, when asked if they thought the process of globalization means the concentration of wealth makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. 15.4% agreed that globalization means more opportunity for all, rich and poor.
./english/535.txt:30:The WSF clearly has the ability to bring progressives from social and political movements, intellectuals, and grassroots activists from all over the world to come together as an alternative to globalization and the neoliberal agenda. The question is - can the WSF shift gears and move the left to develop a unified strategy and tactics that will counter this system which has created so much inequality, poverty, and war? Perhaps the better question is - does the WSF even want to move beyond providing an opportunity for people to come together to discuss issues and network?
./english/548.txt:6:Every year at the end of January, the world’s corporate and government elite gather under tight police security in the Swiss resort town of Davos for the World Economic Forum (WEF) to plot the future of corporate-led globalization. Five years ago, community organizers, trade unionists, young people, academics, and others began to meet in Porto Alegre, Brazil to rethink and recreate globalization so that it would benefit people.
./english/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/569.txt:7:As two participants from Britain, we greatly enjoyed sharing all this, well as encountering once again the warmth and hospitality of the Brazilian people and the dynamism of their social movements. It is clear that the ideas and agenda of the global justice movement have as wide an appeal as ever. All the same, there was another side to the 5th WSF, one that raises serious concerns about its potential impact on the world-wide movement against neo-liberal globalization and imperial war.
./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/576.txt:23:The shift presents a challenge for the globalization movement, which has always had an awkward relationship to the state. On the one hand, some arguing against the power of unaccountable financial institutions have uncritically held up the principle of state sovereignty, contending that elected governments should be able to decide for themselves what economic policies to pursue. This stance proves problematic for those campaigning in countries ruled by right-wing elites. On the other hand, the anarchist suspicion of any engagement with the state precludes some real alternatives to neoliberalism--accomplishments like Venezuela's redistributionist social programs and Argentina's decision to defy the IMF and freeze most of its debt payments.
./english/576.txt:70:As a positive space, not founded as a mass protest outside a World Trade Organization or IMF meeting, the Forum still provides a unique opportunity for setting an alternative agenda for globalization. Its influence on Davos, where elites are now photographed pondering problems of poverty and AIDS, has been undeniable.
./english/579.txt:16:In addition, a conscious effort was made (with uneven success) to promote more thorough reflection on the relationship between political parties and social movements, on discussing alternatives to neoliberal globalization, and on the role of the nation-state and nationalism in an era when many are calling for new structures of global governance. The extent to which various activist groups were able to utilize Mumbai WSF to enhance international coordination, networking and planning for common actions clearly varied, and the results of their endeavours will only become evident in the future. What hopes and lessons for India and globally does WSF 2004 carry? Before addressing this crucial question, there is another shorter term question that needs a direct answer. What has been, or is likely to be, the political impact of Mumbai WSF on the current Indian political scene?
./english/582.txt:4:Four images from the World Social Forum in India, and a question: how would the meeting evolve, after feeling how globalization of inequality and injustice is like?
./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/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/595.txt:26:Whereas the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall foretold of a new organization of the world, founded on international multilateralism based on law and democracy, we have been plunged into a completely different scenario. That of the undivided rule of the American Empire over the rest of the world. Neoliberal globalization is spreading its tentacles out unceasingly, reaching every last corner of the planet and doing nothing but aggravating inequalities between the rich and the poor, and between the North and the South. This early twenty-first century scenario—become even more explicit after the September 11, 2001 events—is marked by the passage from neoliberal globalization (in which the will for power was hindered by the Cold War) to neo-imperial globalization (in which the logic of war is added to the logic of competition, laying bare the interests of the United States and their allies).
./english/605.txt:10:This Forum has definitely joined the agenda of struggle against neoliberalism with the struggle against militarization and the empire: to the delegates present in Mumbai, the struggle against poverty and exclusion resulting from capitalist globalization is inseparable from the struggle against war and imperialism. But this Forum also included issues before ignored or put aside in the global movement´s agenda, such as the struggle against cast discrimination, which keeps 200 million Indians in the edge of society and claims a rethink about the problem of racism, and the struggle against the combined effects of communalism, patriarchalism and religious fundamentalism – increased by the present path of the imperial power and the fundamentalist hindu government in New Delhi.
./english/605.txt:15:The Indian Organizing Committee (formed by 48 entities) took long to choose the city to house the IV WSF, but its final decision has turned out to be more than justified. Bombay, now called Mumbai, has a weak left presence and is ruled by the extreme right – what an impact has it provoked in the Forum participants to feel the city! Even for those who have been to India before, staying a week in the neighborhood of the exhibition park Nesco Grounds, in Goregaon, north edge of Great Mumbai (30 km from Colaba, south of the peninsula, the financial and tourist “city center”) was a lively lesson about the results of the globalization suffered by billions of people.
./english/605.txt:27:The IV WSF organizers have made possible to the participants in the event an exemplar contact with the unequal development and lead to paroxism, with fantastic post-modern towers raised in huge slums with cosmopolitan rootless elites who live with a rural miserable India, stuck on eighteenth century, with billionaires and affluent middle-classes who live without sorry in midst of countless dalits, people who fight every single day for survival. This experience has imposed, even for the Latin American, an existential redefinition of the sense of misery and exclusion caused by neoliberal globalization.
./english/605.txt:36:These were the sectors which with most highlight have brought their problems and struggles to the IV WSF – specially the dalits, who comprehended few less than half Indian delegates. The hottest problems in these people´s lives – which delegates of their organizations had understood being linked to the neoliberal globalization – were those motivating most part of the discussions realized in Nesco Grounds. In addition to the issues with a special class focus established by the communist or socialist left sectors, another great range of inquiries emerged more directly from combat to castism, communalism, religious sectarism and patriarchalism have earned centrality in the Forum.
./english/605.txt:94:But articulation and formulation of plans of action should be put in the right context. When one demands that the Forum make alternatives, proposals and plan of action viable , in fact, what is demanded is a change of the correlation of forces that only can come from a wide process of retro-feeding between the Forum and thousands of movements and national and local entities. Some exemplar actions, such as the proposal by Arundhati Roy in the Mumbai´s opening (Do Turkey´s Enjoy Thanksgiving? in www.forumsocialmundial.org.br) – boycotting in a systematic way two big and emblematic corporations in neoliberal globalization –, can be made viable in Forums such as the present ones. That is not the same for dozens of proposals that are already becoming patrimony of the global movement. In order to switch so much the force correlation, we should make a great political and organizational quality jump, making it possible the capillar articulation in the international processes with a great number of national processes.
./english/607.txt:1:World Social Forum presents real alternative to globalization
./english/607.txt:4:THE 2004 World Social Forum (WSF) was for the first time held in Mumbai (Bombay), India, between 16-21 January. More than 100,000 delegates came together for the biggest anti-neoliberal globalization meeting ever, representing trade unions, environment, women, human rights, peace, alternative sexuality and other movements.
./english/607.txt:6:Poor tribals, dalits [former untouchables], street vendors, daily wage workers, rural labourers and people displaced by large projects such as mega dams were also present in force. They came together in more than 1,200 seminars and workshops, while marches, rallies, street theatre, songs and other events continued well into the nights.The plurality of this forum is its strength. It represents an ever-growing coalition of a very wide global spectrum of social strata negatively affected by globalization. Its myriad views reflect both its inclusive nature and the spread of its appeal to sectors of the population not attracted to earlier radical or anti-establishment ideologies. It initiates a search for alternatives that are not imposed from any one stream of thought but are cross-fertilized by many different intellectual currents culminating in new and innovative theories and slogans. The forums slogan - "another world is possible" - symbolizes both its rejection of globalization and the latters claim that it is the only alternative.
./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:12:It is possible the 2005 WSF will be even more ambitious, and attempt to lay the basis of a rainbow coalition against neo-liberal globalization, though such efforts may undermine the openness for which the forum is famous and attractive. In any event, it is certain that after Mumbai the forum can only move ahead.
./english/611.txt:28:The fact that it was teeming with attendees and speakers, becoming a kind of progressive self-contained universe, was nothing new. That many more people were marching and celebrating outside speakers venues than were attending the speaking events themselves was new, however. It apparently owed in part to poor translation facilities. If you came from parts of India that didnt leave you fluent in English or Hindi, you were at a loss to understand many talks being given. But I suspect people not attending talks had another reason as well. As with other WSFs most of the presentations were about how bad globalization, capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and caste relations, not to mention Hindu fundamentalism, are. The people parading all day outside the talks knew all this without having to hear it. Does it really make any sense to get up on a stage and talk about the ills of poverty and of indignity in a city like this - where walking five minutes in any direction outside the gates of our event offers incontrovertible evidence of the claims -- evidence so powerful, so humbling, so sickening, and so overwhelming, that no speaker could possibly expand on its message?
./english/611.txt:32:Two central tensions of the WSF still exist, however. First, the WSF has been a venue for information exchange. When you do that over and over, with the information remaining mostly familiar...you start to atrophy. Taking the event to a new continent means reaching new audiences so that old substance is rejuvenated by reaching new listeners. But many people want more than that. They feel that with a burgeoning momentum of connections and commitments spanning the world, there ought to be aprogram that the WSF adopts, furthers, and wins. What about the WSF programmatically addressing war, say - or corporate globalization, or the trends in India, for that matter, or even something narrower such as boycotting particular firms engaged in especially horrible practice.
./english/611.txt:46:In this sense the WSF could undertake to help build a new international activist offensive on a scale like that of the anti-corporate globalization movement, but now with targets all over every country, including mainstream TV, radio, and print media outlets worldwide. The effort would have an activist, "raise the social costs until you meet our demands" component. And the effort would have "a positive build a better world" in our own media component, as well.
./english/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:9:These two sides of the equation are indisociable: the WSF only makes sense and has a future in the sense that it feedsback the struggles against neoliberal globalization and is a relief to them, allowing to mix in its interior non deliberative spaces, such as the Conferences, seminars, panels, etc, with other more deliberative ones as the selforganized activities within the WSF, promoted by diverse social movements. Amogst them is the Social Movements Assembly, which has bee a reference mark in the struggle against neolibreal globalization in the past years, because from it have been promoted the mobilizations sich as Quebec against the FTAA, or the one in Cancun agaist the WTO, besides Genoa and the February 15th , and that after all, have been one of the central aspects of legitimation of the WSF as a reference in the struggle against the system.
./english/614.txt:15:The experience in Mumbai has been useful to prove that the WSF is possible out of Porto Alegre, that its open character facilitates the integration of a broad plurality of many social movements, feeds the social mobilization and makes clear that the WSF globalization is not only possible but also necessary. Besides, it has made clear that the organization of the WSF is possible with distinct parameters in relation to those that had been used in Porto Alegre: to have a presence and visibility of the most oppressed social sectors, to block the space for sources of money that compromise the Forum, etc. Mumbai has also showed that there are movements that oppose neoliberalism but do not feel comfortable with the working and acting procedures of the WSF and that there are many spaces to be built in order to integrate as much movements as possible.
./english/614.txt:63:We are all conscious that as time goes by and the more the Forum consolidates itself, the risks of institutionalization and instrumentalization raises. That’s why the evolution and the future of the WSF, its role in the struggle against neoliberal globalization, its relation to the social movements and the role of them in its development have to be permanet preocupation amongst us, but avoiding to fall in the temptation to change its open and plural character.
./english/629.txt:4:The success of the World Social Forum 2003 in Porto Alegre and its process of globalization throughout the year of 2002, brought about many questions about its continuity. Many valuations have been written, pointing to different directions, as well as new proposals have been put forward for the organization of 2003, 2004 and 2005 events. In fact, the Forum faces a positive crisis, one of growth, that demands a deeper look at some of the issues remarked in its Principles Charter. To avoid the risk of destroying its potentialities, it is imperative that some ambiguities are overcome, before the process moves toward irretrievable crystallized orientations. A timely occasion for this could be the next meeting of the WSF International Council - better prepared and longer than the previous ones - expected for June 2003.
./english/629.txt:44:As the squares, the Forum is an open space, as its Principles Charter also specifies. But it is not a neutral space like the public squares. The Forum opens from time to time in different parts of the world - in the events where it takes place - with one specific objective: to allow as many people, organizations and movements as possible that oppose themselves to the neo-liberalism to get freely together, listen to each other, learn with the experiences and struggles of others, discuss proposals of action, to become linked in new nets and organizations aiming at overcoming the present process of globalization dominated by the large international corporations and by the financial interests. Thus, it is a space created to serve a common objective of all those who converge to the Forum, functioning horizontally as a public square, without leaders nor pyramids of power in its interior. All those who come to the Forum are willing to accept these conditions - for this reason, in order to join this “square”, one must agree with its Principles Charter.
./english/629.txt:122:Without any doubt the priority given to the self-organized activities – that expresses in the practice of the events organization the option for Forums-spaces and not for a Forum-movement - would be much conducive to accomplishing the objectives of the WSF, formulated in its Principles Charter and indicated in the beginning of this text: to allow as many people, organizations and movements that oppose themselves to the neo-liberalism as possible to get freely together, listen to each other, learn with the experiences and the struggles of the others, discuss proposals of action, become linked in new nets and organizations aiming at overcoming the present process of globalization dominated by the large international corporations and by the financial interests. Because in fact it’s in the self-organized workshops and seminars that this can occur, and not in the traditional context of large meetings and congresses, where the people listen passively to what respectable people have to say, and by chance be lucky enough to have the opportunity of formulating questions.
./english/634.txt:4:The World Social Forum (WSF) Charter of Principles emphasizes that the WSF offers a space for anti-neoliberal capitalist globalization forces to assemble and discuss, that the WSF ‘does not constitute a locus of power to be disputed by the participants in its meetings’ nor ‘a body representing the world civil society.’ My overall impression of the third WSF annual meeting (World Social Forum website: www.worldsocialforum.org ) in Brazil this past January 2003 is that it fulfilled very well its role of offering such a space and marked a distinct but small advance over the previous two such assemblies, with several important “triumphs.”
./english/634.txt:10:The US delegation of 1,100 people was said to be the second largest, after having been small in previous years. Organized labor’s representation doubled to 717 organizations from 156 countries. While most labor analysts have concluded since the meetings at Porto Alegre III that organized labor still has a long way to go to catch up with the WSF and the current anti-globalization movements, I was more favorably impressed with labor’s progress, based on my frequent informal meetings with several different trade unionists from Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. Brazilians, as always, were present in huge numbers (as many as 70,000), something that will change in 2004 when the fourth WSF annual meeting takes place in India. More than 4,000 journalists attended, representing 1,423 media organizations (more than at the last World Cup Soccer matches in Japan, which is the international standard for maximum attendance by reporters). The always dynamic Youth Camp, which tented 2,500 the first year and 15,000 the second, mushroomed to 30,000 this year. I attended a meeting, as an invited guest, of young activists in a “big tent” at the Youth Camp where plans for an International Youth Network were discussed. Young women were a majority and led the discussion.
./english/634.txt:19:A second “triumph” at Porto Alegre III was the WSF’s for the first time completely upstaging the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF, a club of the world’s wealthiest individuals, or “unelected Masters of the Universe" as the London Financial Times has dubbed them), held this year in Davos, Switzerland. Indeed, even the harshest critics of WSF acknowledge that in terms of world impact on both public opinion and many key power centers the WSF is beginning to leave the WEF in its wake. As one commentator noted in Terraviva (a WSF daily newspaper printed during Porto Alegre III): “Davos is discussing the crisis of confidence afflicting its own [neoliberal] model, whereas Porto Alegre shows an impressive liveliness.” WEF president Klaus Schwab reportedly said that the new year found the world at its most “fragile” and “dangerous” state in the WEF’s 33-year history. Despite this, the millionaire delegates to Davos scrambled around all the major issues of the day without coming up with anything resembling a unified leadership position to guide the world further along the paths of neoliberal globalization--this time, by their own admission, with a much needed “more human face.” The WEF once again stated its agreement with the Tobin Tax but took no action toward its implementation. On the burning issue of the US war plans in Iraq, the WEF delegates at Davos floundered completely. US Secretary of State Colin Powell “did not receive loud applause at the Davos meeting, as did many others…[who] criticized the US for ‘militarizing the world” (Terraviva).
./english/634.txt:25:At Porto Alegre III, the war in Iraq and the US plan of “Shock and Awe” were seen as a logical outgrowth of the IMF’s “shock therapy” applied around the world under neoliberal capitalist globalization. [Note: senior Bush officials have confirmed that Shock and Awe "is the concept on which the war plan is based"; the architect of Shock and Awe, military strategist Harlan Ullman, has gloated to the press that the effect of the war’s opening 48-hour bombardment of Baghdad will be "rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima."].
./english/634.txt:42:* James Cockcroft is Research Fellow at the International Institute of Research and Education in Amsterdam, Holland and an online professor for the State University of New York. He has written 35 books on Latin America, international affairs, and human rights, including Latin America: History, Politics, And U.S. Policy (Belmont, California: Wadsworth/International Thomson Publishing, Second edition, 1998, in Spanish as América Latina Y Estados Unidos: Historia Y Política País Por País, Mexico City: siglo veintiuno editores, 2001) and Mexico’s Hope: An Encounter With Politics And History, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999, in Spanish as La Esperanza De Mexico, Mexico City: siglo veintiuno editores, 2001). In Porto Alegre III, he participated in the panel “Imperialismo e resistência popular à globalização capitalista na América Latina” (Imperialism and popular resistance to capitalist globalization in Latin America), along with Raul Pont, Prof. Janette Habel, and Michaël Löwy.
./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/651.txt:4:Who would have thought it! After two decades of dominance, the one-track proposal of globalization by large economic and financial corporations acting through the market, legitimated conceptually by neo-liberalism, finds itself contested by a powerful - and similarly global - movement of public opinion. Expectations are rapidly being reversed. In a very short time, growing but disordered dissatisfaction with the directions globalization is taking has panned out into coalitions and networks with a major capability to gather and mobilize support, and has built into a new wave of collective aspirations and ideals in direct confrontation with the "of the market, for the market and by the market" proposal.
./english/651.txt:6:The World Social Forum is part of that process. Its short trajectory is indicative of how expectations regarding globalization are shifting. As a Forum, its aim is precisely to enable a global agenda to be built up in a process of dialogue among the whole diversity of civil networks, public campaigns, alliances and coalitions that, in their specificity and differences, stand in opposition to the dominant globalization. That purpose was helped by identifying as anti-Davos, as counter to the ideas and perspectives issuing from the World Economic Forum. That is how it was in 2001, at World Social Forum I in Porto Alegre, which surprised by its innovation and multiple potential. Now, from January 31 to February 5, at World Social Forum II, once again in Porto Alegre, adhesion to the idea of the Forum and the major impact it has had in the world media have turned the tables. Although it has existed for only two years - negligible against the 32 of the World Economic Forum at Davos - the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre now seems to be dictating the agenda. Now it is from their side, from Davos, that the opposition - anti-Porto Alegre - has to come...
./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/651.txt:10:Concrete proposals are being demanded of this movement that contests the reigning world (dis)order. It first and most fundamental response is to build a new outlook, a new agenda. This will deny legitimacy to the economist priorities imposed by the logic of economic and financial globalization by making proposals that simply correct its social evils. We are committed to building a social, democratic and sustainable approach to the economy and to globalization which will serve to foster human freedom and dignity. No to the absolute primacy of trade and the market! The need we face is to radicalize the call for human rights for all as the fundamental priority capable of conveying the new consciousness of mankind. Breaking down the separation between economy and society, between economy and nature, between nature and society, these are tasks central to building a global agenda capable of promoting planetary citizenship.
./english/651.txt:14:The strategic challenges facing us are considerable. The global, citizens agenda we want to pursue depends precisely on the strength of our social and cultural diversity and of the multiple responses that grow out of it as counter proposals to the one-dimensional thinking of prevailing globalization. The distinguishing mark of the World Social Forum resides precisely in our ability to build the space necessary for global networks and movements to meet, dialogue and exchange while respecting and strengthening their own diversity and autonomy. The greatest challenge is to build bridges for convergence in diversity. That is something we are just starting to invent. The results and the impact are not seen, however, by those who are decidedly in the opposing trenches or by those who - worse still - do not believe in the difference they can make by participating as citizens in determining the course this world will take. Being among those who believe than another world is possible is in itself already very gratifying and encourages us to put our best efforts into seeing that wave grow.
./english/654.txt:13:This Charter explicitly states that the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre does not have a deliberative character. The same happens with the World Economic Forum, in Davos, to which the Forum of Porto Alegre is proposed as an alternative (and it is to highlight this aspect that it is held on the same days). To all participants, those days simply represent a stronger and more intensive opportunity to deepen their commitments and articulations, on a worldwide level, within an effort which already existed and will continue to exist after the Forum It is obvious that behind this similarity there exists a huge difference: the participants of Davos aim to maintain and increase the domination of the capital - which they control - over the human beings of the whole world, as well as the expansion of their private business. The Porto Alegre participants, feeding on the increasing protests that come up everywhere against a globalization dictated by the interests of that capital, want to move forward in their proposals to build another world, centered on human beings and respectful of nature, a world which is not only seen as possible but also necessary and urgent and which, in fact, they are already building in their practical action.
./english/658.txt:22:The Forum is bringing together increasingly diverse actors from a great variety of social sectors: artists, intellectuals, leaders of native-population movements, parliamentarians, etc. (even though "etc." is not a good expression to qualify the other actors). However, a few key sectors are still absent or are barely represented. Of these I shall mention only one: that of the military in favor of peace. I realize that mentioning this sector can be controversial, but I am convinced that if we obtain the participation of more military sectors in favor of peace, we shall reinforce the dynamics of the World Social Forum tremendously. This year, in the conference on Militarism and Globalization, a French General who played a significant role in the deployment of UN peacekeepers in the Balkans, General Jean Cot, gave a very important speech, which was strongly applauded. The challenge is to find out how to go beyond these almost exceptional cases. Also, it will be important not increase distances, which could weaken the effort of the whole: I am referring in particular to the fact that it does not seem appropriate that the Forum should be limited to a world of adults and that young people should have to meet separately, remaining more or less away from the debating centers or playing a secondary role. Genuine innovations could very well be hatching in the Youth Forum. If so, so much the better, but let us not stand outside.
./english/658.txt:31:Moving toward the globalization (as its name implies) of the World Social Forum
./english/658.txt:33:The perspectives are promising. The Indians have already offered, during a press conference in Porto Alegre, to organize the 2004 Forum in India. This news was carried by the press in Porto Alegre and in India, and Siddhartha reaffirmed it in his speech during the beautiful closing ceremony. In addition, the African members of the International Council of the WSF also stated their will to organize the 2005 Forum in some African country. To enlarge the Forum, to make it known in China and in India and in other big and small regions not only of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Arab world, but also even of Europe, especially of Eastern and Northern Europe, and of the American continent, above all in United States, is a "historical task" of the next months and years. To succeed in having the Forum assumed as an own claim by the people, by the simple people, is an indispensable step if we expect to counter the capitalist globalization, which has, on its part, been extended all over the world and has penetrated all the different aspects of peoples daily life. Now that we are opening a new stage, let us do all we possibly can to give birth to three, four, five, and more "Porto Alegres"... in the most diverse and populated regions of the world, embracing the greatest variety of actors, and leaving the plural records of the proposals elaborated and carried forward by the people.
./english/668.txt:8:Protestors marched against fundamentalism of all sorts, against hunger and genetically modified agriculture, the IMF, the Free Trade Area of the Americas and much more. The vibe was almost always near-euphoric with horns blaring, hands clapping, feet dancing, flags waving and chants singing out regularly in at least four languages.Sharp Contrast to World Economic ForumThe World Social Forum began last year to provide a counter vision and voice to the World Economic Forum a staid corporate and government gathering designed to informally facilitate corporate globalization. And while "Davos" -- along with the protestors against it -- grabbed the lions share of the corporate-media headlines by switching its venue to New York City this year, Porto Alegre was a cauldron of ideas, creativity and debates all under the slogan "Another World is Possible."Candido Gryzbowski, director of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis, one of the events main organizers, went so far as to assert that Porto Alegre had left the World Economic Forum in the dust. "We dont need them. Our message, our concerns are more comprehensive," he noted. "We want to create alternatives, not just to neo-liberalism, but also to various types of fundamentalism and un-democratic governments."Certainly, the World Economic Forum 3,000 person event in New Yorks Waldorf Astoria was a significant gathering of powerful world players. But the sheer magnitude of the Porto Alegre event far surpassed Davos this year, becoming so large as to be difficult to comprehend, even for its most avid participants.The program of conferences, workshops and seminars, along with films, music and artistic events ran more than 70 tabloid pages in each language.
./english/668.txt:11:And this being the beginning of the 21st century, his most-marketable non-trademarked image was for sale in nearly half of the hundreds of vendors stalls. There were Che books, Che t-shirts, Che CDs, Che baseball caps, Che posters, Che flags, and even little-mini bottles of Che cacaca -- the local cane alcohol drink. By contrast, despite the anti-US government sentiment of most of the meeting, images of Osama bin Laden were nowhere to be found, neither in the vendors stalls nor the meeting halls. Anti-fundamentalism and pluralism were the themes of the day.There was also a plethora of music every day in a makeshift amphitheater, all night concerts, and stirring speeches by the stars of the anti-corporate globalization movement Walden Bello, Martin Khor and Naomi Klein, by venerated leftists like Noam Chomsky and Brazils Luiz Ignacio "Lula" da Silva, as well as by Nobel Peace Prize winners Rigoberta Menchu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel.Both the "war on terror" and Israeli-Palestinian conflict figured prominently in a multi-day session entitled "A World Without Wars is Possible." The Argentine economic debacle was hotly debated in many a venue, and the scandalous demise of the Enron corporation was high on the agenda. There was a World Youth Congress.
./english/671.txt:4:Rather than opposing the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre to the World Economic Forum in New York, it is more revealing to imagine it as the distant offspring of the historic Bandung Conference that took place in Indonesia in 1955. Both were conceived as attempts to counter the dominant world order: colonialism and the oppressive Cold War binary in the case of Bandung, and the rule of capitalist globalization in that of Porto Alegre. The differences, however, are immediately apparent. On one hand the Bandung Conference, which brought together leaders primarily from Asia and Africa, revealed in a dramatic way the racial dimension of the colonial and Cold War world order, which Richard Wright famously described as being divided by the colour curtain. Porto Alegre, in contrast, was a predominantly white event. There were relatively few participants from Asia and Africa, and the racial differences of the Americas were dramatically underrepresented. This points toward a continuing task facing those gathered at Porto Alegre: to globalize further the movements, both within each society and across the worlda project in which the Forum is merely one step. On the other hand, whereas Bandung was conducted by a small group of national political leaders and representatives, Porto Alegre was populated by a swarming multitude and a network of movements. This multitude of protagonists is the great novelty of the World Social Forum, and central to the hope it offers for the future.
./english/671.txt:6:The first and dominant impression of the Forum was its overflowing enormity; not so much the number of people therethe organizers say 80,000 participatedbut rather the number of events, encounters and happenings. The programme listing all the official conferences, seminars and workshopsmost of which took place at the Catholic Universitywas the size of a tabloid newspaper, but one soon realized that there were innumerable other unofficial meetings taking place all over town, some publicized on posters and leaflets, others by word of mouth. There were also separate gatherings for the different groups participating in the Forum, such as a meeting of the Italian social movements or one for the various national sections of ATTAC. Then there were the demonstrations: both officially planned, such as the opening mass May Day-style parade, and smaller, conflictual demonstrations against, for example, the members of parliament from different countries at the Forum who voted for the present war on terrorism. Finally, another series of events was held at the enormous youth camp by the river, its fields and fields of tents housing 15,000 people in an atmosphere reminiscent of a summer music festival, especially when it rained and everyone tramped through the mud wearing plastic sacks as raincoats. In short, if anyone with obsessive tendencies were to try to understand what was happening at Porto Alegre, the result would certainly have been a complete mental breakdown. The Forum was unknowable, chaotic, dispersive. And that overabundance created an exhilaration in everyone, at being lost in a sea of people from so many parts of the world who are working similarly against the present form of capitalist globalization.
./english/671.txt:8:This open encounter was the most important element of Porto Alegre. Even though the Forum was limited in some important respectssocially and geographically, to name twoit was nonetheless an opportunity to globalize further the cycle of struggles that have stretched from Seattle to Genoa, which have been conducted by a network of movements thus far confined, by and large, to the North Atlantic. Dealing with many of the same issues as those who elsewhere contest the present capitalist form of globalization, or specific institutional policies such as those of the IMF, the movements themselves have remained limited. Recognizing the commonality of their projects with those in other parts of the world is the first step toward expanding the network of movements, or linking one network to another. This recognition, indeed, is primarily responsible for the happy, celebratory atmosphere of the Forum.
./english/671.txt:10:The encounter should, however, reveal and address not only the common projects and desires, but also the differences of those involveddifferences of material conditions and political orientation. The various movements across the globe cannot simply connect to each other as they are, but must rather be transformed by the encounter through a kind of mutual adequation. Those from North America and Europe, for example, cannot but have been struck by the contrast between their experience and that of agricultural labourers and the rural poor in Brazil, represented most strongly by the MST (Landless Movement)and vice versa. What kind of transformations are necessary for the Euro-American globalization movements and the Latin American movements, not to become the same, or even to unite, but to link together in an expanding common network? The Forum provided an opportunity to recognize such differences and questions for those willing to see them, but it did not provide the conditions for addressing them. In fact, the very same dispersive, overflowing quality of the Forum that created the euphoria of commonality also effectively displaced the terrain on which such differences and conflicts could be confronted.
./english/671.txt:13:The Porto Alegre Forum was in this sense perhaps too happy, too celebratory and not conflictual enough. The most important political difference cutting across the entire Forum concerned the role of national sovereignty. There are indeed two primary positions in the response to todays dominant forces of globalization: either one can work to reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and global capital, or one can strive towards a non-national alternative to the present form of globalization that is equally global. The first poses neoliberalism as the primary analytical category, viewing the enemy as unrestricted global capitalist activity with weak state controls; the second is more clearly posed against capital itself, whether state-regulated or not. The first might rightly be called an anti-globalization position, in so far as national sovereignties, even if linked by international solidarity, serve to limit and regulate the forces of capitalist globalization. National liberation thus remains for this position the ultimate goal, as it was for the old anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles. The second, in contrast, opposes any national solutions and seeks instead a democratic globalization.
./english/671.txt:15:The first position occupied the most visible and dominant spaces of the Porto Alegre Forum; it was represented in the large plenary sessions, repeated by the official spokespeople, and reported in the press. A key proponent of this position was the leadership of the Brazilian PT (Workers Party)in effect the host of the Forum, since it runs the city and regional government. It was obvious and inevitable that the PT would occupy a central space in the Forum and use the international prestige of the event as part of its campaign strategy for the upcoming elections. The second dominant voice of national sovereignty was the French leadership of ATTAC, which laid the groundwork for the Forum in the pages of Le Monde Diplomatique. The leadership of ATTAC is, in this regard, very close to many of the French politiciansmost notably Jean-Pierre Chevènementwho advocate strengthening national sovereignty as a solution to the ills of contemporary globalization. These, in any case, are the figures who dominated the representation of the Forum both internally and in the press.
./english/671.txt:17:The non-sovereign, alternative globalization position, in contrast, was minoritarian at the Forumnot in quantitative terms but in terms of representation; in fact, the majority of the participants in the Forum may well have occupied this minoritarian position. First, the various movements that have conducted the protests from Seattle to Genoa are generally oriented towards non-national solutions. Indeed, the centralized structure of state sovereignty itself runs counter to the horizontal network-form that the movements have developed. Second, the Argentinian movements that have sprung up in response to the present financial crisis, organized in neighbourhood and city-wide delegate assemblies, are similarly antagonistic to proposals of national sovereignty. Their slogans call for getting rid, not just of one politician, but all of them que se vayan todos: the entire political class. And finally, at the base of the various parties and organizations present at the Forum the sentiment is much more hostile to proposals of national sovereignty than at the top. This may be particularly true of ATTAC, a hybrid organization whose head, especially in France, mingles with traditional politicians, whereas its feet are firmly grounded in the movements.
./english/671.txt:19:The division between the sovereignty, anti-globalization position and the non-sovereign, alternative globalization position is therefore not best understood in geographical terms. It does not map the divisions between North and South or First World and Third. The conflict corresponds rather to two different forms of political organization. The traditional parties and centralized campaigns generally occupy the national sovereignty pole, whereas the new movements organized in horizontal networks tend to cluster at the non-sovereign pole. And furthermore, within traditional, centralized organizations, the top tends toward sovereignty and the base away. It is no surprise, perhaps, that those in positions of power would be most interested in state sovereignty and those excluded least. This may help to explain, in any case, how the national sovereignty, anti-globalization position could dominate the representations of the Forum even though the majority of the participants tend rather toward the perspective of a non-national alternative globalization.
./english/671.txt:24:In a previous period we could have staged an old-style ideological confrontation between the two positions. The first could accuse the second of playing into the hands of neoliberalism, undermining state sovereignty and paving the way for further globalization. Politics, the one could continue, can only be effectively conducted on the national terrain and within the nation-state. And the second could reply that national regimes and other forms of sovereignty, corrupt and oppressive as they are, are merely obstacles to the global democracy that we seek. This kind of confrontation, however, could not take place at Porto Alegrein part because of the dispersive nature of the event, which tended to displace conflicts, and in part because the sovereignty position so successfully occupied the central representations that no contest was possible.