Latent structure of a text

./english/31.txt:4:There were many good meetings in which the need for the organisational unity of the left was debated. For example, there were half a dozen gatherings where the various existing ESF networks discussed joint campaigns and days of action (for instance, there are plans to organise an ESF-style conference on the fight against privatisation).

./english/31.txt:19:One of the most positive developments was that for the first time political parties were allowed to participate openly - not just in the Greek organising committee, but also in the seminars and workshops held at the ESF. Until now, representatives of parties had to pretend to be members of this or that ‘movement’ or ‘network’ in order to be listed as speakers in the programme.

./english/35.txt:107:efforts to directly integrate themselves into the european networks.

./english/36.txt:20:6. The new form of the ESF program proved to be very productive. The abolition of plennaries facilitated the preparation of the ESF and at the same time prevented the creation of false impressions about the “representation” of the movement. Furthermore, in some cases we achieved very good mergers (p.e. the seminars of Euromarches, and the “Public services pool”) that included almost all the organizations that work on a specific issue. On the other hand, we couldn’t avoid repetitions and “one organization’s propaganda” seminars. We should all work harder to create more inclusive and better prepared seminars To achieve this goal it is vital to reduce the number of seminars (I think that 170 seminars are enough) and to use European Preparatory Assemblies as opportunities to work also on the content of ESF and not just on its structure. European networks should work in a collective way all the time and not just few weeks before the ESF. In addition to that, we really need a permanent European web site that could facilitate not only voluntary merger but also the centralized merger process elaborated by the European program group. After working for some months on the ESF program, I arrived to the conclusion that it will take many many years before central merger process stopped to be necessary.

./english/36.txt:22:8. Although we did it well with artists, the presence of intellectuals was not adequate. A great number of progressive intellectuals were not at Athens. The ESF isn’t yet a bridge between activists and intellectuals. And it is a pity that alternative thinking networks do not work as much as they can in this direction.

./english/36.txt:29:• We should keep on with the reform of ESF methodology. It is necessary to work together for a program with fewer but more inclusive and better prepared seminars. It is high time that European networks work more within and beyond the EPA.

./english/40.txt:6:In the build up to the European Social Forum (ESF) in Athens, the fourth since Florence in 2002, the Greek organisers were modest in their expectations of its political significance. ‘It will be a well organised event; but that’ll be it,’ said Panayotis Yulis from the Greek Social and Political Rights Network on the eve of the gathering that took place in the abandoned airport from 4-7 May.

./english/40.txt:14:Out were big plenaries with endless lists of celebrity speakers; in were focused seminars involving networks whose roots were first put down in the previous forums in Florence or Paris and are now coming to maturity. Out were corporate sponsorship and high price entrance fees; in were solidarity funds, low entrance fees and thorough international organising work, enabling over 1,000 activists from Turkey and 3,000 from eastern Europe to participate..

./english/40.txt:17:The flow of new ideas coming from the ESF is something even Le Monde remarked upon in its leader on ‘Europe Day’ – a few days after the Athens forum. It pointed to the ESF as a source of alternatives at a time when the European elites are at an impasse. I found a widespread insistence on the importance of deepening our analysis. ‘It’s not enough just to be against Bolkestein [the EU directive introducing market forces to essential services]. We need specific analyses of how neoliberalism is being carried through in different countries, the impact of enlargement and what can be learnt from the UK,’ commented Kenny Bell, deputy convenor of the northern region of Unison. To this end a network of public service trade unions is organising not just action but a Europe-wide seminar in October.

./english/41.txt:3:Report on the Athens ESF, May 3-7, 2006 Carla Krüger (Attac, Transform! network)

./english/41.txt:9:The speakers emphasised the role of dialogue, of creative networking and criticised the penchant of neoliberalism to new wars…

./english/41.txt:13:In the evening, I helped the process by consecutively interpreting from the German to the English (that was interpreted onwards by relay by Babels) for Hermann Hoffmann from the “Alliance for Social Justice”, Thuringia on the development of his initiative and then the terrible calamity for Germany of the reduction of unemployment benefits for those unemployed for more than a year (Hartz IV); on these questions of precariousness and in order to be included in the new network, contact Michel Rousseau (Euromarches)

./english/41.txt:18:I wonder whether “Alternativy” should not be allowed to join the Transform! network.

./english/41.txt:32:There was an advance version of the declaration to which the social movements then added. The main themes were: against the threat of war, against the occupation of Iraq, for a just peace between Israel and Palestine, women’s rights in Turkey, Against Precariousness (founding of a new network), against the G-8 in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) and in Heiligendamm etc. Somewhat irksome was the demand by Babels, which itself had not really earned the medal of honour, especially not for its translations from the Greek and the Turkic, that the speakers should speak their mother tongues and not “shit English or Français merdique”. In my opinion, they had not achieved the performance that would have justified such mean remarks. Therefore, the Russians as well undauntedly first addressed their compatriots in Russian and then switched to English and nobody prevented them. Sophie Zafari first read the draft of the final declaration in English and commented in French and also got through. When, however, an Arabic interpretress wanted to interpret consecutively for a Palestinian speaker, because the majority of the audience (as had been the case during the whole ESF) had not been able to get a radio, she was refused that, and she had to return to her cabin.

./english/41.txt:44:8. WE must continue the networking, the meetings, the building of trust, if we do not want the process to fail and if we really want to resist neoliberalism and build another, more human, more social Europe.

./english/42.txt:1:Report from the ESF Athens 2006 – Repression Network

./english/42.txt:4:Here's a (first) ESF Athens report from the Repression Network. Unfortunately we did not have the chance to discuss it very much between the Network members; so I can just speak for some of us.

./english/42.txt:6:For the Repression Network the ESF Athens wasn't just a meeting with seminars but also with practical action.

./english/42.txt:14:1. As many of you know the Migrant Network discussed already some months ago an intervention at the Aliens Police in Athens. The plan was to protest in front of the station. Since the Aliens Police changed its headquarter and moreover declared that they would close the whole department during the ESF days it was decided to visit another police station.

./english/42.txt:16:The Repression Network considered this as an opportunity to strengthen the cooperation with the Migrants Network and to show our practical solidarity with the migrants as one of the most oppressed parts of the population. We also decided to go into the station to express our protest there.

./english/42.txt:18:A short time before the busses with the members of the Migrants Network arrived we went into the Police Station of Agios Panteleimonas, which is situated in a neighborhood with many migrants. The first demonstrators of the Migrant Network were confronted with the police outside the station and two of them were rather heavily injured.

./english/42.txt:30:The members of the ESF Repression Network who took part in this action were very satisfied with the results. The visit was transmitted in many TV channels and the newspapers reported largely, the second biggest one in Greece (Eleftherotypia) on the front page.

./english/42.txt:39:This means that we had a total of about 500 people in our 4 seminars (not different people since many of us attended two or more seminars). In respect of the fact that the repression issues were never a main theme in the ESF but from the beginning marginalized I think that this number is pretty good. It is even better when we consider that this was the first ESF where our Network organized such seminars.

./english/42.txt:42:3. We went to the Saturday demonstration. The Network members took part in the rally with their organisations. Members of Libertad, Germany marched in the block of the Network for Political and Social Rights, Greece.

./english/42.txt:59:We think that the Athens ESF was a success, not only because of the number of the visitors and the big rally but also for us, the Repression Network.

./english/42.txt:61:We only have the problem that the subject of our Network is not mentioned in the "official" declarations of the Forum, e.g. in the declaration of the Assembly of the Movements. This is something that must be changed. (I wrote a separate mail to the ESF mailing list regarding this issue.) But this finally doesn't mean that this ESF wasn't a success also for our Network and the people we're working together with.

./english/42.txt:67:CONTRIBUTION TO THE 2006 ASSEMBLY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS BY THE ESF NETWORK AGAINST REPRESSION

./english/42.txt:70:The ESF Network against Repression has carried out intense work during this 2006 ESF. We have held 4 seminars.

./english/42.txt:84:Because of this, activists of the network against repression and activists of the migration network together, protested in a Greek police station, protested against how the Greek police humiliates migrants.

./english/44.txt:3:NETWORKS, ORGANIZATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS

./english/44.txt:9:NETWORKS

./english/44.txt:31:Babels is a network of volunteer interpreters and translators that has covered the interpretation and translation needs of the 4th ESF. Babels has over 9,000 volunteers throughout the world and its main aim is to ensure every participant’s right to express their thoughts and ideas in the language of their choice.

./english/44.txt:45:During this FSE, the network established around the Project “Charter of Principles for Another Europe” has been working on the elaboration of a project to be put forward to all European social networks and movements for discussion.

./english/44.txt:48:The network has decided to hold a meeting towards the end of 2006 in Paris to discuss an initial meeting concerning this Charter of Principles for another Europe, to continue and to build on this process in order to provide a common tool showing that alternatives to neo-liberalism do indeed exist.

./english/44.txt:57:The ESF memory project network is informing all organisations and networks that they can publish and circulate the outcomes of their activities in the ESF on the http://worspace.fse-esf.org. You can create “groups” with participants of various organisations; you can edit texts, images, links, files and your proposals and project. If you need help on how to use the site, please “contact participants” for the organisation called “Help desk collective”.

./english/44.txt:60:The associated Euro-marches and trade-union networks reunited at the FSE in Athens propose:

./english/44.txt:61:- The coordination of organisations and struggling networks against the precarious nature of jobs and of our lives by the time of the next Preparatory National Assembly.

./english/44.txt:65:We, the participants of the health network at the Athens ESF, reject the neoliberal approach to health and insist on a revitalisation to the principles of Health for All as set out in the Alma Ata declaration. These are universality, comprehensiveness, equity and services free at the point of care. The right to health will only be achieved with social and economic justice.

./english/44.txt:74:European housing Networks (AIH, HIC, NO-VOX...) are calling for local and united mobilisations, around 2 October, to demand from public authorities the realisation of the right to decent and sustainable housing for all, without discrimination, an increase in public sector housing, the regulation of housing and land markets, an end to forced evictions and the destruction of popular districts.

./english/44.txt:76:LATIN-AMERICA NETWORK

./english/44.txt:77:The Latin American group of the Network Latin America and companions met in the framework of the European Social Forum:

./english/44.txt:97:The No Vox network calls for a demonstration against the G8 in 2007 to denounce the increase in social inequalities, poverty, discrimination, repression, to share the wealth and build new rights such as a decent wage, freedom of movement and residence, housing and land for all.

./english/44.txt:101:In this ESF, more than 40 organisations shared their struggles against the commodification of common goods and the privatisation of public services, against the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) and the Bolkestein Directive and against the neoliberal policies of the EU, national and local governments. From here with the “Athens statement” we launch the European Network for Public Services. We will meet on 27th October 2006 in Geneva in order to launch a European Day of mobilization to defend and relaunch Public Services in Europe aiming at building the first European Forum of Social movements for Public Services in 2007.

./english/44.txt:104:The ESF Network against Repression has carried out intense work during this 2006 ESF. We have held 4 seminars.

./english/44.txt:118:Because of this, activists of the Network Against Repression and of the Migration Network protested in an Athens police station against the humiliation of migrants by the Greek police.

./english/44.txt:154:We must therefore unite and enlarge the mobilisation against free trade worldwide. We propose a conference with European networks working on migration, the casualisation of labour, public services, GMO’s, food sovereignty and the trade unions at the end of 2006.

./english/44.txt:156:Meanwhile, the Seattle to Brussels network calls upon those who can travel to be present in Geneva in July.

./english/44.txt:172:CALL FOR AN “ANTI-DELATION” NETWORK

./english/45.txt:42:• European Network Users and Survivors of Psychiatry (ENUSP)

./english/45.txt:78:3.1.2 Under Average Group: are the countries which main features are: high unemployment, low social security and no existence of patient networks. (for example in Greece)

./english/45.txt:79:Patient networks often can not, or hardly, exist in poor countries, because of the threat of unemployment, social exclusion and dependency. People do not speak about their weaknesses, so there is a high level of taboo. This has got a lot to do with lack of social security.

./english/45.txt:167:- get an empowering network, that contains valuable knowledge.

./english/45.txt:376:Deputy Board Member for the North West Region of European Network Users and Survivors of Psychiatry (ENUSP)

./english/47.txt:72:• Going beyond the boundaries set by the political structures and the borders of the European Union, feminists of Western and Eastern Europe will reinforce their networks of exchange, experience and solidarity.

./english/47.txt:78:• Creation of a European network of associations, trade unions and organisations of young feminists.

./english/47.txt:95:• To build a Europe wide network on R 1325.

./english/54.txt:202:make decisions. The idea is that the various networks and assemblies should

./english/54.txt:237:dates selected by the networks. This was an attempt to maintain the

./english/54.txt:249:Piero Bernocchi (Cobas), the arguments of representatives of the networks,

./english/62.txt:39:Social movement scholarship constitutes a specific area of academic study of social movements usually undertaken in the disciplines of sociology and political science. In American sociology, the early movement theorists tended to view social movements as an irrational form of collective behavior, which could be explained by reference to the mobilizers’ ‘social strains’ or ‘grievances’ (LeBon, Kornhauser etc.). Much of the work after the 1970s sought to challenge this kind of thinking, in which social movements were seen in terms of ‘mob psychology’ or as an expression of social breakdown and anomie. Thus, the new dominant paradigm in the study of social movements was focusing on such concepts as ‘resource mobilization,’ ‘political opportunities,’ ‘networks of mobilization,’ ‘framing’ and ‘political contention’ (Jenkins, Zald, McAdam, Tilly, Tarrow, Snow, Benford etc.). As a critical reaction to this structuralistic way of theorizing social movements, some analysts turned to the study of ‘emotions,’ ‘biographies’ and ‘culture’ (Goodwin, Jasper etc.) with the mainstream approach of Tilly, Tarrow, McAdam and their collaborators eventually accepting to incorporate culture as one of the determinants of their structural effects. However, even from the 1960s, European scholars (Habermas, Touraine, Melucci etc.) were elaborating an alternative paradigm, that of the ‘new social movements,’ critically reflecting on the legacy of Marxism and motivated directly from the social struggles of that period (feminism, environmentalism, May 1968 etc.).

./english/62.txt:45:For this purpose, social movement scholars need to publish in the field’s ‘best’ journals, if they want to survive professionally in the academia. At the same time, their research has to stick to theory development and they should analyze large survey data sets and use sophisticated quantitative methodologies from statistics, network theory etc. To master the field’s jargon, they should develop a language of a detached scholarly stance by making plentiful reference to the work of other academics. The result is that in many cases academic language becomes impenetrable to non-specialists and devolves into a ‘secret language of social movements’ (as Charlotte Ryan has noted in a discussion about the future of social science in the journal Social Problems).

./english/62.txt:56:The understanding of knowledge emerging from recent social movements by contrast reinstates a connection between intention and outcome but on the basis of uncertainty and experimentation. So the connection is not complete or predictable. It is always approximate. Our recognition of the importance of experience-based knowledge and of the open, unbounded nature of the social world we live in, is linked to an understanding that no single actor, individual or collective can ever have complete knowledge of the context in which they act, of the conseuences of their action. So we can never predict with any certainty; we can never presume that social relationships which have been true in the past will continue into the future; we never rule out the possibility of qualitatively new and unpredictable forms of behaviour. But because of our recognition of the social and sharable nature of practical knowledge we believe – unlike the neo-liberals – that human actors can always approximate to knowledge of the consequences of their action and the action of others. There can be a connection – but not a complete or entirely predictable connection - between purpose and consequences. Purposeful, knowing action aimed at social transformation is possible but it can never be all knowing; there will always be uninetended, unpredicted consequences. This two sided charcater of social movements is reflected in their activity. Indeed their/our networking is all the time aiming to extend and deepen our knowledge in order that our action is more effective in achieving its goals. But because of the inherent incompleteness of our knowledge, all our activity has to have an experimental, self-reflexive dimension built into it. If it does n’t, it can fall back into either of the old approaches: a commandist approach or a completely haphazard one.

./english/62.txt:58:There are many ways in which we are creating/prefiguring alternatives as we resist, in the ways we live, the ways we consume, the culture we produce, the relationships we create. These aspects of social movement activity is now widely recognised, discussed and systematised. I want to argue that there is a further, more methodological aspect to the ways we pre-figure another world, a new kind of society and economy. I want to argue that in the very ways in which we organise, the forms of co-ordination we are inventing as we try to expand,deepen, communicate and act on our knowledge, we are nurturing the seeds of a new means of social co-ordination. This is less recognised, reflected upon and discussed. Yet the history of recent social movements can be understood as the development or emergence - or at least an important contribution to such a development - of new networked, horizontal, `de-centred’ forms of co-ordination. They are forms of co-ordination which on the one hand start from a recognition of mutual interdependance, of no centre of superior authority, knowledge or power. But which on the other are based on a desire to be effective actors bringing about change in a purposeful way. I’m thinking here of a history which spans the radical, direct democracy of the movements of 1968 through the networking, consciousness raising processes of the womens liberation movement, to the alter-globalisation movement with its networks of global coordination and flows of knowledge as well as its self-conscious use and develoment of the tools of information technology. Though these movements are distinct in many different ways, on thing they have in common is that they developed their ways of organising partly in order to create means of expressing and sharing new knowledge as a necessary condition for being effective transformative subjects. Throughout these nearly 40 years several generations have been We have been searching and experimenting with non-heirarchical, democratic ways of arriving at a comon purpose and a common understanding as a basis of effective action.

./english/62.txt:73:One of the issue is to try not to disconnect the elements that will contribute to this memory from the social networks that created those elements.

./english/147.txt:30:Social disobedience, claim the protagonists of this movement, is not only a political struggle, but also a cultural one. To be a Zapatista in Europe means to “fight on the side of all victims of the neo-liberal monster through a “networking of the world,” which, for the activists of Ya Basta!, means “grassroots diplomacy and international horizontal correlation,” in their striving for a world “where many worlds fit, a world without borders.”

./english/147.txt:42:The Italian anarchist movement, or movimento anarchico, is decentralized, with no structure, and deals with the problems of totalitarian institutions, psychiatry, ecology, and militarism. It is divided among pacifists, direct action advocates, individual action advocates, and primitivists. It rejects institutions and dialogue with them. It embodies regional networks and appears in demonstrations as the anarchist block, but has many strands. The most famous is FAI, which was founded in 1945 and has passed through different political periods.

./english/147.txt:50:Movimento pacifista refers to the more moderate parts of the Italian movement, such as associations, Christian (catholic) dissidents, non-governmental organizations, various environmentalists, and some non-parliamentary parties. Pacifism in Italy developed in the 1980s during anti-nuclear campaigns, but today very active pacifist networks have sprung from those experiences. Numerous organizations develop humanitarian and social projects in war zones all over the world.

./english/147.txt:80:No Border Network

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

./english/147.txt:88:Offshoots sprang up along the Polish Ukrainian, Polish Belo Russian, and Slovenian Croatian borders, which quickly led to the independent network of no border activists in Eastern Europe.

./english/147.txt:98:Much has already been written about PGA. In 1996, 3,000 activists from around the world gathered in the rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico. Their hosts, the Zapatistas, described the vision that inspired the meeting: “This intercontinental network of resistance will be the medium in which distinct resistances may support one another. This intercontinental network of resistance is not an organizing structure; it doesn’t have a central head or decision maker; it has no central command or hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who resist.” Two years later, the founding conference of PGA was held in Geneva, at which 300 delegates from 71 countries hashed out a lengthy manifesto and “hallmarks” for collaboration. The hallmarks were later changed at the conference in Cochabamba:

./english/147.txt:111:PGA is not an organization, but rather a kind of coalition, a group of organizations and individuals working together for a common purpose. No one may represent PGA nor does PGA represent any organization or person. Each continent can organize as it feels appropriate, but must provide an organization that acts as a contact point for the global network. While one participating organization volunteers to be the Secretariat office, its role is purely mechanical; the forwarding of mail, etc. The only central decision-making body is the Conveners Committee composed of representatives from organizations and movements on each continent. The composition of this committee must show a regional balance and a balance regarding the areas of work of the organizations and the movements that compose it. Like many informal coalitions, the PGA operates without a head office, budget, or formal mechanisms.

./english/147.txt:119:The European Social Consulta has its origins in a Spanish experiment known as the Social Consulta for the abolition of external debt. In 2000, this Consulta turned into a vibrant and dynamic participatory exercise, successfully developing a working network. Without relying on any structure or acronym, 500 assemblies were formed in 500 communities and neighborhoods and around 10,000 people participated in an assembly-based structure, which led to more than 1,000,000 people voting 97 percent in favor of the abolition of the external debt. The Consulta was soon outlawed by the state, which turned it into a substantial experience in civil disobedience and rebellion through direct democracy.

./english/147.txt:127:Though anarchism represents a very important inspiration for the radical and non-reformist part of the social movement, it is more fractionalized than ever. Perhaps anarchism is presented in the best possible manner within networks such as PGA. In this coalition, as well as in the movement in Europe, anarchism brings the ideals of libertarian anti-capitalism, the imperative of horizontal organization, different organizational forms, new decision-making forms, and the expansion of a culture of democracy.

./english/147.txt:135:ATTAC is a network of collectives, members of parties, individuals, and NGOs, many of whom are from the old left. ATTAC is torn between radicalism and reformism. There are left nationalist trends, often seen as connected to President Bernard Cassen; social-democratic trends, seen as related to ATTAC’s vice-president, Susan George; Trotskyist trends, mainly around members of the LCR Party; and rank-and-file activists of diverse ideological orientations.

./english/147.txt:155:Another network that is becoming increasingly influential is Globalize Resistance, a British answer to ATTAC. Gathered around the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, Globalize Resistance is an endeavor of the old left, under a new name, to establish itself as one of the pillars of resistance in Europe. It reflects the fact that the more intelligent part of the older old left has realized that there is something “radically new” in the movement and that it is better to abandon the traditionalist methods and to adjust.

./english/150.txt:10:Euromarch has developed into a network of activists who are organised under the auspices of a pan-European secretariat based in Paris with liaison committees operating in countries throughout the continent. Policy is debated and demands are formulated at open »Assizes« which are held at approximately 6 monthly intervals. Regular coordination meetings are held at national and pan-European levels and these have tended to focus on declarations and organisational matters for the protest activities which have surrounded the EU summits in Amsterdam, Luxemburg (November 1997), Cardiff (June 1998), Vienna (December 1998) and in Cologne (June 1999).

./english/161.txt:129:society our networks reach (in many ways, of course, it is not even possible to define

./english/161.txt:148:of a wider network of social relations. The book also includes some more general

./english/161.txt:189:representation of the movements and networks protesting against the summit,

./english/161.txt:190:not even of the Dissent! network. It is not possible to represent a network: a

./english/161.txt:191:network can only be sampled, and the place from which we sample will of course

./english/162.txt:1:The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges, Networked Resistance

./english/162.txt:5:Among the events of recent history, few have been as surprising, as full of enigmas, as the coordinated world demonstrations known as the Global Days of Action. Immediately upon their appearance, they overflowed the organization that had called them into being: the People's Global Action (PGA), founded in Geneva in February of 1998. (1) This transnational network of resistance had adopted a new concept of solidarity advanced by the Zapatistas, who encouraged everyone to take direct action at home, against the system of exploitation and oppression which they described as neoliberalism. As early as the month of May, 1998, the PGA helped spark demonstrations against the WTO whose effectiveness lay both in their simultaneity and in their extreme diversity: street parties in some 30 cities around the world, on May 16; four days of protest and rioting in Geneva, beginning that same day; a 50,000-strong march that reached Brasilia on May 20; protests all over India after a huge demonstration in Hyderabad against the WTO on May 2. The following year, London Reclaim the Streets launched the idea of a "carnival against capital" in financial centers across the world for the day of the G8 summit, June 18: there were actions in over 40 cities, including a ten-thousand-strong "carnival of the oppressed" by Niger Delta peoples against transnational oil companies. In the face of transnational capitalism, a networked resistance was born, local and global, tactical and strategic: a new kind of political dissidence, self-organized and anarchist, diffusely interconnected and operating only from below, yet able to strike at the greatest concentrations of power. What is the strength of such movements? The improbable and serious appeal to a "do-it-yourself geopolitics": a chance for personal involvement in the transformation of the world.

./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:13:Two British critics, Anthony Davies and Simon Ford, posed exactly those questions, with direct reference to art. They pointed to the way that artistic practice was tending to integrate with London's financial economy, particularly through the vector of specially designed "culture clubs" where artists sought new forms of sponsorship and distribution, while businessmen looked for clues on how to restructure their hierarchical organizations into cooperative teams of creative, autonomous individuals: "We are witnessing the birth of an alliance culture that collapses the distinctions between companies, nation states, governments, private individuals – even the protest movement," the two critics claimed. (3) They perceptively drew a link between contemporary artistic experiments – those dealing with the use and appropriation of complex signs and tools, or with the catalysis of interactions between free individuals – and the politicized street parties of the late 1990s. But their analysis opposed these new movements, not to transnational capitalism, but to the outdated world of pyramid-shaped hierarchical organizations. Thus their image of the June 18 carnival: "On the one hand you have a networked coalition of semi-autonomous groups and on the other, the hierarchical command and control structure of the City of London police force. Informal networks are also replacing older political groups based on formal rules and fixed organizational structures and chains of command. The emergence of a decentralized transnational network-based protest movement represents a significant threat to those sectors that are slow in shifting from local and centralized hierarchical bureaucracies to flat, networked organizations."

./english/162.txt:17:Conceived at the outset of the year 2000, this alliance theory was mainly concerned with distinguishing a "new economy" from the old one. It combined a network paradigm of organization, as promoted by Manuel Castells, (4) with a description of the culturalization of the economy, as in British cultural studies. But what it demonstrated was more like an "economization of culture." Everything seemed to be swirling together: "In a networked culture, the topographical metaphor of 'inside' and 'outside' has become increasingly untenable. As all sectors loosen their physical structures, flatten out, form alliances and dispense with tangible centers, the oppositionality that has characterized previous forms of protest and resistance is finished as a useful model."

./english/162.txt:21:These kinds of remarks, which came from many quarters, were already confusing for the movements. But they took on an even more troubling light when the Al Qaeda network literally exploded into world consciousness. On the one hand, the unprecedented effectiveness of the S11 action seemed to prove the superiority of the networked paradigm over the command hierarchies associated with the Pentagon and the Twin Towers. But at the same time, if any position could be called "oppositional," it was now that of the Islamic fundamentalists. Their successful attack appeared to validate both the theory of a decisive transformation in organizational structures, and Samuel Huntington's theory of the "clash of civilizations." Suddenly the protest movement could identify neither with the revolutionary form of the network, nor with the oppositional refusal of the capitalist system. Loud voices from the right immediately seized the opportunity to assimilate the movement to terrorism. And to make matters worse, the financial collapse that the movement had predicted effectively happened, from the summer of 2000 onwards, casting suspicion over everything associated with the dot-com bubble – including all the progress in democratic communication. At the same time, the secret services of the most powerful countries, and especially the US, declared themselves ready to meet the challenge of the networks, by giving themselves new capacities for autonomy, horizontality, interlinkage. (5) The difficulty of situating a networked resistance to capitalism within a broader spectrum of social forces thus became enormous – as it still is today.

./english/162.txt:25:This difficulty has not stopped the mobilizations. But what has come to a halt, or splintered into a state of extreme dispersal, are the theoretical attempts to analyze them in a way that can contribute something to their goals and capacities of self-organization. What I want to do here is to make a fresh try at this, from an anthropological viewpoint that can distinguish between the fictions of a "self-regulated market" and the reciprocities and solidarities that make it possible to live together as human beings. So we'll begin with a social and economic study of the vital need for resistance to the crises of capitalism. We will then see how this resistance can develop within the contemporary technical environment. And finally, returning to the question of alliance or opposition, we will look at some of the contributions that artistic practice makes to this networked resistance, by rediscovering languages that seemed to have been consigned to the museum. I am thinking primarily of conceptual art: a practice that doesn't produce works, but only virtualities, which can then be actualized, at each time and in each place, as unique performances.

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

./english/162.txt:43:Just one more thing. I do not want to accord any privilege, in what follows, to that supposedly more "advanced" fraction of the world population which is so deeply involved with electronic networks. I think the opposition between the "Net" and "Self" – between a modernizing process that enforces our abstraction from historical ad cultural traditions, or failing that, determines a desperate and regressive retreat to the fixations of local identity – is simply false. (12) More interesting is the divide between the possessive individualism of the flexible personality, and a concern for human coexistence. As we saw above, the movement of movements found one of its beginnings in a concept of solidarity arising from the Zapatista struggles, which have fundamentally to do with questions of land. But the meaning of these survival struggles of the Mayan peoples could only reach the subjects of the developed world through the Internet, where the commodification of cultural and scientific knowledge is at stake. Here the essential struggle is to overtake and dissolve the language of ¥ € $, not through a return to the closed, bureaucratic frameworks of the Keynesian state, but instead through the political development of new principles of exchange and reciprocity. Thus this fourth field of resistance, with touches closely on human language but also on technical development, seems destined to furnish elements of articulation for other struggles, in a shared search for alternatives to the systemic crisis.

./english/162.txt:46:It is well known that the Linux operating-system kernel, and free software generally, is made cooperatively without any money changing hands. This is something that quickly caught the attention of artists and culture critics, as in the discussions over what Richard Barbrook called the "high-tech gift economy." (13) The expression recalls an anthropologist, not Polanyi but Marcel Mauss, the author of the famous essay on The Gift. His essential contribution was to underscore, at the very heart of modern economic exchange, the presence of motives irreducible to the calculation of the value of material objects, and also of the individual interest one might have in possessing them. As Barbrook points out, the heritage of Mauss was very much alive in alternative circles, his ideas having inspired the Situationists, who passed them on to the do-it-yourself media ethic of the Punk movement. But mostly what fueled the discussion of the Internet gift economy was not theory, but the simple practice of adding information to the net. As Rishab Aiyer Ghosh explained, "the economy of the Net begins to look like a vast tribal cooking-pot, surging with production to match consumption, simply because everyone understands – instinctively, perhaps – that trade need not occur in single transactions of barter, and that one product can be exchanged for millions at a time. The cooking-pot keeps boiling because people keep putting in things as they themselves, and others, take things out." (14) By placing the accent on the overflowing abundance and free nature of the available content, Ghosh responded implicitly to one of the most contested themes in Mauss's essay, which cast each gift as the deliberate imposition of a debt on the receiver, instating hierarchies which were quite foreign to the practice of networked information exchange.

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

./english/162.txt: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:54:Map of collaborations around the development of Active Software, invented in Australia for the actions there on June 18, 1999, and now used by much of the indymedia network. Image: www.active.org.au/doc/roots.pdf/ (detail)

./english/162.txt:66:There is no nostalgia for a primitive life in the fact of quoting Mauss, nor any facile admiration for the "revolutionary fête." Things are much more complex. On the one hand, the contemporary quest for "direct action," for "direct democracy," finds an initial realization in the collective, cooperative production of these public events, which bring together all the rigorously separated aspects of modern social life. Indeed, the very aim of such events is to criticize certain fundamental separations, like the one that amputates any basic concern for life from the laws of monetary accumulation. But that doesn't mean that the event, the ecstatic convergence, is a total solution: instead it is a departure point for a fresh questioning of the social tie, at times when its deadly aspects become visible, as they are today. The protestors' claim, not just to the occupation but to the creation of public space, with all the conflicts it brings in its wake, offers society an occasion to theatricalize the real, in order to replay the meaning of abstractions that are no longer adequate to the needs and possibilities of life. The "total social fact" of the contemporary demonstration is, at its best, a chance to relearn and recreate a language for political debate, which isn't just about money, and doesn't only have "¥ € $" in its vocabulary. And the networked protests we are speaking of, including those of the peace movement in 2003, have produced the first chances to do this at the scale of the globalized economy and of global governance.

./english/162.txt:70:Artistic practice has been one of the keys to the emergence of these "global social facts" – not least because artistic practice has also been one of the ways to hold off group violence, to open up a theatrical space that doesn't immediately become a war zone. This is obviously something that contemporary society risks forgetting, and that particular risk is reason enough in itself to go beyond the specialized, disciplinary definition of art, to try to relocate art within a much broader political economy. Before I do that, however, I want to draw one last group of ideas from Yochai Benkler. His paper closes with the problem of what he calls "threats to motivation." One of these comes from the failure to integrate the results of commons-based peer production into usable wholes which can make a project successful. Translated into political terms, this would mean the failure of the networked movements to change any tangible aspect of social life. That is a real threat to motivation; and I think it's vitally important to keep offering practical ideas and proposals about possible changes on all the scales of governance and existence, from the neighborhood to the world level, at every new demonstration. Benkler points to different strategies for putting together the results of common effort. These strategies range from self-organization of the integration process, to the delegation of this tricky point to a hierarchical structure or a commercial enterprise. Again the translation into our terms is obvious, and has become increasingly visible at events such as the European Social Forum, held in Florence in November of 2002. Just when the networked struggles get big enough to succeed, there is an enormous temptation to hand them over, in the name of efficiency, to a traditional politburo supported by professional media people. The problem with such expedient strategies is that they risk giving participants the impression that the voluntary production of political culture with their peers is being confiscated by somebody in a directive position. A fantastic example of this is the 30-thousand member ATTAC association in France, which, to the discontent of many members, is in fact a strictly controlled hierarchical organization at the national level. However, for ATTAC to have the social power it does, it has also had to produce a decentralized network of local committees, which operate very differently from the national bureau and regularly criticize or contradict its decisions. The tension you can see there in a very real situation, between collective process and effective decision, is at the heart of the democratic experiment today. You might even say that working though that kind of tension is the art of politics.

./english/162.txt:79:The examples of this revenge could be as numerous as the experiences of those involved in it. That is why I want to talk about an event in which I personally took part: the carnivalesque performance and riot in the City of London on June 18, 1999. Before it took place, this day was intensely dreamed by a multiplicity of actors, sometimes connected in constant dialogue and exchange, sometimes affected at a distance by signs that promised to break their isolation and unleash their agency. The inspiration first emerged, at least in certain versions of the story, during the summer of 1998 in conversations between members of London Reclaim the Streets and the anarchist group London Greenpeace (not the famous NGO).26 It spread through the networks of Peoples' Global Action, drawing on the suggestive potency of two key ideas. One was the "street party," as a way to refuse the domination of the city by the automobile – and of democracy by traditional party politics. The other was the phrase "Our resistance is as transnational as capital": a return of twentieth-century internationalism in red, black, and green, after a long trip through the jungles of Chiapas where the Zapatista uprising began on January 1, 1994 (the day NAFTA came into being). A complex circulation through time and space, where solidarity means respect for local autonomy and differing motivations for struggle, was encapsulated in these two key ideas. A call to action, distributed widely through the Internet, put it like this:

./english/162.txt:96:3. Anthony Davies and Simon Ford, "Art Networks," www.societyofcontrol.com/research/davis_ford.htm. Further quotes are from this article and "Culture Clubs," www.infopool.org.uk/cclubs.htm.

./english/162.txt:97:4. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

./english/162.txt:105:12. The opposition structures Manuel Castells' three-volume work on the "information age"; it is discussed in the prologue to The Rise of the Network Society, op. cit., pp. 1-28, and returns throughout the second volume, The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

./english/162.txt:122:You are here: Home » mdr » Publications » The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges, Networked Resistance

./english/172.txt:21:We emerge from the ESF in Athens having made a step towards a better coordination between Eastern and Western movements, with a common determination to fight for peace, jobs, and secure existence. We will promote our agenda of European campaigns and mobilization on the main issues of our common platform developed in the ESF networks.

./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:26: According to Klandermans, there are three fundamental motives that account for participation in collective action: Instrumentality, which ‘refers to movement participation as an attempt to influence the social and political environment’; Identity, which ‘refers to movement participation as a manifestation of identification with a group’; and Ideology, which ‘refers to movement participation as a search for meaning and an expression of one’s views’ (2004, 361). Although not mutually exclusive, these three angles tend to be associated with different strands of social movement theory (Ibid). This part will briefly outline some of the main theories related to each motive. In that respect, instrumentality is connected to resource mobilization theory, identity to new social movements’ theory and ideology to ‘framing’ studies, while the social networks approach covers all of the three motives. I will further discuss the ways in which the role of media and communication has been conceptualized in each theory or, as I will try to demonstrate, under-theorized and under-researched.

./english/176.txt:34:The Social Networks Approach

./english/176.txt:35: Aiming ‘to explore in greater detail the web of multiple ties that make up a movement’ (Diani 2004, 339), the social networks approach is a recent development in social movement theory and the only strand dealing explicitly with all three motives for social movement participation.

./english/176.txt:36: This is because social networks have traditionally been treated as ‘predictors of individual participation’ (Ibid). In this sense, the shape and characteristics of an individual’s personal networks are considered to be affecting their opportunities for recruitment to a cause. Other studies in this line of inquiry have established a link between networks and collective identity, as well as the creation of ‘frames’, proposing that networks provide ‘the structure of social movements “free spaces” (Polletta 1999), that is ‘the areas of social interaction in which holders of specific worldviews reinforce mutual solidarity and experiment with alternative lifestyles’ (Diani 2004, 348). In this respect, networks are perceived as phenomenological constructs of meaning (White 1992, 65), constituting ‘crucial environments for the activation of schematas, logics, and frames’ (Breiger 2004, 519).

./english/176.txt:37: A recent shift in this line of inquiry marks ‘a move away from static structural models to… better understand the interactive dynamics’ that can transform a particular social setting or community… into a source of collective action (McAdam 2003, 284). For instance, in a recent empirical study Passy proposed that social networks are associated with three key mobilization mechanisms: socialization (imbuing individuals with certain cognitive schemes and frames with

./english/176.txt:38:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 76which they interpret social reality), structural-connection (connecting potential activists with an opportunity to participate) and decision-shaping functions (helping individuals to assess the costs and benefits of their potential participation through contact with the actions of other participants) (Passy 2003, 24-25). Given its emphasis on relations, ties and interactions, one would expect that communication and media would be a central element of the networks approach to social movements. This is however not the case. For instance, while social networks are considered as key predictors of movement participation, little attention has been paid to the communicative aspects of an individual’s direct or indirect ties to a movement and to the communication media through which these relationships are constituted. In other words, the fact of whether participants in a movement communicate mainly over the telephone or over the internet may have an impact on the capacity of their social networks to act as agents of mobilization. In addition, the transmission of ideas and cognitive schemata taking place through networks also implies a process of communication whose characteristics and mechanisms remain under-researched. Yet, there are a few studies which ‘have focused on the flows of communication and the links between different territorial areas’ (Diani 2004, 351), showing that the levels of collective action in one place affect collective action in nearby geographical areas. However, these studies examined uprisings of the late 19th century which took place in a completely different communicative and media context, and as such cannot account for the role of current communication media in the diffusion of protest. Thus, the role of communication media, means and techniques remains an under-researched subject within social movement study. Even though all of the aforementioned strands of social movement theory recognize the crucial role of communication and interaction in processes of mobilization and participation, they have nonetheless failed to incorporate these considerations into their theoretical framework or research design. When the role of the media is taken into account, the focus rests on the mass media, disregarding the functions of more personal communication. This perpetuates a seemingly unintentional but nonetheless false perception of mediated communication as indirect or impersonal as opposed to ‘direct’ face-to-face communication. This preoccupation with the mass media tends to focus attention on the ‘external’ communication of a movement and not on its internal modes of communication and their impact on the movement’s identity, structure and ideology. It also maintains a perception of social movements as entities with specific and given characteristics and ways of communicating. This deprives us of Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 77all the valuable observations that a

./english/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:48:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 80Apart from the boundaries between public and private, mass and personal, I would argue that further inquiries into the role of the internet in social movement activity should also question the clear-cut distinctions between the offline and the online, the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’. Such distinctions were a defining characteristic of early internet studies, which tended to conceive the internet as a space or a ‘new frontier’, as a virtual world which ‘actually removes heavy users from the exigencies of everyday life’ (Ibid, 15). This distinction is partly reflected in current theorizing concerning the role of the internet in social movement activity. For instance, in a recent article about social networks and movement participation, Diani proposes that further studies should examine ‘whether “virtual,” computer-mediated ties may replace “real” in the generation not only of practical opportunities, but of the shared understandings and – most important – the mutual trust, which have consistently been identified as important facilitators of collective action’ (2004, 352). This shows a concern over the substitution of ‘real’ ties with computer-mediated ones, echoing earlier criticisms of the internet as a virtual domain which has the power to replace the real one. However, this type of theorizing fails to acknowledge ‘the continuities between the offline and the online’, necessary in order to ‘understand and explain how the new potentials are actually used’ (Slater 2002, 542-543). In that respect, it is worth considering ‘virtuality’ or ‘reality’ not as the inherent properties of a specific medium but as the result of its social uses by people. As Slater notes, ‘[i]t is the making of the distinction that needs studying, rather than assuming that it exists and then studying its consequences’ (Ibid, 543). Furthermore, it is worth bearing in mind that the creation and maintenance of social relationships takes place through multiple communication media. For instance, a recent study of the social use of the internet by college students discovered that ‘the more people with whom students communicated using the internet, the more they communicated with face-to-face and on the telephone’ (Baym et al. 2004, 316). Therefore, the internet may reinforce rather than replace other forms of communication in the maintenance of social relationships. In the case of social movement ties and participation, these findings suggest that the distinction between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ ties may indeed be misleading, as ties are constituted through various media. This should divert the focus of current research from the distinction and comparison between these different media and orient it towards their interplay and complex articulation. The survey Against this backdrop and as part of my PhD fieldwork, I undertook a survey of participants in the Paris 2003 European Social Forum exploring the mechanisms Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 81of mobilization for the ESF, as well as the

./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:127: This prevalence of more personal modes of communication is hardly surprising. Studies in mobilization and movement participation have repeatedly demonstrated that interpersonal networks and direct or indirect ties to a social movement increase the possibility of an individual’s participation. It is thus rather astonishing that social movements’ studies have hitherto failed to take into account the effects and uses of interpersonal communication, opting to focus instead on the impact of the mass media.

./english/176.txt:134:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 942 The statistical significance of these relationships was measured using the Chi-Square and the strength of the relationship was assessed using the Phi Coefficient, a measure suitable for establishing associations between nominal (and particularly dichotomous) variables. If the value of the Phi Coefficient was below 0.3 then the variables were considered independent. Values between 0.3 and 0.7 were indicative of a weak association between the two variables, while if Phi was above 0.7 then the association was considered strong. All of the reported associations were statistically significant with p<0.05, while in many cases p was 0.000. 3 The significance of the association was measured using again the Chi-Square, while the strength of the relationship was assessed using the Gamma measure in the case of an association between a nominal and an ordinal variable. The association between nominal and dichotomous variables was measured using Cramer’s V and the Phi Coefficient. References Baym, N.K., Y.B. Zhang and M.Lin. (2004) ‘Social interactions across media: Interpersonal communication on the internet, telephone and face-to-face’, New Media & Society 6(3): 299-318. Bennett, W.L. (2004) ‘Communicating global activism: strengths and vulnerabilities of networked politics’, 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. 123-146. Bennett, W.L., T.E. Givens and L.Willnat. (2004) ‘Crossing Political Divides: Internet Use and Political Identifications in Transnational Anti-War and Social Justice Activists in Eight Nations’. Paper for the European Consortium for Political Research Workshop. Uppsala, Sweden, April 14-18, 2004. Breiger, R.L. (2004) ‘The Analysis of Social Networks’, in M. Hardy and A. Bryman (eds.) Handbook of Data Analysis, London: Sage Publications, pp. 505-526. Burnett, R. and P.D. Marshall. (2003) Web Theory: An introduction, London and New York: Routledge. Castells, M. (2001) The Internet galaxy: reflections on the Internet, business, and society, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clemens, E.S. and D.C. Minkoff. (2004) ‘Beyond the Iron Law: Rethinking the Place of Organizations in Social Movement Research’, in D.A. Snow, S.A. Soule and H. Kriesi (eds.) The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 155-169. Diani, M. (1992) ‘The concept of social movement’, The Sociological Review 40(1): 1-25. Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 95___. (2004) ‘Networks and Participation’,

./english/176.txt:138: McAdam, D. (2003) ‘Beyond Structural Analysis: Toward a More Dynamic Understanding of Social Movements’, in M. Diani and D. McAdam (eds.) Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 281-298.

./english/176.txt:140: Passy, F. (2003) ‘Social Networks Matter. But How?’, in M. Diani and D. McAdam (eds.) Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21-48.

./english/180.txt:1:A balance about the Euro-demonstration held in Brussels the 19th of March 2005 and promoted by the CES and the European Movements and Networks partcipating in the ESF

./english/180.txt:25:networks and campaigns since Nice; the victory in the battle against the

./english/180.txt:27:Bolkestein (seminaries-networks-demos); the European mobilizations of

./english/180.txt:28:the ETF; the multiplication of European networks and campaigns around

./english/187.txt:22:The process of convergence among the multitude of Social Movements that are fighting for Another World: In a very short time span mass mobilizations have made possible the convergence of groups and networks working in a dispersed manner. In these newly created spaces of gathering, we have become aware of the importance and the complentarity of our social struggles, we have visualized common causes and enemies and we have discovered the system’s fragility, we have become aware of our strength.

./english/187.txt:29:Because of this, we call on all organizations, networks and social movements to reflect on this proposal for a project of collect action, above and beyond the acronyms and specificities of each group. We call for the creation of a social framework that allows us to advance toward this project , and which makes it possible.

./english/187.txt:36:Strengthen and widen the European social fabric that is critical of the system. The European Social Consulta will allow us to reinforce the work of local grouops and networks, and to connect these groups and networks with struggles at the global level. The connection between the different European social movements requires a project like the European Social Consulta, which will crytalize in a network-based organizing system, shaped by the grassroots and operating in a participatory, horizontal and decentralized fashion, as much in the taking of decisions as in the realization of actions.

./english/187.txt:63:We understand the ESC as a network-based organizational process, at the European level, whose different elements function in an autonomous and decentralized, yet coordinated fashion on the basis of agreements tpreviously consensed upon at various territorial gatherings (European, regional, etc.).

./english/187.txt:84:Encourage the creation of other promotor groups, make contact with the networks and collectives working in their region and keep them informed; this is a task of Promoting and Extending the Consulta.

./english/192.txt:21:-> The mainstream of the trade union movement in Britain was actively involved in both the preparatory process and the Forum itself: feedback from various unions has been overwhelmingly positive, with reports of highly successful seminars involving important networks of activists;

./english/192.txt:22:-> There was also a marked increased in participation by black, Asian, Muslim, and refugee networks: this is an important achievement given the Europe-wide offensive against civil liberties and the rights of migrants and asylum-seekers;

./english/192.txt:28:The London Forum, which involved the plentiful participation of young people and a broad coverage of all the issues of concern to the movement in the plenaries and seminars, should, together with the mobilization for the G8 summit in Gleneagles next July, help to transform this consciousness into much stronger organized networks in Britain. The corporate media in Britain are notoriously reluctant to provide serious coverage of the altermondialiste movement, but the Guardian (18 October 2004) acknowledged the significance of the Forum, warning that

./english/192.txt:36:Often it is more difficult to acknowledge the significance of these disagreements because they are presented as procedural problems. Thus a number of French networks have complained about the fact that the platform at one seminar were all agreed in defending the right of young Muslim women to wear the hejab, even though this does not seem to have prevented a very vigorous debate taking place from the floor. This seems to me like an evasion of the real issue.

./english/192.txt:42:In Britain, by contrast, the altermondialiste networks that had participated in the earlier Forums were relatively weak. A coalition had to be created from scratch to organize the London ESF. This involved bringing together very diverse organizations with no history of working together and huge differences in political culture. Working together would have been hard in any circumstances.

./english/192.txt:54:But London also showed that combining radicality and diversity becomes harder, not easier, over time. Important divergences have crystallized over a variety of issues - the war, the European Constitution, the hejab, the role of the radical left. There are also differences over how to build the movement: some networks are much more ambivalent about involving the trade-union mainstream than others. This last difference cuts across others: for example, I suspect I am closer to some French comrades about bringing in the unions than I am to some Italian comrades with whom, however, I agree much more about the war. This makes holding together and expanding the coalitions we are trying to build much more complicated.

./english/193.txt:5:Between 14 and 17 October, more than 25,000 participants came together at the ESF in London, located at the wonderful Alexandra Palace, as well as at several other locations in Northern and Central London where several ‘autonomous spaces’, ranging from a ‘radical theory forum’ to ‘tactical media’ and ‘beyond the ESF’, were also held. It is impossible to grasp all the issues discussed at the ESF, reaching from ‘life after capitalism’ to ‘life despite capitalism’, from ‘against privatisation’ to the ‘experience of the commons’, from the ‘women’s assembly’ to the ‘no border network’, from ‘organising for workers rights’ to the ‘first assembly of the Precariat in Europe’ (a theme barely present on the official ESF) and so on and so forth. The supply of seminars and workshops was enormous, but the process of merging seminars in the run up to the ESF in many cases had led to the bringing together of things that do not fit.

./english/193.txt:27:The creation of autonomous spaces is absolutely necessary, but is it enough when it is not done in a perspective of making the whole social structure available for transformation? Holloway’s concept of power and anti-power is closely linked to a dichotomy of the state and an (autonomous) civil society burning holes into the structure of capitalist-state rule. But if we take Gramsci seriously civil society or any autonomous space is not something apart from the state, but the primary and very contradictory field of struggles about hegemony. The capitalist rule is not only based in the relations of production but a cultural hegemony that goes through each one of us. How to deal with real contradictions in and between us? Giving the ‘we’ of the movements such an emphasis Holloway obscures other forms of domination, reproduced by ourselves. Moreover movements as networks are themselves building informal hierarchies (Spehr 2004), structured by power relations, with its own avant-garde, different levels of savoir-puvoir. But this construction of ‘we’ as one movement in all its diversity produces a myth like Hardt and Negri’s ‘multitude’ – which might explain the success of both books.

./english/193.txt:34:However autonomy is not simply a thing one can take. Autonomy has to be worked out, in search of new forms of social relations and subjectivities. Nearly 90% of the locally active members are women. In organising these new social relations a need for desaprender (‘unlearning’) became evident in the face of entangled modes of domination reproduced in the community (for example machismo) and became part of self-educating processes. The movement gives itself space for collective reflection to work on conflicts. Partisans tried to get into the movement, but their old forms of clientalism and domination prevented a deeper influence. There is no disintegration of the movement in the face of a new government. Things have been institutionalised, networks of organisations been created, durability is the goal (not conjunctural actions) – but as this is a process from below (like in Chiapas as well), quiet, slow, changing subjectivities, it is not that visible in the media. The state is absent, apart from its repressive functions. The experience of exclusion was necessary for the movement. ‘Neoliberalism itself induced us to appropriate its promises, but without reintegrating into the system that excluded us.’ But repression is getting harder.7 ‘Will we always need someone to organise us our lives’, Jara asked, ‘some political party, or union, or government?’ For Holloway the piqueteros (although they do not like this expression, because it hides the everyday production and reproduction within the community) are the most prominent case of ‘urban zapatismo’, burning holes into the structure, against the existing, breaking with identities – it is the movement of non-identity. This is not a loss, there is nothing to be repressed, and it should not be a sacrifice but a pleasure.

./english/195.txt:5:We cannot evaluate the recent London ESF without frame it within the story of the process that led to its production. This is the story of the contrast between two broad camps that have emerged in the course of the process itself. On one hand, those coming from many networks and organisations to make the ESF a temporary space-time common that would prefigure alternative practices and multiple non-exploitative doings in a "global city" like London. On the other, those whose efforts followed the Socialist Worker Party and Socialist Action lines, the mentalities of union bureaucracies and the directives of Ken Livingstone's office to monopolize and centralize the event. This became to be known as the struggle between “horizontals” and “verticals”.

./english/195.txt:7:Perhaps this distinction caused some confusion, since the definition of “horizontality” or “verticality” did not identify a specific group, organisation or network, nor a specific ideology or world view of politics and political events. Often, one could identify "horizontals" in "vertical" organisations and "verticals" in "horizontal" networks. However, we can understand the contrast described by the terminology in terms of modes of doing predicated on opposite organising principles. One, based on participatory, open and inclusive democracy, in which participants through their iterative relational practices reached consensus on both means to be employed and ends to be achieved and were willing to engage in the continuous learning process necessary for these practices. The other in which democracy was identified with a rigid vertical structure within which ends are defined by the few, and the means are seen purely as instrumental to those ends. For “horizontals” the means embody values as much as the ends (whether we use free or corporate software, whether information is posted freely or under coordinating committee control, whether working groups emerge from the ground up or “allowed” by a coordinating committee). Indeed because of this, the shape of ends emerges from negotiations of means. For the “verticals” it was just about “getting the job done”, that is, their concept of “job” and final outcome.

./english/195.txt:9:I think that the contrast between these substantially different ways of doing, these modes of producing events, is highly “educational” for all of us, and we can evaluate the final outcome in these terms. By focussing on process and the totality of our movements, what can we say about the ESF held in London last November? Ambiguous result. On the one hand, it has represented a clear step forward for our movement. This not only because 25,000 people have attended and all large events like these encourage encounters between people across networks. Also and especially because a section of the movement has overcome its insularity at events like these and, working with organizing principles based on horizontality, inclusiveness and participation, has broadened substantially the programme of and participation in self-managed and autonomous zones. About 5000 people, many of whom where wearing the bracelet of the “official” event, have been estimated to have participated in the broad range of activities of the autonomous zones, and defined future action programmes on crucial themes such as precarity, migration and communication rights.

./english/195.txt:11:On the other hand, there is also a sense in which the process of the ESF in London has not been a way forward for our movement, but a serious set back. The degree of subcontracting of the various processes of the “official” events, culminating with the hiring of an “event management” company, the environmental unawareness of its practices, the vertical control freakery that has dominated all moments of its production, suspicious of all productive networks from the movement that did not match the “way of doing” template of union bureaucracies and socialist parties, the contractual “terms and conditions” email sent to anyone purchasing tickets, the petty self-promoting splashing of UK union names on the walls of meeting rooms instead of reaching out to symbols that belong to all movements across the globe, not to mention the bullying, the trade unions’ and Greater London Authority’s financial blackmails and the monopolization of platforms such as the final rally, are just an indication that in terms of these practices, we have a long way to go to make another world possible. In the effort to “build” the movement, to “outreach” to people who have not yet heard about the horrors of the world, the organizers have forgotten that a process of radical social transformation takes much more than an increasing number of people laid down as “building bricks”. This relational incompetence is a heavy political liability in our movement, and cannot be justified by the ends of “educating” more people or outreaching into the mainstream union organizations, as Alex Callinicos argues in a recent posting to the ESF-UK email list. We cannot overcome this by choosing between the false polarity posed on us by those who portray the Social Forum as a space or as a movement of movements. We move beyond the impasse if we understand it to be both. Because to be radically transformative, the movement of movements must strive to set a limit to the voraciousness of capital, to be its true insurmountable barrier, and at the same time to constitute new social relations, new modes of producing and doing, including producing politics. The practice of this articulation is what constitutes an open space. Without this articulation and the efforts necessary for it, our collective political subjectivity as a transformative force is, simply, lost.

./english/199.txt:9:Before making too much of this situation, it is important to take a step back and reflect on the London ESF experience and the broader politics of autonomous space. Although perhaps more exaggerated this time around because of the nature of London's political culture- most notably the presence of SWP and Socialist Action- the tension between grassroots network-based movements and their more traditional organizational counterparts has been a constant since the beginning of the forums, and was present within earlier mass direct action mobilizations, including Seattle, as well. Intense struggles over political vision, tactics, and organizational form are not cause for alarm; indeed, they are constitutive of the convergence process that characterizes the forums and the broader movement from which they emerged. The important question is thus how to best manage such conflicts, rather than erase them entirely. And this is precisely where the politics of autonomous space has the most to offer.

./english/199.txt:11:Before describing my own experience in London , I should confess that I fully side with the horizontals. Not in the sense of an unrealistic utopia, but rather as a guiding vision, an ideal we should always aspire to. Horizontalism does not ignore informal hierarchies, but rather seeks mechanisms to control them, without reinscribing vertical structures into our formal organizational architectures. At the same time, horizontalism means always remaining open and flexible to diversity and difference- within certain limits, of course. Whereas those with divergent organizational practices may be welcome, those who support war and neoliberalism are not. I consider myself left libertarian and anti-capitalist, but I realize I form part of a much larger, complex, and contradictory whole. Building autonomous spaces, "separate, yet connected" as we used to say in Barcelona , becomes a way to manage conflict, respecting differences while sometimes acting together, and at other times taking critical action apart. Such a politics recognizes the importance of open space, but radically questions boundaries and clear demarcations. Rather than open space, we need to start thinking about multiple spaces, open not just internally, but also with respect to one another. Open space thus becomes networked space, physically manifest within and around the forum.

./english/199.txt:17:I spent all day on Thursday at the Radical Theory Forum. Although the formal discussions were somewhat disappointing, the opportunity to meet dozens of others struggling to unite theory and practice, thus moving beyond anti-intellectualism within our movements and the lack of critical engagement within the academy, was extremely exciting. On Friday I made my first and only appearance at Alexander Palace . Although I was mainly interested in the parallel initiatives, I did not want to miss out on the main spectacle, which I do not mean in a derogatory sense. The value of the forums in a world where mass actions are increasingly difficult to pull off is that they allow us to come together to physically represent ourselves, embody our networks, generate affective ties, and perform our politics. It is perhaps too easy to dismiss such collective rituals in critical-rational terms, but how else to explain why they remain such important poles of attraction? Indeed, there have been calls for non-authoritarians and anti-capitalists to abandon the forums since the first World Social Forum in 2000. Yet we continue to show up along the margins, and if this year is any indication, in ever greater numbers. Will London be the definitive break?

./english/199.txt:25:On Saturday and Sunday, although I also attended workshops and discussions at Bloomsbury , including an informal discussion about activist research, I spent most of my time at the Life Desite Capitalism conference. Together with several hundred friends and colleagues, many of whom had also moved between and among different locales, we explored the concept of the Commons in different spheres: land, labor, communication, etc. Although the opening and closing plenaries reproduced some of the hierarchical structure many of us criticize within the main forum, the smaller workshop discussions were interesting and worthwhile. I particularly enjoyed the Saturday afternoon session on moments of excess, where our conversation ranged from mass direct actions to collaborative networking within open source development models. That evening I translated for a small group of Spanish activists at an ESF seminar discussion with Michael Hardt, who had just come from a gathering at Beyond ESF to found the first ever Assembly of Precarious Workers. Indeed, autonomous spaces are also excessive, bursting through the boundaries of the official forum, and the boundaries dividing one another.

./english/199.txt:35:What I am ultimately suggesting is that we renew our vision of the forum itself, recognizing that our movements are too diverse, even contradictory, to be contained within a single space, however open it may be. This does not mean abandoning the process, but rather building on the London experience to recast the forum as a network of interconnected, yet autonomous spaces converging across a single urban terrain at a particular point in time. Some spaces may be larger, and thus generate more gravity than others, while the boundaries are always blurry, diffuse, and permeable. Moreover, there will necessarily be contradiction and struggle, even within and between our networks. Such conflict should not be feared, but rather recognized as an integral part of the forum itself. In places like Prague and Genoa urban space was divided among diverse forms of direct action practice. In London we finally began to incorporate a similar logic on our own terms, without reacting to an enemy. As for we critics, rather than return to our bunkers to recreate an imagined state of pure horizontality, we would do better to recognize that mass movements are always conflictual and contradictory, that horizontalism is about learning to manage conflict without reintroducing formal centers of command. This is the lesson I learned in London , and why I support the politics of autonomous space.

./english/202.txt:7:The ESF 2004 was an extremely contradictory event and process. Thousands of people found ways to use this space in the spirit of the WSF principles. They debated strategies for the anti-capitalist movement, while developing Europe-wide activist networks which could act together more effectively. Some devised alternative methods and capacities which could make another world possible. All this happened because activist gatherings generally find ways to make things happen according to the means that are available and despite the obstacles present.

./english/202.txt:11:The call for Europe-wide days of action was also positive. However, it is all too easy for enthusiasts to make such calls. Their political effectiveness will depend upon creative activist networks making several kinds of links: between local, national and European dimensions; between movements and mainstream organisations (beyond a formal coalition model); and likewise between apparently separate issues.

./english/202.txt:23:To make another world possible, the ESF preparatory process should follow the spirit of the WSF principles – especially by building activist networks and practical alternatives to capitalist domination. In particular:

./english/202.txt:25:• European assemblies as a political process. These events should include an opportunity for exchanging experiences of struggles, discussing strategic implications and building networks which could act together. Perhaps plan these as a mini-ESF, back-to-back with the organisational meeting. For activists unable to attend, the internet could provide opportunities to participate.

./english/205.txt:13:From then on, things couldn't have gone worse. In a first period, because the SWP and the GLA posed as fundamentally antithetic the participation of ‘serious organizations' – basically the British trade unions, still siding with the Blair government despite the odd criticism – and networks and groups based on ad hoc and horizontal ways of organizing, without administrative hierarchies and decision-making centres. This is where it began: a process of denial of all the potency shown by movements since the mid-90s, in favour of a provincial political pragmatism strictly concerned with the immediate agenda of the main groups involved. This problem was made brought to the attention of the ‘continental' actors involved (COBAS, Transnational Institute, different national Attac groups, Greek Social Forum, …), and the Preparatory Assembly that took place in London in February produced a document demanding that the British groups worked towards some sort of composition between the ‘verticals' – SWP, Socialist Action and trade unions – and the ‘horizontals' – all the others.

./english/205.txt:32:It is interesting to highlight that this year's ESF probably had its least ‘ideological' ‘opposition' ever: even at the conference of People's Global Action – anticapitalist network whose existence predates the Social Forum process and is very critical of it – in July there was a great number of groups interested in taking the ‘one foot in, one foot out' approach. It was above all a matter of occupying space and making oneself heard; that this should end the way it did was much less the result of a ‘principled opposition' than a consequence of the specific circumstances of the British process, and the fact that the London lives under a police State in disguise: Beyond the ESF (the largest) and a few other autonomous spaces were under permanent surveillance, with helicopters flying overhead and policemen at the door to take pictures and monitor the flow of people.

./english/205.txt:34:The accumulated tensions would surface on the Saturday, when a group of around 300 people occupied the plenary session where Ken Livingstone and Lee Jasper were supposed to speak (the former, possibly warned by the police, had cancelled shortly before); carried out by groups such as the Wombles, the North-European Anticapitalist Network, Xarxa de Mobilitzacio Global, Reseau Intergalactique, Indymedia UK and Babels, the action stormed the platform, hung banners saying ‘Another World is for Sale', criticized the GLA's control over the event, and read statements from Babels and Indymedia UK, the latter on the seizing of its servers by the FBI.

./english/205.txt:46:The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination in particular explored interesting tactics and approaches to direct actions. For example, the attempt (frustrated by the police) to organize a free public transport party in the underground – where Yomango were ‘responsible' for the foods and drinks, while Planka brought their experience in coordinating the struggle of migrants and unemployed workers in resisting the privatisation of public transport in Sweden. The emphasis here was not on the spectacular media impact, but on the direct contact with the users of one of the world's most expensive public transport systems. Another interesting idea is the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, whose workshop at Beyond the ESF was packed: tactically versatile, it can be an alternative for large demos (where it has the merit of escaping the dichotomies that lead to escalation), small direct actions and popular theatre and education. Popular education is, in fact, one of the staples of the preparation for the G8 2005 meeting in Scotland carried out by the Dissent network by means of their roadshow.

./english/209.txt:23:The organisation of the ESF is intended to be process of democratic negotiation and co-operation between all those wishing to participate and who agree with its Charter of Principles. The idea is that different organisations, with different traditions and capacities would share their skills, resources and ideas and in the process learn how to work with each other, and ‘contaminate' each other with new cultures and perspectives. It's not an easy process and the timetable for the London ESF did not give much time for it. But the GLA's philosophy of centralised, almost Jacobin, management has endangered some of the intellectual and organisational resources for this task, built up from trial and error over the first two years of organising the ESF. Fortunately, aspects of the process have established sufficient momentum and infrastructure to be indispensable - most notably Babels ( www.babels.org ), the international network of volunteer interpreters. But the organisation of the ESF website, for example - a vital tool for the new horizontal ways of organising - is something which the GLA was not prepared to delegate to any significant degree. The result is an extremely expensive site which lacks many of the tools for interactivity and for information gathering which are vital to the development of the ESF process. These could have been provided in an expert way and at low cost by the technical activists of the movements. The overtly bureaucratic control of the website is symbolic of a wider problem of mistrust of the capacity of the self- organised new movements.

./english/209.txt:29:Another force opening up the process are radical Non-Governmental Organisations like the World Development Movement, War on Want and Friends of the Earth. They do have the formal structure with which the GLA can deal. Moreover the GLA need their support for the legitimacy of their management of the process. But these NGOs - some of them part of influential international networks - are actually staffed by people committed to the ‘horizontal' methods of the movements for which the GLA and some of the unions have shown mistrust. These mainly young people have used their bargaining power to play a vital role in keeping the process open.

./english/210.txt:3:To asses the 3rd ESF we must take into account that the two elements of which the ESF consists had drifted apart. If we look at the London ESF as a process it is not hard to agree that it was a European success. 25,000 anti-neoliberal-antiwar activists assembled in London , debated, exchanged experiences, built or strengthened networks, organized campaigns and had a good time. The Autonomous Spaces were better than ever. The Preparatory Meetings worked all year round guaranteeing in hard conditions enough transparency and democracy, the expansion of collective intellect networks like BABELS, NOMAD and the Memory Project, things are in a way getting less national and more collective.

./english/210.txt:15:Because of these problems we think that the ESF must be held every year. We must admit that our arguments are not very convincing. London was tiring to prepare but most of all we see that our networks are having big problems to survive next to this huge event. We must not slow down, so the one and half-year agreement must be let to show its abilities. Especially when the Networks aren't ready yet and we think that –mostly- parties will not allow them easily to grow. We must find ways to cut down power gained by national quota, change the way plennaries are organized but not by eradicating public political debate on the needs and priorities of the movement, work harder expanding to the East and Balkans but more important than all we must be more inclusive with the social issue of Europe, with the working people that produce the wealth of society, with immigrants that seek their right to escape from poverty and not be discriminated in Europe, with the socially excluded.

./english/212.txt:19:The programmatic dimension (elaboration of proposals) was presented by some networks, which are progressing in their forum work, thanks to some carefully prepared seminars during preliminary meetings. However, the ESF is generally not the central locus of their elaboration. The ESF could be used to give them public visibility. Yet this doesn’t generally occur because of the insufficient attention given to this dimension of forum work in the conception and structuring of the ESF’s. There are no moments when alternatives can be given political visibility. Among some organisers there is very limited interest, sometimes none at all, in the establishment of a ‘memory’ of the forums. This serious insufficiency is presently being partially dealt with but its solution requires the mobilisation of human and financial resources. In this context, the establishment of a database of the various proposals emanating from the three ESFs should become a priority objective.

./english/218.txt:12:4) We support the proposal to allow a priority to speak during the European Preparatory Meetings to people who represent a country or to delegates of a network relatively to persons representing only one organisation.

./english/221.txt:7:We networkers and flextimers of Northern and Southern Europe, autonomously gathered at Middlesex University and determined to go beyond sclerotizing ESF, solemnly join minds and bodies in the present declaration of conflict against Europe 's governments and corporate bureaucracies.

./english/221.txt:17:We agree to shape a transeuropean network of movements and collectives determined to agitate against freemarketeers for social rights valid for all human beings living in Europe .

./english/221.txt:21:We will gather in Berlin in early 2005 to decide a common protest action against the sanctuaries of EU power, in order to launch euromaydays and the supporting structured network of labor radicalism and media activism tentatively called NEU, Networkers of Europe United.

./english/221.txt:23:We call onto all our European sisters and brothers, be they autonomous marxists, postindustrial anarchists, syndicalists, feminists, antifas, queers, anarchogreens, hacktivists, cognitive workers, casualized laborers, outsourced and/or subcontracted employees and the like, to network and organize for a common social and political action in Europe.

./english/221.txt:27:Networkers and Flextimers of Europe Unite: There's a World of Real Freedom to Fight for!

./english/221.txt:29:Euromayday.org, Wombles, NEAN (Northern Europea Anticapitalist Network), Monsun, Motkraft, AFA Berlin, NoBorder, Precog, Global Project, ChainWorkers, YoMango, Indymedia Estrecho, Precarias a la Deriva, Universidad Nómada, Coordination Intermittents et Précaires, Stop précarité, and other collectives and networks against precarity

./english/224.txt:27:- We should adopt a biennial frequency for the ESF, alternating with the WSF. In between two ESFs, some of us propose to hold a European meeting to have an update on and review the ongoing campaigns, and networking activities, and to discuss convergent mobilisations.

./english/228.txt:14:To achieve all these goals we must start today moving towards this direction and work collectively through the European Prepatory Assemblies this way too. On the same occasions we discuss the matters of organizing the ESF we must give time and space to discuss mobilizations and networking (like this of the so called EuroConstittution).

./english/228.txt:23:3. We must offer very heavy support to the European Networks and integrate them in to the process.

./english/228.txt:25:4. Making stronger the cooperating collectives like BABELS, NOMAD, Memory Project, Map of Networks and the FSE-ESF Website and putting them in the centre of the Organization; taking power away from “national” organizers.

./english/228.txt:43:1. Logistics (including networks like BABELS and NOMAD)

./english/228.txt:47:3. Expanding the Network , working in two ways: a national campaign to involve the Greek movement and a specific group on Balkans-East Europe networking.

./english/229.txt:11:The London Social Forum has already been a matter of debate and its events have already been discussed in great depth and length; the overall conclusion derived from both positive and negative feedback is that there is a necessity to reassess the whole preparatory phase as well as the final one. The list of targets, as defined during the London Social Movement, against war, neo-liberalism and racism cannot be achieved alone by the regular meetings, they need to be incorporated into activities as part of the European networks with the scope of creating an ‘auto-reform’ within the boundaries of the Social Forum. The preparation and the “managing” of the European initiatives - already decided in London - must be brought to common responsibility and, in Paris, we need to define methods, contents and workshops to achieve these goals.

./english/229.txt:13:Until now we highlitghted the “event” of the Forum, which is still a fundamental element, and the prapatory process has been considered as a mere organisational matter; this must not be the case, the preparatory meetings should be the place where networks and their members become protagonists of the Forum’s development, and decide and coordinate the European campaigns. The boundaries of the Forum are there not only to provide a platform for ‘public speech’ but also to work on objectives, campaigns, plans for implementation and mobilisation of strategies: in short put words into actions and practise what we preach.

./english/229.txt:15:What we have witnessed up to now, is a decision-making process based on meetings that represented national realities only. As a consequence, the European networks had little influence, while the role of the “local” delegates and organizing committee was excessively predominant; the obsessive attention toward the speakers, as if they were issues of high relevance and prestige; a deadline of meeting which is too short (yearly) are an obstacle to the project and the effective organization.

./english/229.txt:21:A new link is emerging between plenary meetings, workshops and theme discussions, that are organized by networks, and there is also a more explicit relationship between the Forum seen as a great “space for learning” and a place of discussion and organization of networks and struggles. The social Forums, inlcuding the first held in Porto Alegre, were born as public spaces for the creation of alternatives: this is a process, of course, but this role must be strongly renewed as the necessary result from the link between the “space for learning” and the “organization of networks, campaigns, struggles”; between social movements and politics; between the experiences and capabilities of activists and intellectuals, who want a different world.

./english/229.txt:23:This double role, not easily manageable, is to be treasured and can be fuelled if the networks, the associations, the local Forums and the movements are involved in the organisation of the ESF from the very first day. In such a way, plenary meetings and workshops can be the “cultural projection” of the themes they carry on. This is an ineluctable step, if we want to avoid the domination of the Forum by the leaders of the social movements, who can also play the role of cultural education and information; therefore, it is necessary to have qualified persons involved in the plenary meetings and workshops. “No global” and experts must find their own space to enhance the role of the “space for learning” again. The exponents of networks, associations, trade unions can have their more natural placement in Forum’s meetings and thematic workshops that are organized by netwoks, supposed to be integral parts of the Forum, without being excluded from considerations and moments of education; also the debate on specific themes between political parties and movements can be the occasion for common efforts and possible confluence of ideas.

./english/229.txt:26:The approach to workshops and plenary sessions has to be focused on the “things to do”, the organized campaigns, the thematic networks; so a third level in the forums is then required: the level of the united “thematic meetings” (education, HS, temporary workers, migrants, public services, jobs etc.) from which manifestos and struggle initiatives might come out;

./english/229.txt:28:A balance between Forum’s function of “space for learning” and place of networks and struggle organizations is needed, so that the very meeting of social movements can become the final place where speakers are principally, though not exclusively, the representatives of meetings and workshops. The meeting of the social movements can be no longer a “separate world”, but the final place of the Forum, where people decide on the proposals (also thematic proposals), which have come out from the plenary meetings, seminars and workshops: this would enable us to write the final document and agenda, not as a result of an exhausting mediation, but as an expression of public discussions and efforts of mobilization that would have already gained the support of the networks.

./english/232.txt:6:People participating in the UK Local Social Forum Network met in Sheffield on the 4/5th December and found consensus on this document to be brought to the Assembly which is going to be held in Paris the 18/19 Dec 2004.

./english/232.txt:11:3. The Assembly of movements: although the final document was built more openly than before the calls for actions have to come from the work of the networks and the assembly is the space for all to express the work which has be done. The way the London Assembly was organized didn't give the local social forum network the chance to communicate their work. We also want to point out that Stop the War Coalition in Britain has called a rally for the 19th of March, the same day when the ‘central demonstration in Brussels on 19 March against war, racism, and against a neo-liberal Europe, against privatisation, against the Bolkestein project and against the attacks on working time, for a Europe of rights and solidarity between the peoples’ will take place. We support the action in Brussels and we will work for that.

./english/232.txt:13:4. We support the call ‘to mobilise massively on the occasion of the G8 summit in Scotland in July 2005’ and we suggest a contrasummit organized by the ESF Network in order to present the alternative we are working for.

./english/232.txt:19:7. The way the ESF works is crucial. Less plenaries, which were just stages for the well known politicians, could be an answer. Start from big thematic or affinity assemblies and then split into working groups in order to establish networks aiming to work on successful actions to fight neoliberalism and build alternatives. Various documents have been written already and ignored, but there is the chance and the time to call for an open ‘How to build the next ESF’ debate.

./english/232.txt:21:8. The location and the space in the ESF has to respond to the needs of the people. In Alexandra Palace the LSF network seminar couldn’t work in the way which had been decided because the space couldn’t be used in a different way but was only suitable for an old-fashioned platform-based meeting.

./english/233.txt:11:• The pre-selection of 5 or 6 themes for the content of meetings was restrictive. Some proposals spanned two or more themes - naturally, since linking issues and struggles is one purpose of the ESF. It would have been better to see the range of proposals without attempting to bend them to a limited range of themes, then decide the balance of the programme and links to be made between proposals once they are on the table. In some cases the pre-selection of themes led to unhappy ‘mergers' of meetings which failed to make the cross-issue links some proposers wanted. For example the civil liberties organisations were thrown together when they actually sought networking between them and migrants' groups.

./english/233.txt:13:· Local social forums had an inadequate part in the official programme. Unlike the Paris ESF, the costs of setting up their networking ‘space' were not covered by the London ESF ticket price or venue-finding arrangements. Local SFs had to make their own arrangements in the `alternative' spaces apart from one seminar at Alexandra Palace

./english/233.txt:27:· Successful events were often based on long-term international networking, with large, participatory preparatory meetings on particular themes or topics held well in advance to expand and consolidate networks and develop ideas. For example this was how the Cultural Forum worked, as well as the several `alternative' meetings dealing with migrant issues

./english/233.txt:29:· However, there were some surprises in which the ESF generated important new networking. For example the Assembly of the Precariat, which promises to be rather fruitful in terms of future organisation of precarious workers, brought together some groups who had not known much about each other's plans before the ESF period. A second positive example was the alliance forged between Indian and Colombian groups working on Coca-Cola.

./english/233.txt:37:· The extent and form of central coordination of the event needs re-thinking. Participants in this meeting were divided between two alternative models. One is the ‘Edinburgh Festival' model in which various organisations organise various events, alone or in ad hoc groupings, and determine their own ticket prices. Once they have done this they might agree to a common ticketing system so as to create one inclusive price for a `core' list of events. Whatever the financial model, some event-organisers will always want to offer their events free of charge. A second model is to have people working on ‘thematic terrains', as the WSF now does to bring the programme together, some or all of them possibly linked to ongoing networks for particular topics. These would be linked by a central coordination space which would deal with logistics (translation, getting visas, accommodation etc) and perhaps attempt to promote sessions to fill obvious gaps in the range of proposals which emerge.

./english/233.txt:41:· The ESF should also reflect, strengthen and encourage ongoing political work at an international level throughout the year. One possibility would be to have 5 or 6 assemblies of social movements per year, each lasting 2 or 3 days. One day (preferably a Friday) would be about organising the next ESF. Then the rest of the weekend could be for the political work of thematic networks (e.g. migration, precarity).

./english/233.txt:43:· Networking is the essence of the ESF process. The proposal made by Phil McLeish on the ‘horizontal' circuit some months ago ( http://www.commoner.org.uk/01-12groundzero.htm ) deserves to be re-visited.

./english/234.txt:7:In Florence , and partially in Paris/Saint Denis, the movement represented itself as it was, it was a snapshot of the existing. A reach set of aspirations, experiences, differences, crossed by the will to cover new ways for social transformation, in an attempt to anticipate the future. The difficulties met in London and in the several meetings of the European Preparatory Assembly have been determined only partially by the "specificity" of the national organizing committees. In fact, the relationship between the Forum and the national and European social dynamics has entered into a tension. It is no longer sufficient to locate a "public space" in which the different sensibilities, networks, associations, committees and so on, could meet each other and discuss about the possible alternatives to the present world. The "social issue" is moving contradictorily towards the discovery of converging points between a material condition and moments of common initiatives which could be able to make a step ahead with respect to the modalities that we have known in the past.

./english/234.txt:9:Even if the Forum's "formula" and the thematic axis which characterize it is still significant, the building process is also important, and the interlace between these two aspects has become crucial. It is necessary to reconsider, during the Forum, the relationship between plenaries/seminars/thematic assemblies/social movements assembly, assigning a greater relief to the moments of aggregation and constitution of European networks around the different initiatives; it is also crucial the way in which the thematic merging process is qualified. The process which brought to the call for a second day of action of the migrants' movement - subscribed by tens of actors involved in their struggles, who met inside but also outside the ESF, in the autonomous spaces - is the best example of the way in which it should be possible to build up a political process on a European scale not only merging "similar issues", but around the assumption of common political contents and passwords.

./english/237.txt:11:That admirable optimism was short-lived, however. Those of us who saw our struggles not merely as a three day event but as part of a wider social change through the rejection of domination and control by questioning the legitimacy of existing power structures; those of us who celebrate autonomy and define our processes though our actions and networks of exchange and diversity, were soon to discover that the door painted in the global colours of the ESF would very soon be closed in our faces and bolted from the inside.

./english/237.txt:34:Although highly critical of the organising process, many saw the ESF as a space to network with people and then take their dialogues to open, non-fee-paying spaces. In contrast, others saw the ESF as fundamentally flawed, merely representing a space for the co-option of real struggles. Defining our group territories in this broad landscape and shaping our boundaries without creating borders took time. It was not an easy process and should not be idealised, but it was at least open and honest. Over the summer we carved out our association through sharing resources, time and energy. We collectively imagined a world, not an event, that went beyond the ESF, in life without capitalism sharing our commons, refusing a ‘pay to say’ mentality, and freeing, in all manner, our messages.

./english/237.txt:45:As we began socialising our physical spaces volunteers from Indymedia London, as one of the groups fully engaged in the autonomous spaces, also tried to petition the ESF organisers to utilise the movement’s media and networked resources in the same way. We urged them to decentralise the ESF working lists, to socialise the communication tools and to utilise alternative and community media groups. Most of these points were ignored by the official process, however, including the suggestion of setting up Internet cafes and delegate resource centres at Alexandra Palace. So after multiple attempts, Indymedia turned its attention to working autonomously not only with ASs but also with NGOs engaged in advocating communication rights. This coalition highlighted the need for an activist gathering of thousands to address the issue of the freedom to communicate. Working with NGOs was often difficult for a group with very open networks, and potentially confusing information channels, non-9-5 working hours and exploitable energy. However, the result was that we managed to create a looser form of collaboration, which resulted in a wider understanding of communication as it moved from the margins to become a more central theme. The Camden Centre played host to four days of discussion on tactical media and communication rights as well as free internet and a media centre. Meanwhile, the wider collaboration and relationships built with Communication Rights advocates turned into a very real node of critical support when, as a result of an unrelated incident, Indymedia’s servers were seized during the ESF preparations by the FBI.

./english/237.txt:53:A truly internationalist spirit stood in contrast to the discussions about national quotas of speakers that occupied much of the ESF process for months. ‘Big name’ speakers were not the main priority at the AS. People came to exchanges real experiences, stories and plain words with validity and legitimacy born of their presence and action. We saw this as a way to effectively build networks all over Europe and broaden our movements in the UK.

./english/237.txt:55:Some of the clear differences between the ESF and the AS emerged out of the months of preparation. Many different political groups answered the AS call out for participation and were able to suggest seminars they would like to partake in and self-organise without speculating whether they’d survive an official cull or forced merger. Groups like the Dissent network, which had issues of non-representation in ‘official’ seminar panels and indecision on its participation in the ESF, were able to hold a ‘Day of Dissent’ at the AS in a much more lateral position. The issue of work was also taken up from a completely different angle. At the ESF, union officials were trying to find out how to survive in the wake of the waning of Fordist modes of production: how to organise globally, how to engage the younger generation. At the AS, those young people from all over who attended the Assembly of the European Precariat were reclaiming Flexicurity and trying to make sense of their own life conditions as some of the first European generations without pensions since war times.

./english/238.txt:7:Abstract: Language and communication needs are at the heart of the Social Forums. The emergence of Babels, the international network of volunteer interpreters and translators, demonstrates that alternatives to market capitalism can and are being actively produced through the ESF process. Unfortunately, like Florence and Paris before it, the London ESF continued to promote and communicate in the languages of the ‘power elite' whilst marginalising all others, with negative consequences for equality of participation. This article describes the Babels story so far before critically reflecting on the 'politics of language' as a contribution to the debate on the future direction of the ESF process. We conclude that in order to make the ESF, and all Social Forums for that matter, genuinely internationalist affairs from now on, trade unions, NGO, social movements, networks and individuals must work hand-in-hand with Babels at the beginning of every process, while Babels must pro-actively fight to put language politics at the heart of the Forum.

./english/238.txt:16:Yet how much do ESF organisers and participants reflect on the people, skills, technology, and resources – and above all the politics – involved in enabling participants to understand and speak in the myriad different languages that define and bring the Forum to life? For example, a common misunderstanding among Forum goers is the assumption that interpreters are hired in by the Forum to cater for ‘international speakers'. Yet since the first ESF in Florence 2002, almost all simultaneous and consecutive interpretation, as well as document translation, has been provided in political solidarity by Babels, the growing international network of volunteer interpreters and translators that was born out of the Social Forum process. The development of Babels and the commitment of its protagonists to ‘learn from practice' pro vides one of the best examples of how alternatives to market capitalism can and are being actively produced through the Social Forum process. At the same time, the problematic way in which the ESF (organisers) and Babels relate both to each other and language issues is evidence of the contradictory political ethics and practices within the ESF that must be addressed during the process towards Athens 2006.

./english/238.txt:22:Babels was born in the run-up to the Florence ESF in 2002 when the dubious politics and huge expense of hiring professional interpreters for the WSF in 2001 and 2002 led a small network of communication activists linked to ATTAC France to propose that only volunteers be used to interpret. Initial scepticism about volunteer ‘quality' gave way to pragmatism at the 11th hour when the high cost of the traditional market route began to bite the Italian organisers, unsurprising when one considers that professional interpreters normally command between 300 and 400 euros per day. An emergency call for volunteers was made to which s ome 600 people responded, eventually yielding around 350 volunteer interpreters and translators for the Forum.

./english/238.txt:31:Forum of the Americas in Ecuador under its belt during 2004, by the time of the third London ESF in October this year, the Babels database had almost doubled to over 7000 people representing 63 languages. From this network, the London ESF welcomed 500 volunteers from 22 countries who in turn enabled some 20,000 participants from more than 60 countries to express themselves in 25 different languages over 3 days. However, despite undoubted progress on many levels, it was widely felt within the Babels network that London had been the most politically difficult ESF it had participated in, especially in terms of its relationship to the host country's main organisers. We return to this issue later on.

./english/238.txt:35:The impressive and rapid expansion and development of Babels cannot be adequately understood through statistics alone. The Babels network must also be recognised as an emerging political actor in its own right with a growing sense of identity and purpose. A commonly-held belief within the network is that of ‘horizontality' – Babelitos eschew leaders and hierarchies and instead seek to work collectively as equals in a network organisation based upon creative thinking and consensus. In reality, horizontality remains a difficult principle to put into practice, not least because of the top-down and centralised way in which the ESF itself is organised.

./english/238.txt:37:Underpinning the Babels philosophy is a determination to continually reflect upon its role in each Forum and then learn and develop from practice. Out of this process, three important political pre-conditions have emerged for Babels involvement in Social Forums that are now guiding principles of the network. The first is that all interpreters and translators for the ESF must be 100% volunteers. This stems from the problematic experience of a two-tier workforce of voluntary and paid interpreters in Florence . Babels believes that hiring professionals or companies to ‘service' the Forum goes directly against the principles of solidarity and developing communicational alternatives to the market that are supposedly enshrined in the Social Forum's charter.

./english/238.txt:41:The third and perhaps most important principle of all is Babels commitment to defend and promote “the right of everybody to express themselves in the language of their choice” (Babels charter). For example, for the London ESF Babels insisted that ‘official' and ‘unofficial' language distinctions be abolished after the experiences of Florence and Paris, where the limited language pool of interpreters combined with the inherent bias of the Forum's organisers to make English, French, German, Italian and Spanish the official and thus overwhelmingly dominant languages. As Emmanuelle Rivière a professional interpreter and coordinator with Babels-UK explains, this outcome led to some serious soul-searching within the Babels network as to its own role in the Social Forum:

./english/238.txt:49:Putting both these principles and the knowledge gained into practice is no easy task for a volunteer network working mainly by Internet, but progress is being made on a number of fronts. Partly through Babels pressure, the last WSF in Mumbai 2004 saw the spectrum of ‘official languages' publicly broadened to 13 languages to reflect the ethnic diversity of India and the Asian continent, a development thought to have increased the number of participants from those language groups. Respect for language diversity is also being addressed through a commitment to improving the ‘quality' of interpretation and translation. Quality in the specific context and purpose of the Social Forums does not mean a professional standard of ‘technical proficiency' but the general ‘quality of communication' experienced in the Social Forum as a whole. This not only concerns how interpretation and translation are performed, but also how ‘access to the message' is facilitated or obstructed by the organisational structures and language discourses of the Forum, and its organisers, speakers and participants.

./english/238.txt:59: Despite the central role of Babels in both meeting the language needs of the ESF and developing alternative long-term communication infrastructures with others, the network cannot and does not function in isolation from the rest of the ESF process. Ultimately, Babels like everyone else involved in organising and participating in the ESF, must reflect critically on the outcomes and relationships being generated by our activities, and what this implies for future directions.

./english/238.txt:71:Because of this, and a number of serious problems over accommodation and reimbursement for volunteers, Babels issued a number of critical public statements and nearly pulled out of the London ESF on several occasions. That fact that Babels stepped back from the brink each time was partly due to the fact that reaching a consensus to walk away is far harder than agreeing to get involved, especially in a a network bringing together people from different backgrounds and perspectives. Moreover, the UK coordinators of Babels who agreed to participate in this year's ESF did so with their political eyes wide open. The reality is that the Social Forums – and especially the ESF – are not politically ‘pure' spaces where everyone works together in mutual respect and harmony. They are instead political battlegrounds where self-interested factions fight for leadership and control and are met with resistance from those opposed to vanguardism. Babels thus currently accepts that the innovations and alternatives being generated by projects like itself and and Nomad come not only through the annual process of organising the ESF and WSF­, but also in struggle against those within them. And whatever the shortcomings of the organisation of this year's ESF, we still managed to gain an enormous amount of knowledge and experience that we will now share with future processes, particularly through adding value to the Lexicon and Sitprep projects. Most importantly, pulling out would have stopped the ESF from taking place – this was not a decision that Babels alone should have the power or right to make.

./english/238.txt:75:If we are serious about creating spaces for exchange between people from a diversity of social, ethnic, cultural and political backgrounds and contexts, with a multiplicity of needs, then all of us in the ESF process must collectively address head on the issues and politics of language and communication within our movement. Babels cannot obviously do this alone. Trade unions, NGO, social movements, networks and individuals must from now on work hand-in-hand with Babels to make connections with social movements and actors in marginalised countries and communities in the process help pass on knowledge to create new Babels coordinations. This is especially urgent for the next ESF scheduled for Athens in Spring 2006 due to the severe shortage of Greek interpreters within Babels. Without a genuine commitment by everyone to an unprecedented process of linguistic and popular outreach – and to the necessary resources this implies – the ESF is destined to remain centred around the Western European left and risks having the microphones turned off altogether.

./english/240.txt:7:Over the past few years, many networks and groups have been established around Europe to promote campaigns around refugee issues. A pre-ESF conference in September in London brought together 70 people from a large range of migration related networks, including British groups. The European Social Forum (ESF) was seen as one step in the wider process of migration as a social movement, an opportunity to address a new audience. The meeting was designed to bring about more cohesiveness among the Europen networks in the long term, and to discuss joint proposals for seminars and workshops for the official ESF programme as well as for the alternative spaces.

./english/240.txt:11:In terms of organising seminars and workshops for the official ESF, migrants and refugee groups or collectives who wanted to participate were referred to the refugee network (RN) that was primarily set up to represent refugee and migrant organisations. It was never made clear who created it. On the one hand, it was claimed that the RN was not part of the ESF organising structure. On the other hand, it was listed as part of an organising ESF sub-group as early as April. Nearly all active participants in RN were related to the SWP, and were either members of trade unions or other national organisations.

./english/240.txt:15:Collaboration between the RN and individual activists, groups and networks struggling on issues of migration proved complicated. RN decisions were made arbitrarily without any effort at consultation. Co-ordination and the setting of priorities was thus in the hands of a few. Minutes of meetings have never been published. As there was no open email list, groups who were not able to participate in one of the rare RN meetings had no opportunity to engage. Therefore, it was almost impossible for autonomous groups and activists to co-ordinate seminars through the RN. The lack of transparency caused constant battles, especially with organisations from outside Britain.

./english/240.txt:17:The ESF Organising Committee set the entrance fees for asylum-seekers at the extraordianarily high level of £20. In addition to entrance fees and travel expenses, many migrants had to fork out £70 for a visa. Only British organisations and networks affiliated to the refugee forum could get free entrance tickets. Individual asylum seekers who may have been encouraged to visit the ESF could not do so unless they had the good fortune of having heard of or belonging to one of the affiliated groups. The RN refused to challenge this decision on the basis that it was decided by the Organising Committee. Following furious critique by almost all European migration related groups, the RN raised money from trade unions and other donors in order to buy entrance tickets for asylum seekers or migrants, but again these funds were only available for asylum seekers connected to the RN.

./english/240.txt:19:The RN had a fund of £10,000 to be used to outreach to migrants and refugee groups in Britain only. This was challenged at a European ESF meeting in Berlin by Sans Papiers, Kein Mench ist illegal and particularly the No Vox network, an organisation specifically set up to gain access to the ESF for Sans Papiers, migrants, refugees and unemployed as well as low waged people from across the world. In this battle the fund was suddenly reduced to £5,000, and networks from other countries were told to raise their own funds.

./english/240.txt:21:To highlight this exclusion of undocumented migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from participating at the ESF, several collectives such as the Sans Papieres Lille and Paris, the Wombles, the Voice and the Noborder network called for a demonstration on the first day of the ESF in Dover, Calais and Waterloo. Certainly, borders cannot be removed for an ESF-event, but in 2004, the ESF Organising Committee raised additional borders which effectively restricted free movement. Consequently, no delegate of the official ESF participated in this action or expressed solidarity.

./english/241.txt:7:Five years after Seattle and four after the first World Social Forum, it is time to reflect upon what has happened during the last, very resonant years, and about how to continue. In response to this, several initiatives with multiple trajectories are beginning to emerge from the intersection of political action and investigation. Their aim is to put archiving and research techniques at the service of the process of social mobilization and social change. There is not an homogeneous and/or established concept for defining this action. It’s more a “network” of concepts that are growing together around words like archiving, documenting, reporting, memory, systematizing, investigation and activist research. The development of conceptual tools is one of the key-points around it that it is necessary to face now.

./english/241.txt:11:These initiatives have a variety of different objectives: preserving what happened for future memory; making accessible the knowledge spread at international meetings for people who cannot participate to them, which helps to turn them into parts of a process and not just single events; creating networking tools to enhance the effectiveness of the process itself; critical analysis that sheds light on the contradictions of the process, etc.

./english/241.txt:17:The systematization/memory groups are addressing various aspects of the Social Forum. With a very simple (or, on occasion, fictitious) distinction, there are two kinds of information systematization and knowledge production that are considered necessary: one is related to the networking organisational aspect, the other is related to the content. This distinction doesn’t necessarily correspond to that established between “living memory or systematization” and its opposite (at a guess, “non-living memory”).

./english/241.txt:19:The networking organizational aspect gives an understanding of the nature and richness of movements that are involved within the Social Forum process; of what kind of organisations participated in the forum: thematically, regionally and by type and size; an understanding of the direction in which the process is growing through an evolution analysis; or which kind of connectivity the Forum has created; different models of participation etc.. It is focused on developing useful networking tools to reinforce the Forum’s dimension of “weaving” social networks.

./english/241.txt:21:Both aspects are important. Sharing experiences and critiques of neo-liberal globalisation is as important as organising striking power against it, or organising through a “reinvented” power distribution. And of course the two are not mutually exclusive: the networking aspect contains contents and the contents show how we organize.

./english/241.txt:22:I will come back later to the first of these, the networking organisational aspect, in order to present a concrete experience that is addressing it: the Guide for social transformation in Europe: ESF and surroundings.

./english/241.txt:40:It is a piece of research explicitly tailored to action for the critical transformation of the current reality. The research pursues the creation of a knowledge that is valued for its practical effectiveness in generating changes, as opposed to an objective and contemplative theoretical knowledge, as in the traditional academic manner; knowledge that generates and maximizes action and whose fruits serve the process of constituting new antagonistic subjectivities through social movement convergence processes. In the sense of practical effectiveness the core of the Guide is to build useful “networking tools” such as a Directory and contact details of the collectives and organisations which have participated to the ESFs of Florence, Paris, London, organized thematically and by region; and a Map of the European networks developed within and around the ESF process. The level of utility is defined by the capacity of the use-builders of the Guide itself to make it grow through the identification of actors with the networking process, of resources for the action, of reflection for social transformation.

./english/241.txt:42:It also aims to reinforce action research/investigation as a new antagonistic commitment. Another aim of the Guide is the creation of a convergence space for common action amongst activist researchers/investigators operating within the social movements at the European level. For this reason it is and it will be carried out by an open network of groups and research centres, called the Action research network for the ESF confluence process. Moreover, the Guide will contain a specific Map/directory of groups which are producing research within and around the new movements in Europe too.

./english/241.txt:46:• Short presentations of particular experiences of movements and networks developed in Europe

./english/241.txt:55:It is a tool at the service first of all of the ESF confluence process: aiming to help the self-organization of the ESF itself as well as the creation of European and transnational networks. And it will produce knowledge, more self-consciousness among the protagonists of the ESF process; and more focused actions and strategies for the future.

./english/241.txt:57:In a process of collective creation, it is nurtured by a spirit of experimentation and cooperation through an open and pluralistic network structure. The Guide is developed from a network of very diverse nodes, politically and organizationally, such as research groups internal to the social movements (Transform! Italia, Transnational Institute, Glocal a-research centre) or social movement organizations (ARCI, EYFA, UNITED for Intercultural Action), in collaboration with academic departments/centres (The University of Florence or The Centre for the Study of Global Governance- LSE), Trade Union Foundations (like the CGIL’s Fondazione Di Vittorio), hackers support teams (Pangea), International archive institutions (IISH - International Institute of Social History) and a cluster of 40 advisers. It is also being developed with the collaborative interaction and recognition by the working groups internal to the social forum process which were mentioned above.

./english/241.txt:59:The research is developed like an effective procedure. Its development is already producing one of its intended results, to the extent that it is helping to weave a new network and harness new kinds of antagonistic subjectivity.

./english/241.txt:77:Prabir Purkayastha, All India Peoples Science Network and WSF India. WSF Memory Seminar: WSF 2004 Mumbai Experience http://www.wsfindia.org

./english/242.txt:9:But this implies relating technical developments to other social practices and uses for which the tools are developed. The user must be at the starting point and not only at the end of the production process. This is why the actors of Nomad, an international network of people committed to putting essential technologies into the public domain, link their technological developments to other practices (in translation, art, media, agriculture...). Nomad activists from across the globe have been working towards developing alternative technologies aimed at general empowerment of people.

./english/242.txt:11:Nomad was created in September 2003 through the development and setting up of the NIFT (Nomad Interpretation Free Tool) for the 4th World Social Forum in India (Mumbai). The NIFT is a translation transmission tool developed in collaboration with the international interpretation network: Babels .

./english/242.txt:15:The issue of re-appropriation of knowledge is closely linked to the political perspective of developing local production in an economy based on solidarity. The Nomad network is not a technical service provider but a political network run on a voluntary basis.

./english/242.txt:28:Nomad participates mainly in the translation group through the setting up of the NIFT. But the Nomad perspective is broader then this issue of translation. We would like to work on other projects during the Forum, such as a project of radio networking, by showing and setting up with Porto Alegre communities some hertzian and web-radios, linking these local radios through the net.

./english/242.txt:42: Nomad is not seeking to be an exclusive network. In fact, if other participants at the Forums have the same goals, Nomad would like to be able to work in parallel or in partnership with them.

./english/242.txt:44: The Nomad organization method: the network and the question of representativeness

./english/242.txt:46:Nomad is not a political organization but functions as a network. The activists participating in Nomad are involved within it as individuals, and if they are involved as part of a structure (e.g. Babels or Apo33), this structure will be considered as an individual group within, or associated with, the Nomad network. In no case can there be an elected representative of Nomad, nor can there be any elected representative of another group within Nomad. A Nomad activist is someone who is involved practically in the Nomad project while respecting the project's principles. Practical involvement and respect for the project's principles are the only legitimate criteria that allow people to speak as a Nomad actor. This indicates a critical position as regards to the electoral system: when we designate a representative, this has the almost automatic result of shattering the network dynamic, destroying the development of ties within a star configuration. When someone is elected, all ties tend to converge towards this single elected person (the representative), and the end result is a kind of idolization of the delegate.

./english/242.txt:54:If Nomad develops and offers alternative technical solutions, this does not mean that it is going to bring new tools to the different countries it is involved with. The objective sought, on the basis of knowledge sharing, is the development of a parallel economy that allows everyone to develop his or her autonomy of production. This parallel economy will be specified by the term “local” economy in a specific sense: local means that it is the users themselves who define their own needs and tools. The term “local” thus has a double meaning: a geographic meaning (allowing for the autonomy of producers and local users) and an ethico-political meaning: it has to do with an area located within a microeconomy, a knot in the worldwide network of an alternative economy.

./english/244.txt:25:In summary, if we do know, believe or suppose that the good building of alter information is not thought to have a “real” influence upon public opinion, what should we do?, What should we take in consideration when we do try to communicate our analyses, the contents of the activities and networks conversations that we are stimulating inside the alternative mass media spaces for social communication? How should we make it? To whom should we direct that information? How could we guess it has been understood? In fact what do we seek to know better?

./english/244.txt:27:Here it looks as though we are facing a double sociological problem of creating a process where the “analysis” of the situation of a social, political, cultural or gender conflict gets to be relevant enough to produce its own proposals of solutions to those conflicts. In a certain way we could say that the production of information from the social movements and from civil society involved in social transformation needs to be working at some points with networks that are practicing “activist research action”. But this article won't focus on this precise point that would be related with methodologies and contents shaping. We would rather here make a proposal to build more reflection around the way we produce and spread information related to the activities of our organizations and/or affinities groups.

./english/245.txt:26:And yet the development of communication strategies and the tools to support them seems to have been woefully lacking. Given that this '"movement of movements" that we're always talking about has blossomed under concepts of decentralised networks and non-hierarchical communication, underpinned by the opportunities afforded us through the use of computers and the Internet, it should be clear that any ongoing Social Forum process should place these values and tools at its heart. Sadly with the 2004 ESF, this was not the case.

./english/245.txt:38:Indeed several meetings took place in the Autonomous Spaces during the ESF that discussed communication tools and memory projects in relation to the Social Forums. Two of these were held at the European Forum of Communications Rights and Indymedia Centre which was a collaboration between various progressive electronic media networks, community media

./english/245.txt:53:Obviously the area of press, media and public relations is one that can cause great concern where there is conflict over the wider political motivations and goals around the ESF. There are concerns over representation, not only regarding the whole ESF project, but also over the prominence given to different issues and campaigns, as well as to individual speakers. This is why policies or guidelines in these areas are essential. These issues were raised at the UK Organising Committee early in the year - recommendations were made that a series of press policies should be developed with a broad range of participants working in partnership with progressive media networks, and that these should include policies to ensure an equitable and clear access to the press, as well as a fair and transparent system for fielding and directing enquiries from the press.

./english/245.txt:55:Because of the many problems of the UK process, organisations and networks who would have been expected to bolster any effort to gain press / media coverage did not engage in a publicity campaign. This meant that whole sectors of organisations failed to add their public weight behind the ESF. This failure should be seen as an important indicator of the attitude of many organisations towards the ESF - they may have participated in the Forum, but they didn't publicise it! Indeed many organisations even failed to link to the fse-esf website from their own websites.

./english/245.txt:61:If another world is possible, then this includes another media. There are many existing organisations and networks engaged in producing alternatives now, on a daily basis, and it is crucial for the ESF to ensure their participation, both to help develop communication channels, to promote the forums in advance, and to help in documenting them. The synergies that can be created through the combined efforts of different initiatives that includes NOMAD and other archiving, reporting and research projects are just the kind of practical collaborations and concrete projects we need if we are to progress anywhere at all in our quest for another world.

./english/246.txt:25:The first was inspired by experiences in solidarity economy that were taking place at the time in Rio Grande do Sul and especially neighbouring Argentina, were an expressive movement of barter trade networks had appeared after the 2001-2002 crisis. At the Cultural Barter Fair, the participants could exchange both goods (either characteristic objects they had brought from their countries or things like t-shirts, crafts, cds etc. that they owned or had produced themselves) and services (such as hairdressing, skill-sharing etc.), either on a one-to-one basis, i.e., a product for a product or a product for a service, or using the social currency that circulated within the fair – called, in a rather hippy fashion, ‘Moon’. The World Social Soiree was an open-mic, open-stage, two-hour, ten-day event were anyone could show up and ‘do their thing’; the only guiding lines were a certain theme for the day, and the fact that each day was supposed to have a different movement or group as the convenor. The Flag of the Flags was produced with all the flags collected throughout the WSF, sewn together in one by a local solidarity economy enterprise, Grife do Morro da Cruz. A development of the idea of the Mosaics in the first two WSF – the Mosaic of Stones (where movements and individuals donated stones with their messages or names engraved) and the Mosaic of Books (where people were invited to donate books for a non-specified reason; later it was decided that the books would form a library that, to this day, still does not exist) – it was interesting not only for its symbolic aspect, an affirmation of unity in diversity which dissolved all particular ‘logos’ in one which, at the same time, was none; but also for the very discussion on art and culture it carried. Firstly, it was the ‘work of art’ without an artist – for who could be said to have created it, those who had the original idea, those who donated the flags, or those who sewed it? Secondly, because, unlike a ‘work of art’ (like the material produced at the Live Museum of Diversity), it was made not to be hung or shown, but to be used: to be carried in the streets, to be draped from high places in direct actions etc.

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

./english/248.txt:33:For many participants, the solution to some of these problems is to adopt the practices of the social or solidarity economy, which encompasses alternative modes of production and distribution of goods. To start with, this means that the organisers of the forum need to realise that the practical construction of the forum can be as political as the contents of its speeches. The recent Uruguay Social Forum, for example, was a showcase for fairly traded and co-operatively produced goods – inspired, in part, by the explosive growth of bartering networks in neighbouring Argentina following its economic collapse in late 2001. The Intercontinental Youth Camp at the 2003 World Social Forum went even further, accommodating more than 20,000 people in a tented city with its own internal currency (the ‘Sol'), which acted as an incentive to participate in the camp's own solidarity economy and purchase its organic produce rather than choosing the nearby commercial outlets.

./english/253.txt:7:The organisers of the fifth World Social Forum have adopted a new methodology for organising the programme, which has involved participating organisations more fully in the construction of the forum from the outset. The greater focus on self-organised events is also intended to facilitate new networks and common actions amongst the participants of the forum.

./english/253.txt:15:To ensure that the Forum process becomes more useful in promoting the density and dynamism of the relationships and networks resisting and creating alternatives to neo-liberalism.

./english/253.txt:20:Obviously applying this to the ESF needs work. But this process could be very important to both unifying and Europeanising the organisation of the ESF and ensuring it reaches out to the widest range of networks and movements across Europe and internationally.

./english/259.txt:37:I greatly appreciated the supportive space of the Barcelona meeting to share such thoughts with other activist-academics and academic-activists, and particularly with the other anthropologists present. Workshops and roundtables in which I participated with interest included one on the organisational implications of networks, in terms of both theory and practice, and an afternoon spent reflecting on the socio-political implications of particular activist tactics, from direct action to mass marches. As with most conferences, however, the scheduled meetings were greatly enhanced by sharings in the spaces outside these meetings: sitting on the steps outside the conference one evening discussing the analytical relevance for social movements of conceptual metaphors drawn from physics and the life sciences; building links over tapas in a cheap restaurant with academic-activists from Greece, Israel, France, and the UK; and talking with fellow anthropologists about the problems, both personal and professional, engendered by an ethnographic and participatory orientation to research.

./english/260.txt:58:relationship, working together in the context of the Network for the Social Support of

./english/266.txt:90:Pesticide Action Network North America: Search for news about corporations involved in pesticide production and genetic engineering.

./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/269.txt:19:From this first tentative experience came the impulse to organize an ongoing research project. It is clear that we need tools for talking about and intervening in new kinds of work -this terrain of labor which often doesn’t even have a name - so we set out to map the territory, with one eye always set on the possibility of conflict. This is a bid for survival arising out of our own needs: networks to break solitude, words to talk about what is happening to us.

./english/269.txt:55:And sixth, we begin to consciously encounter the need to mobilize common economic and infrastructural resources. We want to be able to ‘free’ people, just like the parties do: free from illegality, free from precariousness. We could organize a marriage agency… we can disobey, falsify, pirate, shelter and whatever else occurs to us. The proposal of the Laboratorio de Trabajadores space, as well as almost any other proposal, requires money. We don’t want to fall into the star system, touring and talking and not developing the local network that is so important to us, nor do we want to fall into the dependency of subventions. The resources we’re concerned about are as much immaterial and affective as they are material. Our bid is to construct a pro comun. To do this it is necessary to collectivize knowledge and networks, breaking the logic of individual maximization to which the intellectual agencies of the city of renown have accustomed us.

./english/272.txt:18:1.Stressed the importance of the knowledge arising from experience; knowledge that might be tacit, ephemeral, not necessarily possible to codify and yet an important clue to understanding how society worked. In their ways of organising – whether feminist `consciousness raising’ groups or networks of workers across factories – they attempted to share and to `socialise’ this practical knowledge, combining it with more systematic forms of knowledge as a basis for understanding both how the power structures work and their own policies and strategies. In this way the movements paid close attention to practical knowledge and at the same time sought to go `behind’ immediate experience, to understand what produced the injustice against which they struggled and how it could be overcome. Hence their interest in critical theory: creative Marxist traditions in particular but also in the case of feminism psychoanalytic theory too. In this way the movements understood knowledge as differentiated. (An understanding paralleled by new developments in philosophy of science)

./english/272.txt:30:There are wider implications of this approach to the politics of knowledge and of the movements becoming aware of the importance of the knowledge they produce for the efficacy of their power to transform. First is the importance of organised moments of reflection, on what movements have learnt in the course of their resistance, on studying the reaction of the power structures, on the insights of those at the frontline, ensuring that the new knowledge sheds light for the working out of their next strategic steps. There is also the importance for movements (and for innovative, `movement – oriented parties) of surveys, investigations, consulta, that could ensure that strategic discussions are rooted in the practical knowledge and insights of those engaged in resistance; including those involved in struggles and networks beneath the surface, without a public, political expression.

./english/272.txt:34:But by discussing the future of the World Social Forum I am going ahead of myself. The reason why it is necessary to summarise what we can abstract with hindsight from the practice of the earlier movements is because these movements went through a significant defeat. As a result many threads of thought were broken and forgotten. (What I’ve said here is only a fraction of relevant thoughts). Not only did they suffer a significant defeat this but this defeat produced a distorted legacy. I’m thinking here of the legacy of a post-modernism which separated the movements’ concern with language and culture from their roots in resistance and action to change the material realities which language describes. Defeat also halted a half-finished process of new thinking and the emergence of subjects of socialist or radically transformative change. The movements rarely had the infrastructure and resources to survive, other than in memory, writing, scattered personal networks and the occasional project. There are exceptions which prove the point: for example Rifondazione Comunista in Italy has been able to maintain some political continuity between the innovative movements of the 70’s and the equally innovative movements of today and is as a result very different – in many but not all ways – from most conventional parties of the left. But generally, a weakening or defeat of the social movements left a vacuum and in many places, the traditional left, whether a warmed up Leninism or a defensive parliamentary socialism, moved back into an influence disproportionate to their size and political credibility with their limited and stifling approaches to knowledge.

./english/274.txt:70:human history, and to draw from them a broader vision of how particular forms of freedom might be generalized into an overall social vision. The task is to network and connect multiple and divergent struggles and practices in a mutually complementary and beneficial manner. The goal is not to lead the masses, to create a new human nature or state of being, but to identify existing forms of freedom, and to draw out the underlying logic and generalize them into a pluralistic reconstructive vision. It is

./english/275.txt:147:Despite eco-socialist attempts in western Europe to rally social movements around the projects of Green parties,64 the process of movement fragmentation was not reversed until the Zapatistas, drawing on the heritage of majority world community development, found ways to articulate a project of cooperation between diverse actors.65 The intercontinental Encuentros of activists that they facilitated, and the People’s Global Action network that sprang from these, made it possible for activists in an enormous variety of different movements and locations to start to recognize themselves in each other and to explore ways of acting together as a ‘movement of movements’.

./english/277.txt:6:The western Marxist tradition identifies the active engagement of human beings with their environment and with each other as a central ontological category. This physical, verbal and cognitive engagement is embodied through skill: the practical availability of what are often prediscursive modes of action, generated in collective learning processes such as conflict or alliance, materially sedimented in experience, practices, language, networks and so on, and thus continually subject to transformation or loss, but also constantly available as a resource for creative action. Movements, from above or below, are then different possible “proto-hegemonic” attempts at developing this potential from different starting-points and mobilising it around shared social projects and against others.

./english/277.txt:94:Such literature is by no means unusual in this milieu, typically (like Ideal Home) focussed entirely on the practical (from advice on particular acts via discussion of eviction proceedings and details of how to defend a squat through to histories of successful squats and lists of contacts). Ideal Home thus fits into a history of systematic attempts at stabilising and developing particular forms of knowledge, which in the case of contemporary movements goes back at least to Nicholas Saunders’ Alternative England and Wales (1975) and Abbie Hoffman’s Steal this book (excerpted in Hoffman 1989). Comparable literature exists for continental Europe as well (from details of how to set up alternative radio stations (Network Medien-Cooperative 1983) to details of how to carry out actions against armaments firms (Maass 1983)), and of course much of the alternative press is devoted to such matters, from computer encryption to details of forthcoming demonstrations (for which Green Anarchist was recently closed down by the police). Skill can of course take less tangible or abstract forms than this; but I think this sufficiently illustrates the material and institutionalised nature of skill in social movement contexts.

./english/277.txt:146:My research (Cox 1999b) started from an interest in understanding and locating a “counter-cultural” network of friends based in Dublin, but including emigrants in Britain, Europe, America and Australia, formed in Irish student politics and London squats, and regularly involved in social movement activity of different kinds. The impulse for the research came from my own association with them, and my own activities as one of the “intellectuals” of the group. Attempts at developing this kind of understanding were and are absolutely normal among this well-read, if largely self-educated, group, so that the research in effect consisted in following a line traced from within this milieu.

./english/277.txt:166:Since writing the first version of this paper in 1998, much has changed. In the space between submitting and defending my PhD, which argued that developing networks between social movements was not only a real possibility, but also a logical development for those movements, the “Battle of Seattle” took place, and the current phase of what has become called a “movement of movements” opened. Following Irish participation in the Prague (2000) and Genoa (2001) summit protests, an Irish wing of these movements developed, and quite a number of activist / academics have been involved in one form or another.

./english/277.txt:168:Simultaneously, there has been a worldwide growth in activist research in and around the movement of movements, with the development of specific networks, thinktanks and get-togethers. Our movements are reflexive, and they make (more or less) critical use of the academy for their own purposes, including enabling gatherings, documenting movement processes and moving the networking process forward.

./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/282.txt:53:In essence, Lukacs's opponents argued that the Hungarian Revolution was lost due to factors beyond human control; Lukacs's riposte is, 'No, comrades, we blew it!' Had the Hungarian CP leadership been better equipped theoretically, they would not have made the mistakes they did, and the outcome would have been - for good or ill - different (4). Now, to return to McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, they never seem to provide a basis for saying, 'They blew it....' (or, of course, 'They got it right, for the following reasons'). They do get close, sometimes, but seem to stop inquiring just as the issue comes near to a head. They note, for example, following McAdam (1999), that the Civil Rights Movement 'socially appropriated' the Black church network, but talk about social appropriation as a 'mechanism' rather than a more or less deliberate activity. They record that the Communist Party in the Philippines effectively abstained from taking any active position during the 1980s revolution against Marcos, and even note that the Party had the capacity, had it intervened, to make a decided difference to what happened, but they do not further explore this interesting abstention. (5) In short, they largely avoid concrete political judgment. They do not offer grounds for saying, 'That was a practical mistake,' or '(Ideally), had we been there, we would have spoken or acted thus....'

./english/282.txt:86:The community that validates movement intellectuals is different: it is the movements themselves. To become in any meaningful sense a movement intellectual, one must be treated by significant others in the movement as playing that part, that is, as someone it's worth listening to, with whom it's worth conversing about the movement's past, present and future, its problems and tasks, its perspectives, its ideas and its practices. The movement intellectual's audience - those who effectively credential an individual or group aspiring to this role - is the network of movement activists, and it is through their actual practice that the movement intellectual's ideas are, to the degree they are accepted, tested.

./english/282.txt:95:As to how people become movement intellectuals, acquire the necessary skills and confidence, present themselves, and become accepted in the role, we can only offer some scattered suggestions. Gaining the 'right to speak' may derive from a claim to represent a specific 'community' or organization, from demonstrated commitment to a cause, from being accredited by the media or from authorship of a well-known book, etc. Nancy Naples (1998a) discusses the mentoring of potential leaders, with 'old hands' proposing them as speakers, encouraging them to put themselves forward for particular positions, introducing them to informal networks of activists, apprenticing them, giving them 'the real story' behind given conflicts, interpreting statements for them and so forth. The birth of new movement organizations may provide opportunities for individuals who were excluded from leadership in older ones: Ella Baker played foundational role in SNCC after battling against the practical sexism of the Baptist ministers who headed the SCLC; militant shop stewards may play powerful roles in 'unofficial' union movements in opposition to existing union bureaucracies.

./english/282.txt:236:The Anarchist FAQ, in fact, goes rather beyond this. Its primary location is not a newsgroup but a website, and printed versions are sold by anarchist groups and distributed by anarchist publishing networks. Rather than introduce people to a mailing list, it introduces people to anarchism. The document itself is produced (it is in constant development) by a number of reasonably well-known anarchist activists.

./english/283.txt:28:In other words, for those of us attempting to utilise and practice academic/teaching/writing/theory spaces as spaces for radical and critical engagement, these in themselves constitute activist practice. But distance from this view was apparent from the comment, midway through this particular meeting, that ‘we’ve hardly talked about activism at all’! In return, several people articulated their problems with a sense of the moral burden and high ground assumed by ‘activists’. This generates insecurity about being ‘hardcore’ enough in relation to the ‘hierarchies’ of activist engagement. Some also felt that the moral high ground assumed by some activists can become a mask for other problematic behaviours (as someone said, ‘I know a fuck load of activists who are assholes’; obviously, the same is true for academics … ). Plus, as commented on in relation to Reclaim The Streets, people become involved with activist groups and networks for a whole host of reasons (social contact, desire for community, something to do, a space for the expressing of anger with multiple causes .. etc. ). Thus it might be problematic to privilege the moral as driving and explaining peoples’ (including our own) activist engagements over other reasons.

./english/284.txt:95:This historical conjuncture forces the discipline to rethink itself again. Spatial reflexivity and global awareness lead to a recognition that the anthropologist is connected as well, not isolated but part of larger global flows. For example, fieldwork could be rethought not as a remote or distinct place, but as an interconnected network of spaces in which the anthropologist is a node, listening to and speaking with the set of participants in a kind of a ‘networked ethnography’.

./english/284.txt:96:A similar sense of being translocal and internationally-connected is shared by global justice movements. Part of the strength of this global network of local struggles comes from highlighting spatial thinking and developing global consciousness amongst diverse communities. Popular slogans that stress this linking are, for example: “we are everywhere” or “our resistance is as global as capital”. Gupta and Ferguson make reference to a transnational public sphere and the creation of forms of solidarity and identity based on this reconceptualization of space, and a more connected reterritorialized experience (1997: 68). The complex interrelations between the ‘globals’ and ‘locals’ has become not only an interesting intellectual exercise but a key project in developing effective political praxis. How exchanges might flow (of information, experiences, ‘technology’, etc.) along multiple axes between ‘historically inteconnected’ places, is then an important point of reflexivity for the ‘globalized and globalizing’ anthropologist.

./english/284.txt:100:This paper is a work in process. As a follow up on my second essay “Can the Activist Speak in the Academy? Decentering the Politics of Representation” and embracing the feedback provided, this paper attempts to respond to the question of ‘why Anthropology’ (and other disciplines) –is being perceived as a friendly ally by some current global justice activists [3]. This review of two theoretical pieces and a chapter of ethnography can give us a glimpse. The argument is that reflexivity offers a great tool of resistance contributing radical epistemologies, horizontally empowering practices, and networked awareness of global interconnectivity. Reflexive thinking and action can engage in a de-centered, horizontal and networked way with spaces of resistance, and at the same time making ethnographic practice a locus of antagonistic production of knowledge.

./english/290.txt:77:In second place, the externalization of the home: many of the tasks that were previously conducted in the home now are resolved in the market and many of the qualities of labor in the home today impregnate, in functionalized fashion, the city-firm. The establishment of fast food and pre-cooked meals replaces the hands of the mother that, with the help of the children, managed to have the food ready for when the men of the house returned after their workday; the contracting of other women (frequently women from the countries of the East or the South of the world and, in general, with interminable work days and very low salaries[13]) become a generalized resource that contributes to alleviating the burden of domestic work and to making women compatible with other employees outside the home, at the same time that they maintain an affective South-North passage spurred on by the crisis of the sustainability of life in many countries of the South; the extreme cheapening of clothing thanks to the delocalization of the textile industries to countries where the costs of production as much lower (and levels of exploitation much higher) eliminates the need for weaving, sewing, and darning at home; the golden telephone gives conversation and consultation against loneliness to grandmothers whose children are not able to cope with the many tasks and the multiple places they have to be; the traditional capacities of the housewife (harmonizing counterposed interests, intuiting desires, attending to distinct necessities, resolving others' problems...) are transferred to the firm and unfold their virtuosity in order to make an environment seem natural and fluid, an increasingly networked environment, that in another fashion would breakdown or explode... the examples can be extended ad nauseum, the case is all of that configurates what Donna Haraway has called the household economy outside of the home.[14] But make no mistake, this externalization of the home does not presuppose that the labor of care has been completely absorbed by the market. Its coordination to assure the sustainability of life and a good part of the concrete tasks continual falling primarily in a gratuitous fashion on the minds and hearts of women and on the networks that they are capable of creating, even if not in the seclusion of the private, but within an intricate network that traverses homes, spheres and countries, and, on occasion, has the telephone line and modem as its principle supports.

./english/290.txt:93:The present context is marked by the conjunction of macropolitics of security and their everyday correlate, the micropolitics of fear. At the grand scale we observe how the western governments justify the application of these securitary policies as a response to the present geopolitical configuration, strongly marked by the "terrorist threat". These macropolitics articulate themselves day to day with the micropolitics of fear, directly related to the deregularization of the labor market and the instability that this generates. Simultaneously, consumption tries to impose itself as the sole remnant of public activity and public spaces organized around other axes disappear. The securitary triumphs as a way of taking charge of bodies and filtering them into the distinct strata of our societies. In this context of uncertainty and deterritorialization, precarity is not only a characteristic of the poorest workers. Today we can speak of a precarization of existence in order to refer to a tendency that traverses all of society, which feeds and feeds upon the climate of instability and fear. Precarity functions as a blackmail, because we are susceptible to losing our jobs tomorrow even though we have indefinite contracts, because hiring, mortgages, and prices in general go up but our wages don't, because social networks are very deteriorated and the construction of community today is a complicated task, because we don't know who will care for us tomorrow... The logic of security founds itself in fear, concretizes itself in practices of containment, and generates isolation that persists in present social problems as individual ones. Practices of containment the subjects that need care and rights either into poor victims or into subjects dangerous for the rest of

./english/291.txt:37:Network-Society

./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/291.txt:45:The paradox of these transformations resides, however, in that these relational and communicative capacities that are in the center of the present economy never pertain to an isolated worker, but rather are inscribed (they form and recreate) in the concrete social fabric, which each worker forms a part of. On the other hand, in this networked context, the consumer/spectator/citizen works when they select one product in place of another, one program in place of another, on candidate in place of the other. And subaltern communities work when they invent a new mode of wearing their pants (even if it is because of a lack of money) that later a cool-hunter sells to a multinational fashion firm. The blackmail, however, is rooted precisely in that, even though work takes place in common, retribution continues to be individual and, at bottom, profoundly arbitrary.

./english/291.txt:55:Precarization affects all of us, and however, axes of stratification traverse it. Axes that have to do with gender, ethnicity, age, and with other things. In the first place, with the resources monetary (patrimony) and cognitive (education) that we count on. In second place, with the networks of contacts and of support in which we participate, in order confront unforeseen events, in order to ease uncertainty. In third place, with the capacity for mobility: just as with businesses, the more mobile we are the more possibilities we will have to take advantage of comparative advantages in changing from one position to another, but it's trouble for us, if - due to physical or mental condition, dependents that we care for, lack of material or cognitive resources or roots - we don't know to move at the exact moment, like a lightning bolt! Finally, the degree of precarization has to do with our place of origin and our legal situation: those who have come to Europe from the East and the South of the world in search of a better life, fleeing from situations of exploitation and/or oppression, not only have to cross ever more militarized borders, but also traverse a veritable legal obstacle course (from their status of being "without papers", that is to say, without rights, to achieving full citizenship) imposed by the European policies of immigration control.

./english/291.txt:67:Once precarity became a key word for explaining our existence in post modernity and the tensions that traverse it, typologies also began to spring up, that attempted to establish some type of coherence within the galaxy of atypical laboral figures in precarious conditions. One of them, perhaps the most well heard, is that enunciated by the Milanese "chainworkers" (www.chainworkers.org) and, more recently, the Italian pre-cog network - under this perspective, there existed three key figures within the condition of precarity: on one side, the "chainworkers" (or properly precarious), that is to say, all those atypical workers contracted in services and the fordist chains of the commercial public and private tertiary sector, as with flexible material production, who live in conditions of continual blackmail imposed by uncertainty due to the changes in the work contract; on the other side, the "brainworkers" or cognitarios, that is to say, all those that, with low salaries and ever longer work hours, loan their knowledges to the firms of immaterial labor (programming, semiotic production, relational activities, logistics, etc); finally, immigrants, that is, subject to whom the European immigration policies force into totally deregulated frequently illegal and probably informal labor relations, and which constitute, as such, the extreme figure of precarity.

./english/291.txt:79:However, one and the other typology shares a same problem: the location of the point of view exclusively in the laboral terrain turns our perspective myopic to the micro and macro conflictivities that are given in and against the precarization of existence in the passage between work and non-work, generating short circuits in the intricate system of connections of the network society.

./english/291.txt:153:From here arises the need to turn this situation around, in the sense of demanding securities and rights in the bosom of flexibility. It would be a matter of demanding and constructing flexicurity, as a contribution to a sort of new welfare state for intermitency. The dispositifs and demands are multiple: assure the access to knowledge generated by all, to housing, to real mobility (through free transportation and the abolition of migration regulations), to health and to care; generate a universal basic income that ends with the economic overturning of the bipolarity of temporary workers, a regularity in their incomes that would give them negotiating power when they accede to a remunerated job and when they refuse to accept determined laboral conditions and that permits the organization of strong networks of resistance in the times of non-work; to study the creation of new labor rights that respond to the new realities of temporary workers and would be aimed at avoiding the new forms of abuse due to this condition and to recognizes the wisdom and dexterity acquired across the length and width of these labor and vital trajectories enriched by mobility (changes of activity, of country, continuous education).

./english/291.txt:217:Propensity to create networks generative of community.

./english/292.txt:47:We want to note two ideas that network within the mechanisms of

./english/293.txt:105:The ‘drift’ or derive, is a tactic which some of us had already experienced in other research contexts[8] whose basic source is the Situationists,[9] and which has not always been easy to explain. Nevertheless, the course of events has clarified, bit by bit, the logic of substituting static interviews for journeys through the city. When proposing the ‘drifts’ we particularly emphasized not only passing through the past and present workplaces of our guides but also the possibility of linking the spaces and, once on the road, to see what would come up. Thus we ended up including in our routes streets, houses, businesses, public transportation, supermarkets, bars, shops, union offices, health centers, etc. We opted for the method of the drift as a form of articulating this diffuse network of situations and experiences, producing a subjective cartography of the metropolis through our daily routes.

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

./english/293.txt:137:In all these wanderings we attempt to extract common names from this dispersion of singularities -each one unknown, even alien, to the others- which comprise the new reality of precarized work. We dream of substituting, albeit just a little, the weakness of dispersion for the strength of alliances, the potential of networks. But the difficulty of both objectives comes out during the drifts. The realities of precarious work are very, very different: the resources we can count on, the emotional and material support, the wages, the rights, the social value of what we do, the diversity of availabilities and sensibilities.

./english/293.txt:154:2) the dislocation of work times and spaces (with flexible hours, part time, at a distance, and in-household workshops), whose effects upon household units and networks of care remain still to be estimated;

./english/293.txt:365:Power is assumed, is made one’s own; one reproduces it in a pattern altered by the addition of each node in the network. Doctors do this under the pressure placed upon them by incentive systems and pharmaceutical companies, social workers do it harassed by lack of resources, telephone operators do it motivated by a difference in status, editors do it seduced by the sheen of public image, section bosses do it pressed by the responsibility of their belonging to a big firm. Emotional blackmail, immaterial privileges, ideas of solidarity and political ideals, intangible promises, potential promotions, the opportunities that they generate, the viable projects, psychological harassment and benefits which depend upon favors and compromises constitute an emotional grammar well studied in certain spheres such as the domestic, where to go to the doctor is always a concession which compels some compensation, translated into time or work or tribute. The radically feminine relations between the lady of the house and the domestic assistant are, in this sense, a complex asymmetrical game of mutual dependencies in which they negotiate the intimacy of care and cleaning, blame, responsibility, and the total dependency which is generated by organizing a life around others’ needs.

./english/293.txt:421:For us this investigation is, above all, a way of thinking together towards collective action, an effort to locate the scattered sites of conflict and know how to name them, to inaugurate other previously nonexistent ones along with those we already experience: in the process of job-seeking, in the job-interview (that grand machine of daily humiliation!), in networks, in shopping centers, on the telephone, in the park, in social centers… After this first cycle of drifts, whose itineraries and reflections we try to collect in this text from the June 20th strike to the more recent and frustrated strike against the war in Iraq on April 10th, we have thrown out two questions, in first and in second person: “What is your war? What is your strike?”.[36]

./english/298.txt:26:I think it would be good to start with the ‘big picture’, that is how the university is an open system opening onto the larger field of casualised and underpaid ‘socialised labour power’. The latter is also often referred to as ‘mass intellectuality’ or even networked intelligence (an abstract quality of social labour power as it becomes increasingly informational and communicative). I have been thinking about it in terms of the opening up of disciplinary institutions as described by Deleuze in his essay on control societies. I would like to move from the idea that the university is some kind of ivory tower or a self-enclosed institution whose current state and future concerns a minority of professionals to that of the university as part of the ‘diffuse factory’ as described in Autonomist work. I think that their description of a shift from a society where production takes place predominantly in the closed site of the factory to one where it is the whole of society that is turned into a factory – a productive site – is still very fitting politically. But in fact, the debate seems to be stuck in the false opposition between the static, sheltered ivory tower and the dynamic, democratic market.

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

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

./english/298.txt:143:TT: I don't know about 'tutelage' but I would definitely be for a greater effort to open up connections with other forms of labor on the basis of what academic labor shares with them (from the common plague of managerial command and its attack on the time of life to the common implication in the diffuse social factory). On the other hand, there is also a specific contribution that academic labor can provide. This specificity is part of its role as a key site in the production and reproduction of knowledges and forms of control (from policy-oriented social research to scientific patents and new technologies); in its contribution to the production of specific forms of labor directly implicated in the reproduction of the social (from doctors to computer scientists, from managers to artists and social workers); but also in its relation to a wider abstract social labour power (informated, affective and communicational), which exceeds the disciplinary power of the work/wage relation. As you said, a big part of the university's work is still institutional: reproducing hierarchical differences and producing docile subjects, so hacking the machine of social reproduction in Higher Ed is bound to be complicated work. I doubt whether a successful engagement with this process would produce another 1968 - the latter was still a revolt against the institutions, while we know now that power operates in and through networks. But it will definitely be a challenging process to be part of - requiring commitment and imagination.

./english/298.txt:160:Tiziana Terranova lectures in media, culture and film at the University of Essex. She is author of Network Culture: Cultural Politics and Cybernetic Communication (Pluto Press)

./english/299.txt:25:In the months that followed the ≥Grand Show≤ of December of 2002, we began to give shape to what all of us understood as a second phase in our exploration of womenπs precarious work. Some moved to other places and no longer shared the day to day of Precarias in Madrid, others joined the group or proposed particular initiatives: the publication of a text in a book or a web page, participation in a conference, collaboration in a video, or else accompanied us in organizing processes or in a mobilization.[1] This coming and going makes room for a mode of networked cooperation which is not so much about belonging, in this case to the group of Precarias, as it is about opening a field of communication and fluid action - sometimes perhaps too diffuse - which we hope will become a means of constructing a new space of aggregation: the Laboratory of Women Workers.

./english/299.txt:29:Our comings and goings had already illuminated a series of problems, as much on the theoretical level ≠ the concept itself of precariousness, for example ≠ and on the methodological level ≠ how shall we approach each other? How, being sometimes so close and sometimes so far? ≠ as in the question of how to generate conflict in environments which are invisible, fragile, privateä or in environments which are more or less codified, such as the ones that opened up in the heat of the mobilizations during the invasion of Iraq[2]ä or in diffuse environments like shopping malls, department stores, public transportation, etc. We had important testimonies, many of them recorded and transcribed, and we had generated a series of tools, modest though they may be, such as the picket-survey, the Precarias mailing list, the accounts from the field and, in general, a practice of meticulous documentation with the intention of preserving and giving form to our reflections and our itineraries. The experiential knowledge that we proposed through the ådriftsπ had set us on track and had permitted us to expand our point of view almost vertiginously. On the other hand, the consolidation of the network of contacts that had formed around the project of the drifts and the invitation to strike ≠ the proto- Laboratory of Women Workers ≠ was still in the bud, as were many of the utterances, slogans and hypotheses that we hoped to produce. A few important drifts, in particular that of media production and that of sex work still had not been undertaken for various reasons, and we did not want to leave them up in the air.

./english/299.txt:161:What is clear is that these fantasies ≠ be they of equality or domination/submission ≠ are produced in the context of a social system that is hierarchalized in accord with certain axes, which we have tried in various ways to define. The resulting stratification takes into consideration (1) the work regime (coerced, indentured, paid without debts and autonomous); (2) social, labor and geographic mobility; (3) the degree of exposure of the body (direct in the case of prostitution, semi-direct in massage, or indirect in peep shows and telephone lines); and (4) the organization of work (in flexible and networked enterprises like the chatlines or the larger brothels, or familiar structures like those of some other brothels, autonomy as in the case of some prostitutes, mafia systems, etc.). If we cross these categories of position and regime we have a fairly complex map of axes.

./english/299.txt:307:We take the public transport with Angela and Monica to the Spanish National Television and Radio, with its ministerial hallways from another era, nothing to do with the studios weπve seen in Hollywood movies; we move through the network visiting various little companies in the audiovisual sector, the kind of places where Alejandra has been working and which have given her little leeway to act; we sneak into the central building of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a leading company to chat with Carolina about the backstage of mainstream cinema. On the way home we stopped for a beer to think over all this production of signs but ended up trapped in a conversation with a fan about how Jennifer LÛpez works making beds in a luxury hotel in Manhattan and meets an aggressive executive while disguised as a grand dame and so on and so forth.

./english/299.txt:315:In our first stutterings we made a survey of these points: of the working conditions in small new networked companies, in which it is not a question of major companies externalizing and contracting other companies but rather of major companies directly converting their former departments into subsidiaries, and thus liberating themselves from the obligation to respect labor agreements. We have also talked about the maximization of knowledge, affective resources and - in the case of the media, publicity and culture industry more than anywhere ≠ of connectivity, without this translating into income or stability. We have talked about other types of contracts which predominate at the lowest levels: internships, practica, contracts by job or no contract at all. And we have discussed the flexibility of schedules, the meager salaries and rights, the lack of delimitation of tasks, the polyvalence, the diffuse hierarchies oriented to promote self regulation, etc.[46]

./english/299.txt:331:≥In a reticulated world, social life is composed of the successive multiplication of encounters and connections with diverse groups. The encounters are temporary but can be reactivated, and are realized occasionally at great social, professional, geographical and cultural distances. The project is the occasion and the pretext for the connection, temporarily uniting dissimilar people and presenting itself as a strongly activated extremity of the network during a relatively short period of time, but which permits the forging of more enduring links which, although they remain inactive for a while, will always be available.≤ (p.155, El nuevo espiritu del capitalismo, Madrid, Akal, 2002)

./english/300.txt:24:The convulsions and mobilization sweeping through entire societies did not pass over geographers of course. “Inevitably, a number of geographers were drawn into the struggle, and we brought our scientific tool bags with us,” (Blaut 1979). A call for the ‘relevancy’ of geographical work towards addressing social problems began to be circulated (Peet 1977; p. 11). Localized responses to and experiences with these social struggles on the part of geographers, especially in the US and Canada, began to seriously connect and network after the 1969 meeting off the AAG. “It was at the Ann Arbor meeting of the A.A.G., in 1969, that most of these local movements- including the Detroit Geographical Expedition and the Antipode group at Clark University- suddenly became aware of one another’s existence, and it was at these meetings that the radical movement congealed and the radical tradition was born,” (Blaut 1979; p. 160).

./english/300.txt:76:Conversely geographers will need to recognize and engage with the elaborate amount of geographic thinking and analysis occurring within the movements of global resistance. A veritable potpourri of spatial practices and metaphors occupies many movement collectives’ imaginaries: the analysis of the links between the global and the local (as well as the regional and national) and the different sorts of political strategy necessary at each scale are often debated within movement groupings; the idea of ‘reclaiming’ is one that permeates much thinking within the movement-whether the reclaiming of concrete places (squatters’ movements) or reclaiming landscapes (such as Reclaim The Streets actions); the existence of groups with explicit names such as the Department of Land and Space Reclamation which is utilizing Lefebvrian thought on the creation of space and is now toying with uses of GIS to map corporate power in Chicago [2] ; the creation of ‘maps’ of networked power structures at a global scale to complement cognitive mapping practices and begin to visualize that global scale (Holmes 2003).

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

./english/302.txt:55:So what are we calling for? How do we begin to construct this agency? First of all we would like to invite you to think about how to get this space working in order to give free rein to the ³instinct²: its pieces, its relationship with other organizational tools and knowledge, its imagination, its relationship with other networks and alliances, its material means, its communicative capacityŠ We part from the idea that we are all Œexperts¹ in our own existence, that we have all already developed precarious resources to confront conflicts and to get by, one way or the other, in daily life: shared care-work, sporadic labor protests, health advice, information, legal juggling acts, etc. Some of you, moreover, know well the ins and outs of this or that specific field: the legal system, the health care system, social work, nursing, communication, pleasureŠ Many of you know these fields and feel dissatisfied because they are embedded within institutional logics which domesticate them and impede criticism and contamination. So this is an invitation to produce an estrangement, to think about how to do things in a different way, with different premises and, above all, for other ends. Consider yourselves invited to this first phase, which will consist of a few encounters, first to present the project and then to share ideas and to get the structure of the agency working. Many of you are very busy but we think the gamble is worth it. There is not just one rhythm of participation, together we can invent different forms of participation. The space, the Eskalera Karakola (www.sindominio.net/karakola) in its new location at Embajadores 52 will soon be ready. If you can¹t come to the center we invite you to share your proposals and your concerns through our email: precariasaladeriva@sindominio.net

./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:20:In order to grasp the concrete logic that generates specific practices, researchers have to become active participants. With respect to social movements, this means precisely becoming engaged activists: helping to organize actions and workshops, facilitating meetings, weighing in during strategic and tactical debates, staking out political positions, and putting ones’ body on the line during mass direct actions. Simply taking on the role of “circumstantial activist” (Marcus 1995) is not sufficient; one has to build long-term relationships of mutual commitment and trust, become entangled with complex relations of power, and live the emotions associated with direct action organizing and transnational networking.

./english/303.txt:26:Beyond the purely cognitive dimension, militant ethnography also generates practical embodied and affective understanding. As anyone who has participated in a mass direct action can attest, these events generate extremely high levels of emotional energy, involving alternating sensations of tension, anxiety, fear, terror, collective solidarity, expectation, celebration, and joy. Such affective dynamics are not incidental; they are central to sustained processes of movement building and activist networking. In this sense, the ethnographer’s body actually becomes a research tool (cf. Parr 2001). Indeed, as Margaret Meade once pointed out, “In matters of ethos, the surest and most perfect instrument of understanding is our own emotional response, produced that we can make a disciplined use of it (cited in Jacknis 1988: 172).”

./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:35:The most troubling aspect for Ricardo was that the GSF had not created any channels of communication with the militant anarchists, largely due to the Forum’s strict “non-violence” stance. The dominant political forces within the GSF- the White Overalls, NGOs, ATTAC, radical labor unions and Refundazione, the reformulated Communist party- were characterized by autonomous Marxist, socialist, and social-democratic perspectives and the use of strictly non-violent tactics. On the other hand, the guiding political ethos among decentralized grassroots networks like PGA or MRG is broadly anarchist, at least in the sense of horizontal networking and coordination among diverse autonomous groups. This networking logic also holds for the question of violence versus non-violence, where a “diversity of tactics” position generally prevails. For radical anti-capitalists like Ricardo, even those who would never engage in violent tactics, the important thing is to establish dialogue and coordination among all groups, regardless of the tactics they choose. The strict non-violence position of the GSF, along with their perceived unwillingness to communicate with groups outside their direct action guidelines, was thus perceived as a major obstacle to overcome through the mediation of the radical internationals.

./english/303.txt:37:Over the next week I became deeply embroiled in the complex discussions, debates, and negotiations that ultimately led to the creation of the Pink and Pink & Silver contingents during the main days of action, building on our previous experiences in Prague. Not only did we have to generate consensus regarding the wisdom of joining the more militant squatters, whether self-defense constituted an acceptable response to police provocation, or the specific protest route to follow, we also had to negotiate with the GSF and other international networks in order to carve out sufficient space for our action within an increasingly crowded urban terrain involving diverse tactical forms, such as white overalls, black block, festive pink block, and traditional Ghandian civil disobedience.

./english/303.txt:39:There is insufficient time here for a full ethnographic account of the space of terror that subsequently emerged in Genoa (see Juris 2004). Rather, I want to simply point out that it was only by becoming deeply involved in the direct action planning process, which at times meant positioning myself at the center of extremely intense and sometimes personalized debates, that I could fully appreciate the complexity and logic of direct action planning and the accompanying fear, passion, and exhilaration. Moreover, it was only through engaged participation that I began to realize how diverse activist networks physically express their contrasting political visions and identities through alternative forms of direct action. Tactical debates were thus about much more than logistical coordination; they embodied the broader cultural politics that are so important to activist networking and movement building. Learning how to successfully negotiate differences on the tactical plane would thus serve to help build more sustainable networks more generally.

./english/303.txt:41:At the same time, the overwhelming campaign of low-level state terror unleashed by the Italian state also points to some of the potential limitations of the “diversity of tactics” logic. If rather than dividing and conquering, the state pursues and indiscriminate strategy of physical repression it becomes impossible to safely divide up the urban terrain. In particular contexts, such as the upcoming RNC protests in New York, for example, it might make sense to actively dissuade other activists from using militant black block styles and tactics. However, blanked condemnations of protests “violence,” including the widely circulated statements by Susan George after Gothenburg and Genoa, are not likely to produce the desired effect largely because they violate the basic networking logic at the heart of contemporary anti-corporate globalization movements. Rather, it I sonly through dialogue and immanent critique based on solidarity and respect that such contentious issues can be resolved. At its best, militant ethnography can thus provide a mechanism for shedding light on contemporary networking logics and politics, while also making effective interventions into ongoing activist debates.

./english/303.txt: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:60:For Burdick, this means supporting movements in their efforts to reach out to a broader public. But it might also suggest working with activists to help them analyze different movement sectors, understand how they operate, their goals and visions, and how they can most effectively work together. In my own case, for example, I spent hours talking to MRG-based colleagues about diverse movement sectors in Barcelona and elsewhere and how they might best coordinate through flexible, decentralized structures. We held similar conversations about regional and global networking processes. In this sense, transnational activist networking always already involves a form of militant ethnography, while militant ethnography among contemporary local/global movements necessarily requires the practices of transnational networking.

./english/303.txt:63:1) collective reflection and visioning about movement practices, logics, and emerging cultural and political models; 2) collective analysis of broader social processes and power relations that affect strategic and tactical decision-making; and 3) collective ethnographic reflection about diverse movement networks, how they interact, and how they might better relate to broader constituencies. Each of these levels involves engaged, practice-based, and politically committed research that is carried out in horizontal collaboration with social movements. Resulting accounts involve particular interpretations of events produced with the practical and theoretical tools at the ethnographer’s disposal, and offered back to activists, scholars, and others for further reflection and debate.

./english/303.txt:67:Finally, the question remains as to the most appropriate context for practicing militant ethnography and how to distribute the results. One obvious place is the academy, which despite increasing corporate influence and institutional constraints, continues to offer a critical space for collective discussion, learning, and debate. Indeed, as Scheper-Hughes (1995) suggests, those of us within the academy can use academic writing and publishing as a form of resistance, working within the system to generate alternative politically engaged accounts. Moreover, as Routledge (1996: 400) points out, there are no “pure” or “authentic” sites, as academia and activism both “constitute fluid fields of social action that are interwoven with other activity spaces.” Routledge thus posits an alternative “third space,” “where neither site, role, or representation holds sway, where one continually subverts the other.” The more utopian alternative is suggested by the rise of multiple networks of autonomous research collectives and free university projects, including the “activist research” conference cited above. In my own case, by examining the cultural logics, networking activities, and utopian imaginaries within contemporary anti-corporate globalization movements, I hope to contribute to both academic and activist spheres through exploring, as the Argentine Colectivo Situaciones puts it, “the emerging clues of a new sociability within concrete practices (2001: 39).”

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

./english/306.txt:53:The Karakola has housed projects investigating the working conditions and urban experience of migrant women, debates about the transformations of the LGBT movement, lesbian marriage and the ‘pink market’, discussions about the feminist grounding for antimilitarist interventions. We have introduced the workshop ‘Tools against Racism’ into local social movements, encouraging ourselves to constantly investigate our own discourses. We have initiated an ongoing campaign against violence against women which insists upon looking at the many and complex ways in which ‘violence’ and ‘security’ are constructed. We participate in a neighborhood network proposing socially inclusive urbanistic alternatives to the ‘rehabilitation’ currently under way. We have participated actively and critically in the lock-ins of ‘sin papeles’ in Madrid. These and hundreds of other investigations, mobilizations, discussions and publications have arisen from the crucible that is the Karakola. We insist that all these apparently diverse concerns are intimately related, and we attempt to trace the lines of their relationship, articulating them within the feminist and the global resistance movements, refusing to separate the academic from the activist, the local struggle from the global context.

./english/306.txt:71:And why do we insist that there be a space only for women? One response is that it brings us joy, strength and inspiration to be, create, speak among ourselves: we are comfortable, which is important in an often unfriendly world. But that’s not the whole story. We are also restless, agitated, upset. We fight our bid for collectivity, its difficulties and its limits. We stretch ourselves, mobilizing and pushing ourselves, daring ourselves to share our concerns and express our desires. We are many, different, each one with her story; the alliance is neither natural nor a priori but rather a continuous process of recognition and communication into which we launch ourselves again and again, committed to a strategy of uniting ourselves.To maintain a space where women can cultivate this kind of alliance is necessary because the general lack of meeting spaces is especially acute in the case of women, who either because we are between several precarious jobs or because we are confined to our houses and domestic tasks, because we feel threatened in the street or because we are marginalized within political organizations, have fewer opportunities to create the networks of support and solidarity which we need. It permits us a space from which to think through the multiple singularities of our lives, to create strategies and tools to politicize them, to explore new ways to express ourselves and relate to each other. A space for women is a deliberate space, a space which, because it situates itself outside the ‘normal,’ may function as a laboratory of social, political and artistic relationships.

./english/306.txt:75:Many projects of investigation and feminist study meet in the Eskalera Karakola. The house’s unique position as a self-managed feminist space makes it an important convergence point between the feminist movement and feminist thought, which in other environments are often divorced from each other by institutional policies which habitually separate the ‘active’ from the ‘reflective.’ The breadth and flexibility which self-management permits has also permitted stunningly diverse projects to arise out of the Karakola, and has permitted the cultivation of far-flung networks of feminist cooperation. The capacity to fit all these projects and concerns under one roof has produced a rich process of recombination and mutual feedback which transforms and strengthens all. This flux of knowledges, this collectivity of abilities determines the projects which arise from the Karakola and the political forms in which they take to the street.

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

./english/306.txt:311:c) And last, how to be able to effect real displacements and shifts in the very matrix of power. On the one hand, as we have noted, it is of crucial importance to address the issue of normalization or standarization upon which capital is nourished, visibilizing the new borders of exclusion and marginality. We need a political imagination beyond normalization, capable of articulating speech not from an alien "outside". On the other hand we must conceive ourselves as situated, colonized, power-saturated subjects able to provoke real break-downs and destabilizations from there. In this sense we know that such break-downs, with their emphasis on the body and the quotidian at the centre cannot depend upon individual, isolated choices; they require a collective prectice. The point for us is how to generate real collective agency inscribed in daily practices which do not suppress differences but are able to deconstruct and dislocate processes of normalization. How to build up a discourse that, from a sense of partiality, of the local and the fragmentary, can account for the multiple conections of the new global network.

./english/307.txt:2:TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction The Name and the Thing What is and isn’t the Popular University of Social Movements (PUSM)? Rationale Activities 1- Pedagogical Activities 2- Activities towards Research/Action for Change 3- Activities towards Spreading Translation Capabilities and Tools Organization 1- PUSM-Headquarters 2- PUSM-Network Experimental Phase 2

./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:13:Activists/leaders in particular will discuss and reflect on the basis of their practices. In addition to their role as discussion facilitators, social scientists/scholar/artists will have the specific task of conveying the compared experience of movements and organizations that are not present, but have accumulated relevant knowledge. Participation of social scientists/scholars/artists from the South is particularly desirable, as in general they have more experience with articulating theory and practice. At the conclusion of the thematic phase, workshop participants will define by consensus a set of issues to be discussed with the other workshop (or workshops). The two (or more) sets of issues – one set for each thematic workshop – will be the basis for the inter-thematic phase of the workshops. At the conclusion of each workshop, a rapporteur chosen by the participants will present a detailed report on discussions and main conclusions. This report will be disseminated to all movements, associations, and social scientists/scholars/artists who have joined PUSM. Fellowships and grants will be available for movement leaders/activists and social scientists/scholars/artists unable to pay for their participation Activities of Research-Action for Social Transformation Besides being a network of plural knowledges, PUSM aims to be a network for the creation of plural knowledges. As the pedagogical activities evolve, themes and problems deemed relevant but as yet little known and understood will emerge. Workshop participants will be encouraged to identify these topics and problems, forwarding them to the Translation Coordination. The selected topics and problems will be researched by the PUSM Network in the light of various participatory methodologies (one such

./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/307.txt:19:The Executive Committee handles the administration of PUSM-Headquarters, prepares and manages the budget, and takes care of fund raising. PUSM-Headquarters will establish a relationship of privileged collaboration (namely as concerns training and rendering of services) with the organizations and movements of the city or region of its location. PUSM-Network PUSM-Network is comprised of the set of organizations and movements that adhere to PUSM’s Charter of Principles and Commitments, and engage significantly in any one of the three large kinds of activities that constitute PUSM. The Charter will be drafted by the NGOs/social movements that take responsibility for the foundation of the PUSM. Experimental Phase PUSM will have an experimental phase for the period of a year, at the term of which there will be an evaluation concerning its future. During this phase, PUSM will focus mainly on pedagogical activities. An estimate of the budget for this experimental phase is as follows:

./english/312.txt:4:A call for a European network of precarious/temporary researchers and for the free circulation of knowledge

./english/312.txt:14:Temporary researchers have thus given rise, in the last months, to a number of local committees within the framework of a ‘National Network of Precarious Researchers’ (the Rete Nazionale Ricercatori Precari), communicating through a web mailing-list and periodical meetings. The movement has made claims regarding essentially:

./english/312.txt:26:Second, the internationalisation of the higher education system proceeds relentlessly at the level of the European Union. This process takes place, on the one hand, through the increasing relevance of the European research projects and the emphasis laid on ‘networking’ amongst research centres and university departments at a supra-national level (cf. the periodical Framework Programmes; the Research Training Networks, the European doctorates etc.). Institutional collaboration is established among the abovementioned ‘centres of excellence’, while those that are excluded from these networks are considered as ‘marginal’ or, simply, the ‘Others’. On the other hand, the Europeanisation of the higher education system takes place through a more intense co-operation amongst national governments in the realm of higher education policies (see the inter-governmental conferences held in Paris, Prague and Bologna since 1998 onwards) . This co-operation has had particularly relevant effects on the standardisation of university degrees (i.e. the 3+2 degree and the ‘credit system’). These developments have strongly affected learning mechanisms in European universities, forcing university students to improve their productivity and to conform their personal attitudes and values to an increasingly ‘competitive environment’.

./english/312.txt:32:For all these reasons, we particularly feel the urgency of creating a European Network of Precarious/Temporary Researchers. A network of this kind would be committed:

./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:51:Their aim is to endow the archiving and researching techniques on the service of the process of social mobilization and social change. There is not an homogeneous and/or establish concept to define this searchers area and experience being developed. A “network” of concepts that grown together around are archiving, documenting, reporting, memory, systematizing, summarizing, investigaction, research from/for social movements and activist research.

./english/313.txt:59:The systematizes/memory groups are addressing various aspects of the Social Forum. With a very simple or in occasion’s fictitious distinction, there are two kinds of information systematization and knowledge production that are considered needed: one is related to the networking organisational aspect, the other is content aspect. This difference doesn’t have necessarily to correspond with the difference establish between “live memory or systematizaction” and as opposite, I guess, “not alive memory”.

./english/313.txt:61:The networking organizational aspects gives an understanding of the kind and reach of movements that are involved with the SF process; what kind of organisations participated in the forum: thematically, regionally and size; to which direction is the process growing throw evolution analysis; which kind of connectivity the Forum created; kinds of participation etc., and it is focus on developing useful networking tools, to reinforce the Forum dimension of “weave” social network.

./english/313.txt:64:Both, sharing experiences and critiques of neo-liberal globalisation is as important as organising striking power against it or organising throw a “reinvented” power distribution. And of course networking aspect contains contents and the contents show how we organize.

./english/313.txt:65:I will come back later to the first aspect, networking organisational aspect, presenting a concrete experience facing it, Guide for social transformation in Europe: ESF and surroundings.

./english/313.txt:70:Networking organisational aspects: Systematize information to build useful tools: Doing operative the knowledge already driving on the social networks, to potenciate them and to articulate them with the practices.

./english/313.txt:78:The Guide core is build useful “networking tools” such as a Directory and addresses of the collectives and organisations which have participated to the ESFs of Florence, Paris, London, organized by ambits of actuation and regions and a Map of the European networks developed within and around the ESF process. The level of utility could be defining as the capacity to grown the identification of actors and resources for the action and reflection for social transformation of the use-builders of the Guide.

./english/313.txt:79:It also aimed to reinforce the action research/investigaction as a new antagonistic commitment through finalised to the creation of a confluence space for common action of the activist research/investigaction within the social movements at the European level. For this reason it will be curried out by a network of groups and centres of research, the Action research network for the ESF confluence process, which develop the research. The Guide will also contain a specific Map/directory of groups which are producing research within and around the new movements in Europe.

./english/313.txt:89:It is a tool in the service first of all of the ESF confluence process: helping the self-organization of the ESF themselves as well as the creation of European and transnational networks. It mean to produce knowledge and more self-consciousness among the protagonists of the ESF process; and more focused actions and strategies for the future.

./english/313.txt:91:In a process of collective creation, it is nurtured by a spirit of experimentation and cooperation through an open network structure. The Guide is developed from a network of very politically and organizationally diverse nodes, such us, social movements internal research groups (Transform¡ Italia, Transnational Institute, Glocal a-research centre) or organizations of the social movements (ARCI, EYFA, UNITED for Intercultural Action), collaboration of academic departments/centres (The Centre for the Study of Global Governance- LSE), hackers support teams (Pangea), civil society institutions (IISH - International Institute of Social History) and a cluster of 40 advisers. With the collaborative interaction and recognition of the internal SF working groups, mentioned above.

./english/313.txt:92:The research is developed like an effective procedure. Its development is in itself already a result for example in weave network or harnessing a new antagonist subjectivity.

./english/313.txt:101:A creative line is the collective construction of cartography maps “a caballo” of process of social mobilisation. Some examples are the maps of Bureua d’Etudes and the University Tangente about multinational networks, the bonairence Grup of street art about resistance, the map against/about the Forum of the cultures (but not against the War) of Barcelona or the map of conflicts in metropolitan territory of Rome done by Transform! Italia (publish us: “La riva sinistra del Tevere” by Carta).

./english/313.txt:143:As I present the text, this article tries to present the first line coming from an approach willing of mapping/cartography the fertile space crossing political and investigation, theory and practice, an initiative being develop on the “Action research network for the ESF process” framework, present and INVITE to participate on the reflection. To know better the possibility of a political action by research and to develop a useful tool to help to develop it.

./english/313.txt:163:Prabir Purkayastha, All India Peoples Science Network and WSF India. WSF Memory Seminar: WSF 2004 Mumbai Experience http://www.wsfindia.org

./english/313.txt:185:Glocal a-research centre, Barcelona – Action research network for the ESF process.

./english/315.txt:11:As part of the European Social Forum, we hope to establish an international network of intellectuals/activists who are interested in the relationship between new theories and new forms of politics. How can we move beyond a simplistic opposition to representative politics? How can the network form contaminate the institutional spaces in which a vast number of people live and work? How can we relate the analysis of new forms of power with experimentation in political practice?

./english/315.txt:33:Theorising/engendering radical structures/organisations: complexity, nested systems, scale, weak ties, networks, flattened hierarchies, decentralised structures, fluidity and crystallisation, unfolding, moving beyond

./english/315.txt:35:Network of networks

./english/315.txt:69:The workshop also provided a space for networking and connecting with other theory/practice, scholar/activist, ideas/action initiatives in which people are already participating:

./english/315.txt:71:Planetary Anarchist Network

./english/316.txt:13:The WSF – promoted by an identifiable group of Brazilian, French and other, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), trade unions and individuals – is itself linked organically to the more general movement. This is through an informal Forum event, known as the ‘Call of Social Movements’. This has been attended, and its regular declarations signed, by many WSF participant bodies. The Call formalised itself between WSF2-3 with a Social Movements International Secretatriat. But this body, or tendency, is a matter of discomfort for those within the WSF who want to see the Forum as a ‘space’ rather than a ‘movement’. (Social Movements World Network website, Vargas 2003, Whitaker 2003, World Social Forum website,).

./english/316.txt:15:As for the ‘Global Justice and Solidarity Movement’ (GJ&SM), this is actually a name proposed by the Call, for the general wave of protest against corporate-dominated globalisation, against US-sponsored neo-liberalism/neo-conservatism and war, one name for the new wave of radical-democratic protest and counter-proposition. This ‘movement of movements’ is marked by its network form and communicational activity, a matter recognised by friends and enemies alike (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, Cleaver 1998, Escobar 2003, Klein 2001). Morever, ‘it’ seems to change size, shape, reach, scale, target and aims according to events. So, at one moment it might be focussed against neo-liberal economic globalisation, at another against the US-led war on Iraq. This makes it even more challenging to analyse than to name.

./english/316.txt:20:It is not a ‘transnational advocacy network’ (Keck and Sikkink 1998), though it is much marked by the presence of inter/national NGOs;

./english/316.txt:112:Given their low-level of institutionalisation, and of the conventional quest for political power, both the WSF and the GJ&SM have to be considered in cultural/ communicational terms. But, whereas the movement’s protest events have been dramatically networked, and concerned with mass-media and alternative-media address, those of proposition, such as the WSF, have been rather less so, relying on such traditional (new) left forms as the panel and the demonstration. A path-breaking exception here has been, however, the anti-fundamentalist and anti-war masks, videos, posters and hoardings of the feminist Marcosur group at WSF 2 and 3 (Articulación Feminista Marcosur website).

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

./english/323.txt:2:A reflection on feminist practices from the NextGENDERation network1

./english/323.txt:6:theory’, as it took place on the mailing list of the NextGENDERation–a European network of students

./english/323.txt:23:project of setting up a network of women’s studies students.2 NextGENDERation became the

./english/323.txt:24:name of a network of students and researchers with an interest in women’s studies, gender

./english/323.txt:25:studies, or feminist theory, both located in and outside of academia. As the network was

./english/323.txt:32:2 From the very beginning of the network, ‘women studies’ was understood in its generic sense, referring to

./english/323.txt:187:As the NextGENDERation network developed over the years, the virtual interactions

./english/323.txt:189:network, in different contexts, ranging from informal meetings in homes, cafés, and the

./english/323.txt:193:how the notion of generation in the context of our network had much less to do with age, than

./english/323.txt:204:micropolitics. This coincided with a process of politicisation of the network that, at its outset,

./english/323.txt:207:What has increasingly led our engagement in the network, is the feeding or

./english/323.txt:249:DeriveApprodi 22. She is part of the NextGENDERation network and one of the organizers of the

./english/323.txt:256:literary journal Yang. She's a member of various feminist groups and networks, such as the autonomous

./english/323.txt:257:feminist research collective AFOK in Belgium and the NextGENDERation network, and was one of the

./english/325.txt:20:The Dutch squatters movement was a big movement between 1976 and 1984. Squatters were large in numbers and well organized into neighbourhood groups; they had political impact and staged spectacular riots and because of that, gained a lot of media attention. The squatters’ movement disappeared as a media event after 1984 (after the eviction of their biggest building Weyers), but the (legalized) squats and networks survived and turned out to be fertile soil for other initiatives and experimental ways of life (ibid: 95). Out of the squatters’ movement sprang ‘the’ movement: a network of squats, communally owned houses, food co-ops, Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS: doing ‘work’ for each other without money), music bands, festivals, action groups, research groups, mobile kitchens, groups helping refugees etc. Within this movement, a few thousand people are nowadays on the move in Holland. Some of them out of political motives, others because they want to live their life the way they want to. They want to express and realize their desires outside of the main ideology of the market and the state, their own ways of life and living together (ibid).

./english/325.txt:22:At the end of the 1980’s when the squatters movement was declared death by the media, another important change occurred: activists in ‘the’ movement explicitly rejected the idea of one shared ideal with one common political program, one shared utopia. Yet, like Lyotard has pleaded for, the desire to create something different here and now (White, 1991) still remains. There is an ongoing discussion about the necessity of creating an alternative economy, how life can be de-economized, how you can help other people and have a good life yourself, how the street can be used for more than just traffic, also for fun, dance, laughter, social contacts and love. Using the Do-it-Yourself (DiY)-culture of the punk movement, ‘the’ movement shows that everyone can make music, records, make ‘zines. Just do it. There are enough places to live in; you only have to occupy them. Today’s movement is relatively open and because of that it also lacks the pressure for uniformity what was characteristic of the squatters movement (also of the women’s and gay movements) before. In their network of friendships the contemporary squatters undermine the prevailing relations of production, society, politics, family, the body and sex. You can’t locate ‘the’ movement permanently, but it manifests itself in the occupation of public spaces that they temporarily give the meaning of non-commercialized meeting places. Lacking a single clear goal or program, we see a multitude of struggles.

./english/325.txt:24:As said, in the eighties the squatters’ movement not only became ‘the’ movement by the involvement of all kinds of networks, also a fierce feminist struggle took place. ‘In no other movement feminism has played such a big role as in the squatters movement’ (Huijsman, 1989, p. 221). Feminist activists organised themselves in autonomous women’s groups within the squatters’ movement; at the same time they criticized the male squatters continuously for their attitude and behaviour. ‘In the squatters’ movement the men in particular are changed by the feminist women’ (ibid, p. 250). In the journals of the squatters’ movement much was written about feminism, but the regular media didn’t give attention to this aspect of the movement. Therefore only a few people know that half of the squatters have been and are women. Like in feminism, in the squatters’ movement the slogan ‘the personal is political’ became central and also the notion ‘politics start in daily life’ (Kallenberg 2001, Van Tricht 1995). In this way the alternative, but mostly male squatters’ culture changed in a culture that was more open for other experiences in daily life.

./english/325.txt:87:-DiY-activism consists of networking and, because of that, of fluidity. John Jordan (2002) describes that what was emerging in the mid 90’s was a decentralized movement of movements held together by poetic stories and relationships, rather than programs and ideology, a complex web of inspirations rather than coordination. It is precisely the desire for self-organization and self-determination that is both means and ends of this movement of movements. The ideal is to be ungovernable.

./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:100:In this paper I have described how the squatters movement in Holland became ‘the’ movement in the eighties when they broadened their squat actions to other initiatives and experimental ways of life and when they rejected the idea of one shared ideal. It became a multitude of struggles in which the desire to create something different remained. In their network of friendships (affinity-politics) and their actions they show that the street can be used for more than just traffic, also for fun, dance, laughter, social contacts and love; with this they undermine the prevailing ideas of politics, family, the body and sex.

./english/332.txt:22:Of course they recognize the crisis of the ESF – who could deny it? But what do they propose to resolve this? The SWP thinks that the ESF was “too ambitious”, set itself targets that were too big. No, it was not ambitious enough. The ESF either has to become relevant to the struggles of ordinary people, to become an organising and networking centre for activists across the continent or stay as it is, organising occasional days of action but failing to connect them to the unions and mass organisations.

./english/337.txt:1:Attac European Network

./english/337.txt:15:First of all, we would like to stress the fact that we consider the ESF process to be one of the most important and indispensable spaces for European networking activities. The ESF process supports the building of a European space for « social movements ». In this space, our collective actors can exchange knowledge and weave links in order to elaborate alternatives to the neoliberal agenda. This space is also a privileged tool – not the only one - to build common mobilizations (G8, European Summit for 2007…). It stimulates the convergence of diversity. This process is clearly enriching for all of us (at least, for those of us who can directly take part in this process). There's hardly any other space that is capable of bringing together so many heterogeneous political actors, and without the ESF process political discussions would continue to be restricted either in an exclusively national framework or in the rather formal networks of traditional political parties, unions, large NGOs and their international co-operation.

./english/337.txt:22:2) Networks : an encouraging development… to be taken into account

./english/337.txt:24:A very encouraging development within the ESF process is the increasing ability of the different networks to cooperate on a European level. This development indicates a change in the process. It must be taken into account.

./english/337.txt:26:Therefore, we suggest an extended time frame for the networks during future EPAs.

./english/337.txt:28:We also have to discuss collectively about the building of a new relationship between networks and the EPA plenum. Until now, the EPA plenum exercised a « monopoly » on the elaboration of the programme. This Forum has shown that something has changed. Our next challenge is to build a dynamic discussion to adapt our collective preparation of the Forum to this evolution where networks – born within or outside the ESF process (Education, Health, GATS/WTO, War, Latin America, Public services, No Vox, Tax Justice, etc.) – feed the dynamics of the whole process as they build their own dynamics. How can this networking dynamic be facilitated without impoverishing our common space?

./english/337.txt:50:• The function and scope of the EPAs are interpreted very differently by the individual participants, ranging from a deciding body or "committee" to hardly more than the public organisational framework for the next ESF, and others see it simply as a fine opportunity to improve their cross-national networks. The undefined functioning of EPA has given space for an informal yet deciding small circle taking decisions internally and getting the "official" legitimation at the end of the EPA to formally maintain the democratic principles of the ESF process.

./english/337.txt:52:• We always see the same small group moderating the EPA without transparent legitimation. This "tradition" is obviously not accepted by a growing number of participants and needs to be replaced by a more democratic approach. We could consider designating a co-ordinating group which is responsible for insuring an open and transparent procedure of the EPA. This group could be composed respecting the diversity of participants : countries, size of the actors, thematic networks, etc. Yet of course, the members of this co-ordinating group would not be there to represent their own approach / category of actor, but to ensure the best common process for all.

./english/337.txt:145:Georgios Karatsioubanis (European Network of Democratic Youth Left)

./english/339.txt:7:4.In Athens, we made small, albeit important, steps towards building truly European resistance networks. Furthermore, there were seminars that were attended by the majority of the people who dealt with a specific matter (e.g. precarious employment) and for the first time there were concrete results (e.g. public services).

./english/339.txt:9:6.The national particularities and the current political occurence in each country were again underestimated when the time had come for the European mobilisations. Neither the Forum in his totality, nor the individual networks can function ignoring the fact that a European mobilisation cannot be organised with an administrative decision from above without a prior consultation process in a national level.

./english/340.txt:8: In every step of the preparation, we tried to collaborate with groups from all over Greece and abroad (Voluntary Work Thessaloniki, Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network, No Vox etc.) that up to now did not participate systematically in the Forum process and we created new groups that would be responsible for organizing aspects of the forum (group of architects, group of technical support, catering etc).

./english/340.txt:10:Last but not least, we estimate that the work and the effort of the Network of Culture, with which we collaborated closely throughout the process, played a major role in the free participation of artists from all the fields of art and gave new features in the process by showing that the culture is a field of equivalent priority in the European movements.

./english/341.txt:1:The Trade-Union Network’s Report for the 4th ESF

./english/341.txt:3: The trade-unionist network has the following to report for the 4th ESF:

./english/341.txt:6:A European network was built for providing an alternative response of the Trade Unions to the Lisboa criteria as far as employment and the working relations are concerned, which has already met.

./english/341.txt:8:A European network was built for the defence of civil services, which already met in Geniva on 26th –27th October 2006 and is currently preparing a European meeting for the defence of civil services that will be held in 2007 in Thessaloniki or in Newscastle.

./english/343.txt:46:- The setting-up a follow-up and facilitating group, composed of the networks and organisations that initiated this seminar, without delay, according to the working speed of the different regions or continents.

./english/343.txt:77:Wide Network Women in

./english/343.txt:79:benedicte@wide-network.org

./english/343.txt:216:jaana@wide-network.org

./english/343.txt:228:Endyl- European Network of Democratic Young Left

./english/343.txt:355:IGTN-INT Gender and Trade Network

./english/344.txt:21:Other international organisations involved, such as the European Trade Union Confederation (1974) and the Trade Union Advisory Committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (TUAC 1948). are similarly social-reformist and based in Western Europe. The unification also involves the trade-specific internationals (e.g. public service or agriculture) of the ICFTU and WCL. Some of these have already merged. However, these further complicate the merger. The Global Union Federations associated with the ICFTU in the Global Unions network, are much older than, and autonomous from, the ICFTU. Those of the WCL are merely departments. The WCL, moreover, seems reluctant to have the global or regional merger reaching down to national level. The role of the ETUC in the whole process needs emphasis for two reasons. Firstly, it provides an explicit or implicit model of a unified union body, being formally autonomous from the existing international centres and having long included national unions of both the Communist and Catholic tradition (Moreno 2005). Secondly, however, it is itself self-subordinated to the European Union and thus to an elite social accord of problematic value. This has been extensively argued by veteran left labour specialist, Richard Hyman:

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

./english/347.txt:28:An Anti-imperialist Network

./english/347.txt:30:Up to now, the more radical forces have worked in isolation from each other. On the Friday before the ESF there was, as usual, a day for network meetings. This time one of them was the Anti-imperialist Network formed out of the anti-imperialist space in Athens. It gathered organisations like the Organisation of Greece Communists, Turkish organisations of Stalinist origin, the PFLP, the Basque nationalist Left and youth, and the League for the Fifth International and the youth organisation Revolution.

./english/347.txt:36:Also it was agreed to cooperate closely with the anti-repression-network and the anti-war network, which itself agreed on an international day of action in support of Palestine on 17-18. April 2007.

./english/347.txt:56:That is what we see in the ESF today. Unity in the ESF is only meaningful as unity of struggle against the capitalists and imperialists’ attacks. If the ESF is to become a body forging this unity, drawing in real struggles - like the one in the banlieus in France or the fighters against imperialist occupation in the Middle East - all those seeking this have to unite. That is why the League for the Fifth International has joined the Anti-imperialist Network and strongly advises left forces across Europe to do likewise.

./english/348.txt:1:Report of the Anti-imperialist Network

./english/348.txt:3:At the network meeting were present 12 participants from England, Greece, Germany, Turkey and the Basque Country. The first thing that discussed was about the aims of the network. It was agreed that the aims must be two. First, to fill the gap that exists at the ESF about the study of the role of imperialism in the modern world, at all levels and with all its forms, military, economical, and cultural in order to have concrete proposals. Second, to contribute in the better coordination between different organizations, platforms, associations, cultural centers etc that struggle with different ways against imperialism in order to have concrete actions.

./english/348.txt:4:Also it was discussed the way that the network can enlarge, both in different countries and in the national level of the different countries. After the discussion proceed to the evaluation of the Athens’s ESF and of other matters that was significant in the last six months. A lot of discussion was made also about the G8 meeting in Germany. An issue that is for discussion for next meetings is our collaboration and coordination with the other networks. The results of the discussions are as follows:

./english/348.txt:10:Also we think that the Anti-imperialist Space played a decisive role in the progressive, radical and militant "color" of the 4thESF and of the demonstration. The Anti-imperialist Space regrouped, on the basis of a militant line of joint action, dozens of progressive mass organizations, liberation movements and revolutionary parties from more than 20 countries. Despite the existing technical problems and the considerable financial constraints - we had the assistance of the Organization Committee to solve many of them - the Anti-imperialist Space has successfully coordinated our joint intervention (for the first time in a Forum) and "colored" the 4th ESF with its internationalist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist presence and political line. Almost all the different movements and organizations that took part in the Anti-imperialist Space have expressed their satisfaction and their will to continue this form of coordination and joint action as an Anti-imperialist Network in the framework of the ESF.

./english/348.txt:16:In the network meeting also it was reported from all the participants that during the last 6 months the movements and organizations of the Anti-imperialist Network participated to the actions which were decided at the Athens’s ESF (day of solidarity to the Nepalese people, day of action against the war, day of action for the rights of the refugees and the immigrants) and to all the activities against the imperialist intervention in Lebanon that tae place to the different countries.

./english/348.txt:19:About the issue of the G8 meeting, it was decided to make as a network a call to all different platforms and initiatives for one and joint demonstration against the G8 and to take the initiative for calling all the different ant-imperialist and anti-capitalist organizations to coordinate their actions, to organize discussions, seminars and other activities in the counter summit and to form an joint anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist bloc to the demonstration.

./english/356.txt:1:Report from the European local Social Forum network meeting in Frankfurt

./english/356.txt:39:forum and the network through the web- site

./english/356.txt:41:We still have questions not only for the people involved in the network and

./english/356.txt:50:of the initiative, in others is the network of groups meeting in the space

./english/358.txt:5:During the EPA in Frankfurt, the network of the Charter of principles of another Europe met for four hours to assess the new draft prepared by our French friends, in particular by Roger Martelli.

./english/359.txt:107:(10) Ensure that the WSF as a whole and the forums worldwide not make the mistake of trying to become an international, a movement of movements, or even just a voice of the world's movements. To be a forum, the WSF and the smaller component forums need to be as broad and diverse as possible. But, being that broad and that diverse is simply being too broad and too diverse to be an organization. The forums can and should be venues for meeting. They can and should facilitate networking among mutually congenial participants that leads to shared actions. But to be an organization that takes decisions about anything other than its component forums would transcend the forum project's degree of unity.

./english/359.txt:109:(11) Mandate that the forums at every level, including the WSF, welcome people from diverse constituencies using the forums and their processes to make contacts and to develop ties that can in turn yield national, regional, or even international networks or movements of movements which do share sufficiently their political aspirations to work closely together, but which exist alongside rather than instead of the forum phenomenon.

./english/360.txt:107:(10) Ensure that the WSF as a whole and the forums worldwide not make the mistake of trying to become an international, a movement of movements, or even just a voice of the world's movements. To be a forum, the WSF and the smaller component forums need to be as broad and diverse as possible. But, being that broad and that diverse is simply being too broad and too diverse to be an organization. The forums can and should be venues for meeting. They can and should facilitate networking among mutually congenial participants that leads to shared actions. But to be an organization that takes decisions about anything other than its component forums would transcend the forum project's degree of unity.

./english/360.txt:109:(11) Mandate that the forums at every level, including the WSF, welcome people from diverse constituencies using the forums and their processes to make contacts and to develop ties that can in turn yield national, regional, or even international networks or movements of movements which do share sufficiently their political aspirations to work closely together, but which exist alongside rather than instead of the forum phenomenon.

./english/362.txt:27:The antecedents of the World Social Forum (WSF) can be traced to January 2000 when a small group of about 50 activists, representing trade unions, intellectuals, peasant organisations and other social groups, gathered in Davos. Samir Amin, an intellectual who is regarded as one of the foremost thinkers on the changing dynamics of capitalism, was among those assembled at the "Anti-Davos in Davos". Since then he has been actively associated with not only the WSF but also the regional forums that have evolved as a challenge to imperialist globalisation. He is director, Third World Forum (TWF), located in Dakar (Senegal) and Cairo and in Belgium, a network of social scientists and intellectuals from developing countries. Amin has also played a key role in the formation of the World Forum for Alternatives, which was launched in 1997. The WFA aims to service the needs of social movements that are engaged in challenging the dominant discourse on globalisation. It is also involved in the search for alternatives by developing the tools for "the globalisation of resistance and struggles".

./english/363.txt:63:The "new movement", for lack of a better phrase, is experimenting with precisely this problem. The Zapatistas (Ortiz-Perez 2000) and the "encounters" they sponsored, the series of demonstrations from Seattle to Naples, Quebec and beyond, networks like People's Global Action and Via Campesina, and the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre can be understood in this light as attempts to find non-authoritarian ways of working ? which work.

./english/363.txt:80:The "we" in that last sentence is us insofar as we are activists or intellectuals, but we are of course also ordinary people, with many of the same needs that other people are struggling for, the same weaknesses and often the same collusion with existing relationships of power. There is a tendency in that kind of "we" sentence to take on ourselves responsibility for somehow "making" things happen; but of course this is to seriously misjudge the situation. "We", as activists or intellectuals, do no such thing. When revolutions happen, it is because ordinary people, in their millions, their tens of millions and their hundreds of millions, mobilise themselves in new ways, challenge large-scale power structures and refuse everyday social routines. "We" cannot make that happen, though we can and should prepare for it, in the sense of developing ideas, organisations, networks, projects and cultures which could make a significant contribution.

./english/363.txt:169:This, I think, is part of our challenge: to start creating that new language, despite the immense difficulties involved in even knowing what it is (and despite the boosters who assure us that they do know). After 10 years of networking among activists on the left, in the ecology and community movements (see appendix), the challenge of this task seems to me to loom larger than it did at the start.

./english/365.txt:2:Strengths and Vulnerabilities of Networked Politics

./english/365.txt:7:Many observers doubt the capacity of digital media to change the political game. The rise of a transnational activism that is aimed beyond states and directly at corporations, trade and development regimes offers a fruitful area for understanding how communication practices can help create a new politics. The Internet is implicated in the new global activism far beyond merely reducing the costs of communication, or transcending the geographical and temporal barriers associated with other communication media. Various uses of the Internet and digital media facilitate the loosely structured networks, the weak identity ties, and the patterns of issue and demonstration organizing that define a new global protest politics. Analysis of various cases shows how digital network configurations can facilitate: permanent campaigns, the growth of broad networks despite relatively weak social identity and ideology ties, transformation of individual member organizations and whole networks, and the capacity to communicate messages from desktops to television screens. The same qualities that make these communication-based politics durable also make them vulnerable to problems of control, decision-making and collective identity.

./english/365.txt:10:Strengths and Vulnerabilities of Networked Politics∗

./english/365.txt:12:Networks of activists demanding greater voice in global economic, social, and environmental policies raise interesting questions about organizing political action across geographical, cultural, ideological, and issue boundaries. Protests against world development and trade policies are nothing new. For example, Rucht (1999) has documented such action in Germany dating from the 1980s. However, social justice activism in the recent period seems to me different in its global scale, networked complexity, openness to diverse political identities, and capacity to sacrifice ideological integration for pragmatic political gain (Bennett, 2003a). This vast web of global protest is also impressive in its capacity to continuously refigure itself around shifting issues, protest events, and political adversaries.

./english/365.txt:15:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 3 that activist networks are engaging politically with non-state, transnational targets such as corporations and trade regimes, and that there is growing coordination of communication and action across international activist networks (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 2001; Gerlach, 2001; Lichbach & Almeida, 2001; Rheingold, 2002).

./english/365.txt:16:It is clear that personal digital media are important to these activists. One indicator is the expansion of a web-based communication infrastructure, marked, for example, by the growth of the Indymedia activist information network (www.indymedia.org) from one outlet to more than 100 in the three years following Seattle. Many activists cite the importance of personal digital media in creating networks and coordinating action across diverse political identities and organizations (see on-line interviews at http://www.wtohistory.org). A key issue is whether these communication practices merely reduce the costs or increase the efficiencies of political action, or whether they change the political game itself. My interest in this article is to explore some of the ways in which digital communication networks may be changing the political game in favor of resource poor players who, in many cases, are experimenting with political strategies outside of conventional national political channels such as elections and interest processes.

./english/365.txt:17:Observations reported in this article indicate that digital communication practices appear to have a variety of political effects on the growth and forms of global activism. These effects range from organizational dynamics and patterns of change, to strategic political relations between activists, opponents and spectator publics. In addition, patterns of individual participation appear to be affected by hyperlinked communication networks that enable individuals to find multiple points of entry into varieties of political action.

./english/365.txt:18:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 4 Moreover, the redundancy of communication channels in many activist networks creates organizational durability as hub organizations come and go, and as the focus of action shifts across different events, campaigns, and targets. Finally, there appears to be a relationship between communication practices and the evolution of democracy itself. One of the important subtexts of this movement is media democracy, centered on the conversion of media consumers into producers, with the introduction of open publishing and collective editing software—all channeled through personal digital networks.

./english/365.txt:19:While there are many indicators that digital media have become important organizational resources in making this movement, there are also potential problems or vulnerabilities associated with these communication-based networks. For example, the ease of joining and leaving polycentric (multi-hubbed) issue networks means that it becomes difficult to control campaigns or to achieve coherent collective identity frames. In addition, organizations may face challenges to their own internal direction and goals when they employ open, collective communication processes to set agendas and organize action. Some organizations even experience internal transformation when they become important hubs in networks and must accommodate demands by other network members. These vulnerabilities are, of course, in constant creative tension with the strengths outlined above, making this movement an interesting case of large scale applications of networked communication as foundations for political organization and action. This analysis attempts to examine both strengths and vulnerabilities associated with various communication practices that make transnational activism possible.

./english/365.txt:22:It is easy to see how conceptual confusion surrounds the political impact of the Internet and other digital media. When political networks are viewed at the level of constituent organizations, the implications of Internet communications can vary widely. Political organizations that are older, larger, resource-rich, and strategically linked to party and government politics may rely on Internet-based communications mostly to amplify and reduce the costs of pre-existing communication routines. On the other hand, newer, resource-poor organizations that tend to reject conventional politics may be defined in important ways by their Internet presence (Graber, Bimber, Bennett, Davis & Norris, forthcoming). In this analysis, I contend that the importance of the Internet in networks of global protest includes --but also goes well beyond – gains that can be documented for particular resource-poor organizations. For example, effects at the network level include the formation of large and flexible coalitions exhibiting the “strength of thin ties” that make those networks more adaptive and resistant to attack than

./english/365.txt:24:The implication here is not that the distributed (multi-hub, or polycentric) structure of the Internet somehow causes contemporary activists to organize in remarkably non-hierarchical, broadly distributed, and flexible networks. Digital media applications can take on a variety of forms, from closed and hierarchical, to open and broadly distributed. Preferences for the latter pattern reflect the social, personal, and political contexts in which many global activists define their mutual relationships.

./english/365.txt:26:One idea upon which most observers agree is that applications of the Internet, like the uses of most communication media, depend heavily on social context. As Castells (2001, p. 50) put it: “The Internet is a particularly malleable technology, susceptible to being deeply modified by its social practice, and leading to a whole range of potential social outcomes.” Polycentric (socially distributed) networks that display the flat, non-hierarchical, flexible, and resilient characteristics of much global activism are well supported by various digital technologies (Gerlach, 2001), but the inclination to construct such networks in the first place reflects at least two defining qualities of their makers: the identity processes and the new politics that define many younger generation activists.

./english/365.txt:27:Identity in Distributed Social Networks

./english/365.txt:29:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 7 or late modern societies (Giddens, 1991; Bennett, 1998; Beck, 2000). In these visions of “late” and “post” modern society, identity becomes a personally reflective (and reflexive) project that is organized and expressed through often elaborately managed lifestyles. Through this process, personal identity narratives replace collective social scripts as the bases for social order. These narratives become interpersonal linkages as network organization begins to displace hierarchical institutions as primary membership and social recognition systems for individuals.

./english/365.txt:30:A defining quality of the network society is that individuals are likely to form political ties through affinity networks based on repertoires of these narratives. This quality of networks contrasts sharply to the “modernist” tendency to forge social and political order through mutual identifications with leaders, ideologies and memberships in conventional social and political groups. Castells (1997) has documented how these highly individualized identity processes find creative forms of empowerment through diverse organizational capacities of the Internet. In many ways, the organizational, personal, and cultural diversity of global activism reflect what Wellman calls “networked individualism:” the ease of establishing personal links that enable people to join more diverse and more numerous political communities than they would ordinarily join in the material world (Wellman, 2000, paragraph 1.6). I explore these social and identity processes in greater detail elsewhere (Bennett, 2003b). The present analysis is focused on the ways in which identity-driven communication practices characterize and organize the politics of these activists.

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

./english/365.txt:33:A New Politics Suited to Distributed Communication Networks

./english/365.txt:34:Beyond identity processes, a second impetus for creating such broadly distributed communication networks is that the targets of global activism are both numerous, and they are slipping off the grid of conventional national politics. Many activists believe that labor, environment, rights and other policies of their governments have been weakened by pressures from global corporations and transnational economic regimes such as the World Trade Organization. The neo-liberal drift and re-branding of labor parties in Europe and the Democratic Party in the United States provide some evidence for these concerns. The resulting capacity of corporations to escape regulation and win concessions

./english/365.txt:35:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 9 from governments has created a political sphere beyond normal legislative, electoral, and regulatory processes – a sphere that Beck (2000) calls sub-politics. The sub-politics of corporations and transnational economic regimes have been countered by activist sub-politics that include global demonstrations, campaigns against companies and economic development regimes, and the creation of epistemic networks to gather and publicize information on global issues (Keck and Sikkink, 1998).

./english/365.txt:36:The place of government in the activists’ political calculus clearly varies from nation to nation and from organization to organization. However, newly emerging forms of political action are being aimed beyond government nearly everywhere in the post -industrial North. These politics include creative experiments with publicly monitored labor, environmental, food, and trade standards regimes designed to hold transnational targets directly accountable to activist networks and their publics (see examples at www.globalcitizenproject.org, under labor standards, fair trade, and corporate social responsibility). These nimble campaigns aimed at corporations and transnational trade and development targets lend themselves to the repertoires of digital communication: lists and action alerts, swarming responses (e.g., denial of service attacks on corporate websites), and the continuous refiguring of web networks as campaigns shift focus and change players.

./english/365.txt:40:Rethinking the Organization of Protest Networks

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

./english/365.txt:43:Most of the cases that illustrate this process are instances of national and cultural mobilization. In order for scale shift to occur trans-nationally and cross-culturally with the magnitude and diversity of contemporary global activism, the process seems to require mediation by digital communication networks. More importantly, the ease of linking to these digital networks (aided by activist preferences for an inclusive politics) also eases the demand to continually renegotiate collective identity frames as movements shift in scale. The idea here is not that communication networks replace social transactions or dispell the identity issues of collective action. Rather, the nature of social transactions, themselves, are changing due to the capacity of distributed communication networks to ease personal engagement with others. In thinking about “computer networks as social networks,” Wellman and his colleagues describe a variety of ways in which digital communication can initiate, enhance, and in some cases, even replace direct social relationships (Wellman, et. al., 1996). In addition, Castells (1996, 1997) argues that we must grasp the transformations of space, society, and identity that are associated with digital communication networks. Thus, an inseparable mix of virtual and face-to-face communication defines many activist networks, and contacts in these networks may range far from activists’ immediate social circles if they can be sustained in terms of the cost and scale offered by digital communication applications.

./english/365.txt:49:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 13 environmental NGOs, making them less centrally controlled, and more difficult to turn on and off. The networking and mobilizing capacities of these ongoing campaigns makes campaigns, themselves, political organizations that sustain activist networks in the absence of leadership by central organizations.

./english/365.txt:50:• Communication in diverse networks is ideologically thin, but rich in terms of individual identity and lifestyle narratives. In recent years, songbirds have been linked to the fair trade coffee campaign in North America, and clothing brand logos have been attached to sweatshop labor campaigns in Europe and North America. Such communication formulas travel well across broad electronic networks and often reach spectator publics, but they do little to advance common movement ideology or identity framing.

./english/365.txt:51:• Internet use patterns affect both the organizational qualities of networks, and they can affect the internal development of member organizations. Networks can be reconfigured rapidly as organizations come and go. In addition, hub organizations that become resources for others can be changed by their place in the flow of communication.

./english/365.txt:56:In the American case, the model for activist issue campaigns can be traced to “corporate” campaigns pioneered by labor unions in the early 1980s (Manheim 2001). These corporate campaigns have now spread throughout activist and advocacy circles, being adopted by environmental, health, human rights, as well as by anti-globalization and sustainable development groups and coalitions. For example, a small global network of NGOs stopped Monsanto’s plans to develop genetically engineered seed with a successful media campaign labeling the sterile seed strain “The Terminator.” And the small human rights organization Global Witness successfully targeted the diamond giant De Beers, which ultimately agreed to limit the market for the bloody “conflict” diamonds that motivated mercenary armies to establish regimes of terror in crumbling African states (Cowell 2001).

./english/365.txt:57:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 15 Some of these campaigns resemble traditional boycotts in the sense that they are run by relatively centralized organizations or coalitions, and they can be turned off when specified goals are accomplished. However, an increasingly common pattern is for whole activist networks to latch onto particularly ripe targets such as Nike or Microsoft because their heavily advertised and ubiquitous logos stick easily to lifestyle meaning systems among consumer publics. This stickiness of logos helps activists get political messages into the mass media, reaching audiences whose attention is often limited in matters of politics. Thus, unlike boycotts, many contemporary issue campaigns do not require consumer action at all; instead, the goal is to hold a corporate logo hostage in the media until shareholders or corporate managers regard the bad publicity as an independent threat to a carefully cultivated brand image.

./english/365.txt:58:Success in publicizing hard-to-communicate political messages may bring new players into campaigns even as others leave a network having declared their goals met. The influx of large and unwieldy networks of activists running through political territories once occupied in more orderly fashion by a small number of rights, environmental, consumer protection, labor and development NGOs presents an interesting strategic dilemma for movement organizing. One attraction of centrally run campaigns is the ability to stop them, which reinforces the credibility of activist organizations by rewarding the compliance of campaign targets. The attraction of decentralized campaigns is the ease of joining them and adding new charges against targets.

./english/365.txt:59:The vulnerabilities of these networked campaigns are often inseparable from their strengths. Thus, the decentralized webs of thin ties that make for unstable coalitions,

./english/365.txt:60:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 16 ) left the long-running campaign against Nike after generating enough negative publicity (see below) to induce company president Phil Knight to promise to take greater responsibility for poor labor conditions in its contract factories. However, other players (e.g., United Students Against Sweatshops, and Press for Change, Jeff Ballinger’s founding campaign organization) contended that a key unresolved issue was creating an effective labor standards monitoring system in the absence of reliable government regulation (see Bullert, 2000; and Bennett, 2003c). As a result, the network reconfigured after the loss of the Global Exchange hub, and student activist organizations became the central hubs. The campaign focus shifted to verifying Nike’s claims of greater corporate responsibility. communication noise, lack of clarity about goals, and weak idea-framing, also enable networks to refigure themselves after losses and disruptions. For example, the San Francisco based social justice organization Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org

./english/365.txt:61:Observations of long-running campaigns suggest several hypotheses. Campaigns are likely to continue over time, and change in terms of networks and goals to the extent that: a) the target is widely recognized and newsworthy; b) the target can be connected to various lifestyle concerns (consumer protection, endangered species, environmental quality, human suffering, political corruption); c) weblogs, lists, and networked campaign sites create an epistemic community that makes the campaign a source of knowledge about credible problems, while making the target an exemplar of both problems and solutions.

./english/365.txt:62:Beyond their many applications in issue activism, continuous campaign networks also organize the steady stream of public demonstrations against transnational targets. For

./english/365.txt:63:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 17 example, Lichbach and Almeida (2001) note that on the dates of the Battle in Seattle, simultaneous protests were held in at least 82 other cities around the world, including 27 locations in the United States, 40 in other “northern” locations including Seoul, London, Paris, Prague, Brisbane, and Tel Aviv, and 15 in “southern” locations such as New Delhi, Manila, and Mexico City. Not only were these other protests not organized centrally by the Seattle campaign coalition, but information about timing and tactics was transmitted almost entirely through activist networks on the Internet. In addition to extending the global reach of single protest events, Internet campaigns also enable activists to create and update rich calendars of planned demonstrations. Lichbach and Almeida (2001) discovered wide Internet postings and network sites for no fewer than 39 scheduled protests between 1994 and 2001. This suggests that Seattle was just one of many events in a permanent protest campaign organized by different organizations in the global activist network.

./english/365.txt:64:The point here is that sustained issue and protest campaigns on a global scale cannot be explained by leadership commitments from centralized organizations with large resource bases or memberships. Coordination through polycentric (distributed) communication networks marks a second distinctive feature of global activism. In keeping with our “strengths and vulnerabilities” analysis, the next section suggests that, while networked communication may help sustain the campaigns that organize global activism, these leaderless networks may undermine the thematic coherence of the ideas that are communicated through them.

./english/365.txt:65:Communication in Diverse Networks is Ideologically Thin

./english/365.txt:66:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 18 Both the strengths and weaknesses of loosely linked, ideologically thin networks are illustrated in the permanent campaign against Microsoft. This campaign began with labor activism in the early 1990s, and has since expanded to include trade, consumer protection, product innovation and many other issues, with campaign fronts in North America, Japan, and the European Union. During the years of the most rapid growth in the network (1997-2001), an important hub was Netaction (www.netaction.org), an organization created explicitly as an Internet campaign hub to archive information and mobilize activists (Manheim, 2001; Bennett, 2003c). The richness of Netaction reports and papers reflects the rise of epistemic communities promoting diverse causes of consumer protection, product innovation, electronic privacy, business ethics and practices, and open source software and Internet architecture, among others. Netaction later evolved to occupy similar hub positions in other digital democracy campaigns, and it has reappeared as a hub in the Microsoft network as the campaign entered different phases.

./english/365.txt:67:Such networks that do not produce common ideological or issue frames allow different political perspectives to co-exist without the conflicts that such differences might create in more centralized coalitions. On most days, conservative United States Senator Orrin Hatch and consumer activist Ralph Nader would not find themselves in the same political universe. Yet they have comfortably occupied network space for years in the anti-Microsoft network. The network of opposition to Microsoft includes businesses (Sun, Oracle, Netscape and others), consumer protection organizations, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, the Government Accountability Project, labor organizers, and thousands of direct “hactivists” (Manheim, 2001; Bennett, 2003c). These

./english/365.txt:69:Ideologically weak networks can reduce the conflicts often associated with diverse players entering campaigns, they also may harbor intellectual contradictions. Thus, when the moment arrived to adopt solutions for the Microsoft “problem,” there was considerable disagreement among key players about what a proper settlement of the antitrust charges might look like. And when the legal ordeal began to take a toll on Miscosoft stock value (which fell in the wake of an initial judicial ruling calling for extreme penalties), the union campaign on labor issues was undermined by company cutbacks.

./english/365.txt:70:Rather than trying to find an issue, identity, or ideology that joined so many different players in enduring battles on so many fronts against Microsoft, it makes more sense to think that the openness of the network itself is the defining quality--inviting diverse activists to use the visibility of the target company and its aggressive culture to raise the visibility of their many diverse causes. Such networks can give voice to member organizations without necessarily producing collective action frames of the sort that we generally associate with the growth of movements. Another example of this is the North American fair trade coffee campaign in which Global Exchange (former hub in the Nike sweatshop campaign) became an important hub in a diverse network of birdwatchers, anti-bioengineering groups, and sustainable development organizations. In this network each member could maintain its own identity, while adding value to the causes of others.

./english/365.txt:72:Ideological and identity thinning may also operate in single organizations that adopt open network designs to promote member equality or minimize bureaucracy. Le Grignou and Patou (forthcoming) note this potential for open networks to diminish organizational identity in their analysis of the French organization ATTAC (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens). ATTAC (www.attac.org) is an interesting case because it began with a very specific organizational goal of creating a tax on global financial transactions and using the funds for sustainable development. ATTAC even formed a Scientific Council to guide the production of high quality information. However, the organization also promoted the autonomy of local chapters through an open communication network that resulted in the posting of diverse concerns from the ATTAC activist membership. Le Grignou and Patou conclude that the easy communication of local interests quickly diversified the organizational agenda to include Commander Marcos, “Mad Cow disease”, human rights in Tunisia, and the labor struggles of Danone employees. Le Grignou and Patou explain that the “click here” logic of the open network at once makes connections between such disparate ideas possible, and at the same time creates an intellectual dilemma for the

./english/365.txt:74:Several related hypothesis emerge from this analysis. In particular, the degrees of ideological discourse and identity framing in a network are inversely related to: the number and diversity of groups in the network; the churn, or turnover of links; the equality of communication access established by hub sites in the network; and the degree to which network traffic involves campaigns. This analysis suggests that it is not so much the Internet, but the network structures established through it, that shape the coherence of communication content. This leads to our third generalization: uses of the Internet may have important effects on organizational structures, both inside member organizations, and in terms of overall network stability and capacity.

./english/365.txt:76:The uses of the Internet may be largely subordinated to existing organizational routines and structures when dedicated to the goals and practices of hierarchical organizations such as parties, interest associations, or election campaigns. However, as noted earlier, the fluid networks of global issue activism enable the Internet to become an organizational force shaping both the relations among organizations and in some cases, the organizations themselves. Some organizations are even transformed by Inter-networks as they take on new functions and partnerships. At least four distinct organizational dynamics have been identified in our case studies of organizational interaction with communication networks: 1) organizational transformation due to

./english/365.txt:77:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 22 demands of network partners; 2) organizations that “move on” to other networks to avoid transformation and to maintain their capacity as activist hubs in other campaigns; 3) network organizations created to perform specific tasks that produce successor networks; and 4) organizations that adopt open communication networks and then become transformed by the information exchanges among their members.

./english/365.txt:78:Organizational transformation through network demands

./english/365.txt:79:Because easy Internet linkages can open organizations to unpredictable traffic patterns, obscure nodes can become more central hubs in networks. As discussed above, the Netaction organization in the Microsoft campaign became such a rich archive of reports and research information about the corporation and the campaign that it became a central hub in the campaign network (as measured, among other things by overlapping board of director members). The early mission and identity of the organization were synonymous with Microsoft, even though the mission statement promised engagement with a wide range of electronic policy issues. As noted in the next section, Netaction reclaimed its broader policy agenda only by breaking with the Microsoft campaign and “moving on” to hub positions in other campaign networks.

./english/365.txt:80:Another interesting case is the vast network of Jubilee debt relief campaigns. If one follows the origins of these organizations back into the 1990s, they began largely as religious networks proclaiming debt relief a moral and religious issue. For example, one of the largest contingents at the Seattle WTO protests were churches operating under the Jubilee banner. This coalition led the first large march on the evening of November 29, 1999, drawing 10,000 - 15,000 activists, and setting the stage for the even larger labor-led actions the next day. Although Jubilee chapters with religious agendas continued to

./english/365.txt:81:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 23 appear in demonstration organizing networks after Seattle, the organization has evolved into a confusing array of different organizations in different national contexts. To some extent, the entry of diverse players into the debt relief game (from rock stars such as Bono of U2, to nations themselves) put pressures on weak church networks to open their political and religious frames to larger networks of activists. One result is considerable instability in the Jubilee organizational system, with various name changes, new coalitions in different nations, and most recently, very different political frames in North America and Europe. For example, the United States coalition (www.jubileeusa.org) retains more of its original religious grass roots identity and network structure, while the United Kingdom hub (www.jubilee2000uk.org) has moved so far from its religious origins that they are barely evident in its far flung international think tank and policy NGO network. Even the name of the latest incarnation of the UK organization has changed to Jubilee Research, although the URL remains the same as in the last incarnation.

./english/365.txt:82:Moving on to other networks as a protective strategy

./english/365.txt:83:Because of the potential to become redefined by location in a communication network, many organizations that provide coordinating or information functions in campaign networks adopt a strategy of periodically “moving on” to new networks. As noted above, Netaction (www.netaction.org) maintained its identity as a multi-issue organization in the digital communication policy arena by moving on to other campaigns in areas of digital communication regulation and consumer protection. A recent

./english/365.txt:86:Just as the “move on” organization protects itself from transformation by network dynamics, they also tend to make few identity demands on other network organizations. Since Global Exchange, Netaction, and other “move on” organizations know they will leave networks, they are unlikely to broker collective identity frames or induce other organizations to transformation in ways typically associated with movements when they are viewed from more conventional organization-centered perspectives.

./english/365.txt:87:Specific task organizations that produce successor networks

./english/365.txt:88:Internet umbrella organizations created to organize issue campaigns and demonstrations often take distinctive network forms based on how they allow users to access and communicate through the site. Many of these organizing networks have survived beyond the action that drew them together because they generally offer networking services and calendars that became useful for future communication and planning. In some cases, these secondary planning features of Internet-only mobilizing

./english/365.txt:89:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 25 networks helped to create successor organizations to mobilize future events. For example, the A16-2000 umbrella organization that coordinated the demonstrations at the Washington, D. C. International Monetary Fund meeting in April of 2000 opened its web site to announce a constantly changing roster of participants. The site enabled newcomers to post their own rallying messages at the top of the site (A16-2000Network\A16The Network List.htm). The user interface emphasized the political diversity of participating groups, along with an amazing number of different political reasons for opposing the IMF. The list of endorsing and participating groups (692 and still growing at the time I captured the site) was indexed by geographical location so that organizations in different locales could be viewed on the same page. Another page of the site revealed an equally diverse core group of demonstration sponsors: 50 Years is Enough, Alliance for Global Justice, Campaign for Labor Rights, Global Exchange, Mexico Solidarity Network, National Lawyers Guild, Nicaragua Network , and Witness for Peace, among others.

./english/365.txt:92:Despite these differences in the communication interfaces created to organize the two demonstrations, both web sites offered user features that kept them alive and networked with broader communities of activists beyond those attending the specific demonstrations. For example, the FTAA protest site referred to the A16 site (which was still running), and contained its own extensive calendar of past and future demonstrations. In addition, the Montreal organization prominently featured links on its front page to several current issue campaigns against corporations (e.g., Nike and Monsanto) that needed support. Also posted were news reports from activists who had attended the recently concluded first World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. These user interfaces extend particular protest events forward in time, and give them broad connection to diverse protest communities in cyberspace. Embedding otherwise dated organization sites in these broader structures of time and space helps their successor organizations form with new networking patterns of their own.

./english/365.txt:93:Organizations transformed by their internal communication networks

./english/365.txt:96:Thinking about how digital networks can transform the political capacities of both nodes and collectivities raises some interesting questions about measurement. Some combination of ethnographic observation, member narratives of organizational roles, and network link mapping seems appropriate. It is clear, for example, that link maps alone are often difficult to interpret. A study of Web sites linked to by other organization sites at the time of the Seattle protests showed the official WTO site was the link leader (2129 links), followed by several protest hubs with impressive links: One World (348); Institute for Global Communications (111), Seattlewto.org, the sponsored site of the NGO coalition (92); and Corporate Watch (74), among others (Smith & Smyth, 2000). Various accounts of the Seattle protests (www.wtohistory.org; Levi & Olson, 2000) suggest that one could not easily derive the key mobilizing coalition players from these link patterns.

./english/365.txt:97:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 28 A promising approach is Van Aelst and Walgrave’s (forthcoming) analysis of organizations that received news coverage surrounding the 2001 protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Montreal. They found that the top 17 organizations mentioned in the news also maintained substantial cross communication channels on the Internet, and that most of them maintained on-line calendars for the FTAA and other protest activities. By these measures, there was a mutually engaged political action network that operated with a high degree of coordination through digital channels. What is interesting is that the underlying coherence in the digital channels linking these organizations was also reflected in mass media attention to the individual members of the networks. This suggests that digital networks have found paths to jump their communication from relatively personalized digital channels to the mass media. It is important to begin understanding these crossover communication effects of digital networks as well.

./english/365.txt:104:Another flow from micro to mass media has occurred in the vast global network of anti-Microsoft protest (Bennett, 2003c; Manheim, 2001). Numerous derogatory images have traveled through Internet chats, networked campaign sites, and webzines, and surfaced in mainstream news accounts indicating that the company was trying to “crush competition,” that it was known by opponents as “the Seattle Slasher,” or that Bill Gates was the latter day incarnation of Robber Baron icon, John D. Rockefeller. The difficulty of anticipating the rise of such images -- much less, using standard public relations techniques to combat them -- has given activists new levers of media power in global subpolitics. This media activism has forced many companies to weigh the advantages of highly profitable business models against the damage inflicted upon precious brand images. Canadian media consultant Doug Miller was quoted in The Financial Times as saying “I visit 75 boardrooms a year and I can tell you the members of the boards are living in fear of getting their corporate reputations blown away in two months on the Internet.” (Mackin, 2001)

./english/365.txt:109:Why has a movement that has learned to secure good publicity for particular issue campaigns and organizations not developed more effective media communication strategies for mass demonstrations? I think that the answer here returns us to the opening discussion of the social and personal context in which this activism takes place. Not only are many activists in these broadly distributed protest networks opposed to central leadership and simple collective identity frames, but they may accurately perceive that the interdependence of global politics defies the degree of simplification demanded by most mass media discourse. While issue campaign networks tend to focus on dramatic charges against familiar targets, most of the demonstration organizing networks celebrate the diversity of the movement and resist strategic communication based on core issues or identity frames. For example, Van Aelst and Walgrave (forthcoming) found at least 11 political themes that were shared by substantial portions of the network involved in the FTAA demonstrations in 2001. Thus, demonstrations may be staged mainly as reminders of the human scale, seriousness, and disruptive capacity of this movement, while issue

./english/365.txt:112:The Internet is implicated in the new global activism far beyond reducing the costs of communication, or transcending the geographical and temporal barriers found in other communication media. Various uses of the Internet and other digital media facilitate the loosely structured networks, the weak identity ties, and the issue and demonstration campaign organizing that define a new global politics. In particular, we have seen how particular configurations of digital networks facilitate: permanent campaigns, the growth of broad networks despite (or because of) relatively weak social identity and ideology ties, the transformation of both individual member organizations and the growth patterns of whole networks, and the capacity to communicate messages from desktops to television screens. The same qualities that make these communication-based politics durable also make them vulnerable to problems of control, decision-making and collective identity.

./english/365.txt:113:It is clear that personal relations remain important in the glue of this movement, giving particular meaning to the now trite slogan that the global is local. Interviews with Seattle WTO protesters make clear that personal contacts were essential to organizing such an effective large scale demonstration (see on line interview transcriptions at www.wtohistory.org). At the same time, the creation of digital information and planning networks eased personal frictions and strengthened fragile relations. More generally, the growing technical capacity of activists to report on their own actions has created

./english/365.txt:115:What can we conclude from weighing these strengths and vulnerabilities, and from the balance between the virtual and the material in these networks? Perhaps most importantly, it seems that the ease of creating vast webs of politics enables global activist networks to finesse difficult problems of collective identity that often impede the growth of movements. To a remarkable degree, these networks appear to have undergone scale shifts while continuing to accommodate considerable diversity in individual level political identity. Moreover, the success of networked communication strategies in many issue and demonstration campaigns seems to have produced enough innovation and learning that keep new organizations emerging despite (and because of) the chaos and dynamic change in those organizations. In order to grasp these properties of communication-based politics, it is important to resist the temptation to view this scene from the perspective of particular organizations or issues. Instead, the dynamic network becomes the unit of analysis in which all other levels (organizational, individual, political) can be analyzed most coherently.

./english/365.txt:120:Arquilla J. & Ronfeldt, D. (2001) “The Advent of Netwar (Revisited)” in J. Arquilla and D. Ronfeldt (eds.) Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy. Santa Monica, Rand, pp. 1-25.

./english/365.txt:129:Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell.

./english/366.txt:6:The Battle in Seattle brought to the world's attention a new global resistance movement that was not only made possible by the Internet but, as Naomi Klein has deftly pointed out, was shaped in its image. Sharing the Internet's architecture of interconnected hubs and spokes, the new movement was a coalition of coalitions, a decentralized network of campaigns "intricately and tightly linked to one another."

./english/367.txt:73:An attempt was made to organize a second major pole, where all would be allowed to come with their own banners and leaflets, so long as they agreed to two central slogans — opposing imperialist aggression in Iraq, and opposing warmongering by India and Pakistan. This time the effort was torpedoed by a most unlikely combination. The CPI(ML) Peoples War does not function openly as a party, but only through front organizations. It, as well as the front organization of the MCC, joined hands with the West Bengal state unit of the National Alliance of Peoples’ Movements to scuttle the bid to form an inclusive bloc by arguing that neither political parties nor NGOs should form part of the alliance. Their plea to exclude parties played on the anti-party sentiment of many people, but had the ulterior motive of excluding those organizations which openly function as parties while allowing their own front groups full freedom. The National Alliance of Peoples’ Movements is of course a different type of network. It was initiated by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Campaign, one of India’s best-known pro-toiler environmentalist organizations) and it includes diverse mass organizations as well as NGOs. For the NAPM, or even for one of its units, to flatly reject working with NGOs on the ground that they are agents of imperialism, was a surprising stand, reflecting more likely the personal stand of a few leading members of the state unit. As a result, several small initiatives developed, and none could be sustained for long.

./english/368.txt:11:In the narrow terms of traditional military conflict, the Zapatista uprising has been confined to a limited zone in Chiapas. However, through their ability to extend their political reach via modern computer networks the Zapatistas have woven a new electronic fabric of struggle to carry their revolution throughout Mexico and around the world.

./english/368.txt:12:Initially the Mexican state tried to restrict the uprising to the jungles of Chiapas, through both military repression and the limitation of press coverage (most Mexicans get their news from the state controlled TV network, Televisa). Those efforts failed. First through written communiques and personal interviews with independent journalists which were flashed around the world by fax and electronic mail, then through more detailed reports by Mexican and foreign observers circulated in the same manner, the Zapatistas were able to break out of the state's attempted isolation and reach others with their ideas and their program for economic and political revolution. As vast numbers of Mexicans responded with sympathy and mobilized in support, the Chiapas uprising kindled a more generalized pro-democracy movement against the centralized and corrupt Mexican economic and political system. Inspiring many others outside of Mexico, the Zapatista uprising set in motion a new wave of hope and energy among those engaged in the struggle for freedom all over the world.

./english/368.txt:16:Vital to this continuing struggle has been the pro-Zapatista use of computer communications.(1) While the state has all too effectively limited mass media coverage and serious discussion of Zapatista ideas, their supporters have been able, to an astonishing degree, to circumvent and offset this blockage through the use of electronic networks in conjunction with the more familiar tactics of solidarity movements: teach-ins, articles in the alternative press, demonstrations, the occupation of Mexican government consulates and so on. Over time the state and its strategists have become acutely aware of the effectiveness of this new form of struggle and have begun to take steps to counteract it. Both sides are now active in the cyberspacial dimension of a war which has raged out of Chiapas across Mexico and the world. The ways in which these networks have been effectively used within the larger framework of struggle deserve the closest attention by all those fighting for a democratic and freer society. The measures now being taken by the Mexican state to counter them also need to be understood in order to be dealt with effectively. The description and analysis of this new dimension of revolution and counterrevolution are the objects of this chapter.

./english/368.txt:18:Networks and Struggles

./english/368.txt:24:Moreover, as part of their struggles to resist exploitation and oppression and to develop their own ways of life and community structures, they have developed their own forms of self-organization which turned out to be complementary to the computer systems with which they would link up. In efforts that have been renewed throughout their history, long before the beginnings of Zapatista organizing, they have drawn on old communal customs and invented new ones as alternatives to co-optation by the Mexican party-state, e.g., the conversion of local leaders into caciques working for the long governing Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Within the dynamics of such dramatic changes as hydroelectric development and jungle colonization, the workers of Chiapas have also organized sectorially in ways independent of particular communities.(3) As the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s with its vicious state policies of austerity has deepened, such local and sectoral efforts have reached out to each other and developed networks of communication and mutual aid. This "networking" spread not only within Chiapas but linked to wider national and international efforts, especially those of campesinos and the indigenous. The Zapatistas must, therefore, be seen as one visible moment of a more general struggle which was already deeply involved in networking before the uprising in January 1994.(4)

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

./english/368.txt:30:The elaboration of widespread computer networks has occurred only on the basis of the personal computer which has made it possible for literally millions of people to form a populous "cyber" space. The personal computer industry itself was built on the subordination of what was originally a non-commercial "hobby" to the mandates of profit-maximizing capital. Maintaining that subordination required the harnessing of imagination, the power of invention, the creativity and the labor of vast numbers of people, at every stage of design, production and use. It involved, in other words, the conversion of whole new realms of self-activity into new forms of labor power, willing and able to work for business.

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

./english/368.txt:40:The first working computer network was ARPANET (on-line in 1969), financed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Defense Department. ARPANET grew out of a line of Cold War research on making Western military communications possible in the event of nuclear war, i.e., in the event that much of the communications system itself would be destroyed by Soviet nuclear weapons. The design that was developed within this context of military conflict was a highly flexible, geographically dispersed web of multiple linkages. The organization of that web allowed specially formatted information to move from any point to any other point through many, many possible routes. Thus, even if many of those possible routes were destroyed, many others would still be functioning and the information would get through.(10) In the absence of war, ARPANET was developed to facilitate the long distance sharing of computer time by researchers working on military and other government projects. The supersession of ARPANET by a network of interlinked networks (The Matrix or The Net) has involved the multiplication of linkages and increased both the flexibility and certainty of communication for anyone and everyone using it --military AND the ever more numerous civilian users. When the Mexican state sought to block the flow of information about the uprising in Chiapas it was outflanked every bit as effectively as any Soviet strike might have been. It could keep Televisa from reporting the facts, but it couldn't prevent thousands of independent computer operators from passing them on to all who wanted to know.

./english/368.txt:42:Beyond an understanding of this flexibility, it is important to recognize that The Net does not exist independently of what are often called its "users". The Net is not some objective or politically neutral technology to be "used" in this way or that. It is not a "form" to be filled arbitrarily with "content"; both form and content are constantly being autonomously reinvented and transformed. Networks have been put to uses which have escaped the intentions of their designers and thus become something new, while new networks have been created for purposes unimagined by the designers (and vendors) of the hardware and software employed. These things have made any assertion of "objectivity" or technological determinism less and less credible.

./english/368.txt:46:As The Net has become larger and more complex, its cyberspace has come to contain an incredible diversity of people, purposes and activities, generally co-existing side by side but sometimes diametrically opposed. For example, whereas ARPANET grew out of military purposes, today The Net provides cyberspaces for anti-war, pro-peace groups to share ideas and experiences and organize their opposition to military options around the globe. Indeed, one sub-network of The Net is PeaceNet, named and created for just such purposes.

./english/368.txt:52:Alternatively, participants in social conflicts in society have extended their struggles from other zones of human space into cyberspace. Groups of individuals who have already organized discussion and action outside of cyberspace --such as the indigenous and campesino groups in Chiapas and their supporters-- can reach others through it. Reaching others may involve drawing individuals into their organizing efforts and it may involve creating new connections with other groups for collaborative efforts. Those groups whose members generally have individual access to The Net can use it to enhance their own internal communications. Such "networking", as we have seen, predates cyberspace, but The Net (like mail, telephone and fax before it) has dramatically extended and speeded up the process.

./english/368.txt:54:Just as important has been the internationalization of cyberspace and the networking it facilitates. On the one hand, business has had increasing recourse to computer communications to co-ordinate its multinational operations of production, finance and sales. This has made it easier to move operations out of areas of high wages and militant environmental or consumer groups into areas of low wages and weak regulations. On the other hand, given access to computers and electronic networks, activists located physically in different countries can link up more easily than ever before. They can share their own experiences, ask for and receive information, compare and contrast struggles, discuss alternative tactics and coordinate strategies as easily as those in the same country.

./english/368.txt:58:This problem of access is great in Chiapas and for the Zapatistas. Despite all the media hype which came with the discovery of the role of cyberspace in circulating Zapatista words and ideas, Subcommandante Marcos is not sitting in some jungle camp uploading EZLN communiques via mobile telephone modem directly to the Internet. Zapatista messages have to be hand-carried through the lines of military encirclement and uploaded by others to the networks of solidarity. Similar problems of access exist within those networks. Many who might be sympathetic to the Zapatistas, e.g., various rural and urban communities of Native Americans, Mexicanos and Chicanos in the U.S. and Canada, have few means to plug into The Net. There too, access for most people must be mediated by groups of humanitarian or political activists who download EZLN Communiques and upload expressions of solidarity from off-line organizing.(17)

./english/368.txt:70:For those in Mexico who read those messages and found them accurate and inspiring, this blockage was an intolerable situation which had to be overcome in order to build support for the Zapatistas and to stop the government's repression. What they did was very simple: they typed or scanned the communiques and letters into e-text form and sent them out over The Net to potentially receptive audiences around the world.(21) Those audiences included, first and foremost, UseNet newsgroups, PeaceNet conferences, and Internet lists whose members were already concerned with Mexico's social and political life,(22) secondly, humanitarian groupings concerned with human rights generally,(23) thirdly, networks of indigenous peoples and those sympathetic to them,(24) fourthly, those political regions of cyberspace which seemed likely to have members sympathetic to grassroots revolt in general(25) and fifthly, networks of feminists who would respond with solidarity to the rape of indigenous women by Mexican soldiers or to the EZLN "Women's Revolutionary Law" drafted by women, for women, within and against a traditionally patriarchal society.(26) Again and again, friendly and receptive readers spontaneously re-posted the messages in new places while sometimes translating the Spanish documents into English and other languages. In this way, the words of the Zapatistas and messages of their communities have been diffused from a few gateways throughout much of cyberspace.

./english/368.txt:72:As journalistic, humanitarian, religious and indigenous observers have visited the conflict zone in Chiapas and written up what they have found, their reports --often embarrassing to the Mexican government and its supporters because confirming Zapatista statements-- have been circulated through the same computer networks providing vital material for the growing network of solidarity organizations. When grassroots groups came together at the behest of the Zapatistas in early August 1994 at the new Aguacalientes carved out of the jungle to form the Convencion Nacional Democratica, and then again later at San Cristobal, Chiapas (October 11-13, 1994), Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas (November 4-6, 1994) and Queretaro (February 1-5, 1995) speeches, reports and convention documents were circulated on The Net. Much of this material certainly deserves being labeled with the term used by Italian militants: "contro-informazione" (counter-information) opposed to the official reports of governments and commercial mass media.

./english/368.txt:98:In the summer of that same year, Cathryn Thorup, then Director of Studies and Programs at the Center for U.S. Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, published an assessment of "cross-border coalitions" in the Columbia Journal of World Business.(38) Her primary focus was on the actions and impact of the anti-NAFTA network. She traced the development of opposition to and lobbying against the governments' "fast-track" approach to railroading NAFTA through Congress as well as elite efforts to divide and conquer that opposition. While calling the debate "healthy for both societies" (the U.S. and Mexico), she also highlighted the "tremendous vulnerability" of the state to such organizing and discussed how state policy makers might seek to convert such opposition into "valuable political allies" by consulting with them and cutting deals. Her vision of how the political system might cope with the emergence of these new rogue networks would seem to lie squarely in the tradition of pluralism, i.e., integrate and co-opt the new forces into a slightly modified fabric of governance.

./english/368.txt:102:One of the more provocative of these analyses to come to light, so far, has been that by national security analysts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt working at RAND Corp.(42) In a 1993 report entitled "CyberWar is Coming!", they formulate two related concepts: cyberwar and netwar --in both of which the role of information is central and critical. The former refers to military war making while the latter refers to "societal-level ideational conflicts waged in part through internetted modes of communication", "most often associated with low intensity conflict". Their examples of cyberwar range from the Mongols to the Gulf War. One of their primary examples of netwar is how "advocacy movements" are "increasingly organizing into cross-border networks and coalitions, identifying more with the development of civil society (even global civil society) than with nation-states and using advanced information and communications technologies to strengthen their activities". While Arquilla and Ronfeldt cite movements concerned with environmental, human-rights and religious issues, the pro-Zapatista movement is clearly another example of the kind of activity they are concerned with. In their discussion the "other side" of such "netwar" is the state and its traditional hierarchical institutions of governance. With their writing directed primarily at the U.S. government --with which they clearly identify-- they warn that new forms of warfare must be developed appropriate to this new arena of power.(43)

./english/368.txt:110:Such thinking about the emergence of cyberspace challenges to governability have also drawn on the currently popular concept of "civil society" to contemplate how such threats might be tamed and integrated. In these formulations, "civil society" is conceived as that part of society dominated by neither state nor market and often best represented by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), e.g., human rights, environmental, consumer, women's groups. In a recent RAND paper (which I do not yet have permission from the authors to quote or cite and therefore will not name) available through the RAND web site, Cathryn Thorup and David Ronfeldt have collaborated to provide a sketch of the problems of integrating the increasingly powerful networks of "civil society" into a workable balance with the state (hierarchy) and business (market). For those whose understanding of democracy sees the state and business as fundamental obstacles to its realization, such a conceptualization can only lead to formulae for co-optation, neutralization and defeat.(47)

./english/368.txt:126:There have been assertions of Mexican government tampering with computer communications and more concrete evidence of government efforts to create a counter-presence on the Internet. One charge has concerned the Profmexis network going down at critical moments such as the Elections in August 1994 when upheaval was feared. Another was the disruption of opposition communications in the Mexican congress.(57) In neither case, however, has any hard evidence been forthcoming. The frequent interjections of a few rabid anti-EZLN commentators on some of the Internet lists have raised suspicions that they are PRI operatives, but so far, the simpler conjecture --that they are just fellow travelers-- seems more likely.

./english/368.txt:128:A more documented case has involved the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service interviewing members of the Mexico Solidarity Network (MSN) supposedly as part of an investigation of interference of Mexican Diplomats in Canadian affairs. MSN organizations, however, think that the interviews were the product of collaboration between Canadian and Mexican intelligence agencies and their real purpose was to intimidate Canadian activists and visiting Mexicans reporting on events in their country. The result of such doubts about the covert intentions of the Mexican and Canadian governments have been protests and a call for a commission of inquiry.(58)

./english/368.txt:140:Similar observations hold vis a vis the Zapatistas and the pro-democracy movement in Mexico. While multinational corporations have used electronic networks in tandem with NAFTA to reorganize themselves against North American workers and consumers, the anti-NAFTA movement and then the Zapatista solidarity networks have elaborated extensive and effective networks of their own. Available evidence suggests that efforts by the state to counter these networks inside The Net have been limited and ineffective.(60) The initiative continues in the hands of the solidarity networks providing support to the Zapatistas.

./english/368.txt:142:Nevertheless, it would be dangerous to become complacent in this situation. Just because the state has not found effective ways of countering these struggles does not mean that it will not be able to come up with better tactics in the future. We have seen that our struggles are being observed and studied by the analysts and strategists of the state and of capital more generally. We must continue to monitor their monitoring to see where it leads them. We have seen that Arquilla and Ronfeldt have suggested that the U.S. government "may want to design new kinds of military units and capabilities for engaging in network warfare". ARE such new kinds of units and capabilities being created? Will the U.S. military go beyond wargame scenarios to develop the means to "penetrate, monitor, disrupt, deceive and dominate any computer or any communications system for any length of time, ideally without being detected", as one CIA veteran has suggested?(61) Obviously, it is in our interest to attempt to keep track of efforts to create such capacities.

./english/368.txt:150:The differences in the two situations are worth noting. In the case of the battle over NAFTA, capital had the initiative and two hundred years of free-trade arguments at its disposal. The anti-NAFTA networks were forced to create, virtually from whole cloth, a set of arguments and mass of information to counter that initiative. That they lost is not surprising; that the next round of battle will be on a more even terrain is certain. In the case of the Zapatistas, the campesinos of Chiapas and then their supporters had the initiative, first on the ground, then in the world of ideas. Unable to fit the Zapatistas, their organization and ideas into familiar boxes, the Mexican state has been flailing around defensively, and losing. Its campaign of low-intensity warfare (terrorism) may squeeze many into submission in Chiapas, but it continues to lose the broader battle over the future of Mexico. Its failure to cripple the ability of the Zapatistas to present their arguments against the status quo has forced it to cede more and more ground, if not to the Zapatistas directly then to the democratic reform movement that has taken up their banner.

./english/368.txt:158:The future elaboration of flexible, interlinked, uncontrollable networks must be worked out at these increasing levels of complexity. While the experience of the circulation of the Zapatista uprising can teach us much about the ways in which rhizomatically organized, autonomous

./english/370.txt:47:Schemes to decentralize this aspect do exist, as in Drexler's Agoric Systems, where the messages which flow through the meshwork have become autonomous agents capable of trading among themselves both memory and CPU time. {7} The creation by General Magic of its Teletext operating system, and of agents able to perform transactions on behalf of users, is one of the first real-life steps in the direction of a true decentralization of resources. But in the meanwhile, the Internet will remain a hybrid of meshwork and hierarchy components, and the imminent entry of big corporations into the network business may in fact increase the amount of command components in its mix.

./english/373.txt:12:It is my opinion that, when talking about the so-called anti-globalisation movement, it is possible to trace two parallel processes. One, which I named new radicalism, began with the Zapatista insurrection, has brought about creating of the Peoples’ Global Action network. The second one, I call traditionalistic, has developed separately, culminating by the creation of the WSF and regional forums. The history of these tendencies that have mainly developed simultaneously is relatively well known. Demonstrations – the Global Days of Action – and forums, as well as the Indymedia that has inaugurated a quite specific mode of activist communication, have all become the most important distinctive manifestations of the movement itself. The new radicalism implies an attempt to distance from the practices of the old left; to move away from the area of the conventional politics and to devise a new political space, the "politics from below"; pre-figurative politics (i.e. the modes of organization that consciously resemble the world you want to crate); direct action and social disobedience; anti-capitalism and anti-statism.

./english/373.txt:18:The traditionalists have comprehended, and they are to be congratulated for it, that there is something really new in the new movement: the proof is the very idea of organizing "forums" – the institution that is "new" although organized in the "old" way – as well as the striving of political parties to transform themselves into networks such as ATTAC. As I have already pointed out, these two directions have mainly formed their identities independently from one another. I do not deem, however, that this difference is necessarily a handicap. On the contrary, I believe that these differences are good for the movement. They feed it with different energies. It is possible to learn a great deal from the reformists. Very often one can learn much more than from the anti-authoritarian sectarians who take pleasure in marginalizing and in a certain "anti-authoritarian narcissism". Problems, however, occur when the "globalise the resistance" becomes "monopolize the resistance". When the balance between the two spirits becomes disturbed. When the dialogue space becomes narrow. The last WSF was a convincing evidence of the dis-equilibrium relating to the recently ended ESF in Florence. Bureaucratisation of the movement and establishing of the forum bureaucracy is becoming more and more obvious. The danger of turning the "globalisation from below" into "globalisation from the middle" is becoming more clearly discernable. The phenomenon of "NGO-isation of the movement" is increasingly present as connected to BINGO politics (Big International Non Governmental Organizations). Do we really want to create a movement that will resemble a cocktail party in the Plaza Hotel lounge in Porto Alegre? Do we want a movement dominated by middle-aged bureaucrats wearing Palestinian scarves, armed with the memories from 1968 (or 1917)? Do we want social forums with invisible organizers?

./english/373.txt:36:It is therefore necessary to replace the formula "abandon or contaminate" by the formula "participate or abandon". The "contamination" is not a sincere one, the very expression is an entristic one: furthermore, it is not even productive. Closed in a suburban building of the forum, we are doomed to marginalisation and dissipation of energy. It is necessary to enter into dialogue with other participants in the movement, to organize ourselves so as to be able to reclaim the movement. To say that another forum is possible. In any case, it is necessary for us to turn to building of our own network, PGA, the optics of which would include reflection on the vision and strategy, options, on details of a different world we wish to create. Why dissipate the energy of the new radicalism, is the question that imposes itself, on endless projects? Why don’t we formulate a unique, coherent anti-authoritarian politics within the Peoples Global Action network? It would be the politics based on the bottom-up organizing, open and transparent methods, broad participation, anti-authoritarianism, multi-tactical approaches, innovation and spontaneity. We have to abandon sectarianism and " marginalization pleasure", but also avoid the trap of accepting the traditionalistic and bureaucratic rules of the game and the struggle for power, which we are not accustomed to, bearing always in mind that the goal of anti-authoritarianism is not to be small and isolated. Our goal should be the movement building. Not "summit -hopping": we should try to connect our local work and networking, instead of getting lost in "networks of networks" and "process of processes", hoping from one place to another.

./english/375.txt:112:First of all we saw in Seattle the groups that we thought were objectively antagonistic, contradictory to each other were actually acting in common. The trade unionists, the environmentalist, the gays and lesbians, church groups, the anarchists, the communists, they were actually working together yet keeping their differences. We’ve seen a new model of organising, a model that refuses the contradictory couple of identity and difference, that refuses to say either we all united under the same centralisation or each act individually in our separate parts. What we’ve seen instead is that we have to recognise – we even have difficulty; understanding it at a conceptual level, but we have to understand it at a political level – that we can remain different, that we have to remain different, but that we must act in common. Sometimes this is referred to as a movement of movements, to grasp this notion of our autonomy and our commonality. Sometimes as the notion of network, thinking of the distributive notion of the network of the internet, these various terms have come about independently to try to understand this new model of organising.

./english/376.txt:11:. Its direct aims are still sketchy as of now, being a new group and all, but somehow, it is becoming a good space for alternative discussions about the past and ongoing WSIS-related events. It would be beneficial for women to monitor this site because it is important to learn the other aspects of the WSIS, specifically what advocates and communication networks have to say about the ongoing official processes.

./english/377.txt:10:Brinda Karat, general secretary of the AIDWA, speaking on a panel discussion on TV, referring to the gathering at the Asian Social Forum, said they are resisting the “Empire”. Indeed the gathering of 14,000 persons in Hyderabad, of whom unusually almost half if not more were dalits, and a good proportion of women, apart from those who work with the rights of the most oppressed and excluded, could be seen as a defining moment for the ‘Empire to strike back’ on many counts. As an expression of the vitality of the numerous identities, like dalits, displaced persons, unorganised workers and their ability to share a common space. As an expression of the widespread understanding of the international order, revealing the fact that information on the ‘big picture’ has reached the remote, thus justifying or affirming the value of forums and networks which have worked hard to carry the message of where and how the increasing pressures on dignity and survival are coming from. As a quest for alternatives to the current political and economic regimes and the theories that back them up. And, last but not the least, evidence that civil society has developed the mode and skills to hold international or world conferences outside of the UN’s initiative; an important step forward, as the UN world conferences are beginning to become counterproductive as the conservative forces and the unipolar world debases them.

./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: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:42:What is new about computer and information technology mediated politics is that information can be instantly communicated to large numbers of individuals throughout the world who are connected via computer networks. The internet is also potentially interactive, allowing discussion, debate and on-line and archived discussion. The internet is increasingly multimedia in scope, allowing the dissemination of images, sounds, video and other cultural forms. Moreover, the use of computer technology and networks is becoming a normalized aspect of politics, just as the broadcasting media were some decades ago. The use of computer-mediated technology for technopolitics, however, opens new terrains of political struggle for voices and groups excluded from the mainstream media and thus increases potential for intervention by oppositional groups, potentially expanding the scope of democratization.

./english/379.txt:46:Given the extent to which capital and its logic of commodification have colonized ever more areas of everyday life in recent years, it is somewhat astonishing that cyberspace is by and large decommodified for large numbers of people -- at least in the overdeveloped countries like the United States. On the other hand, using computers, transforming information into data-packets that can be sent through networks, and hooking oneself up to computer networks oneself, involves a form of commodified activity, inserting the user in networks and technology that are at the forefront of the information revolution and global restructuring of capital. Thus the internet is highly ambiguous from the perspective of commodification, as from other perspectives.

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

./english/379.txt:62:There are by now copious examples of how the internet and cyberdemocracy have been used within oppositional political movements. A large number of insurgent intellectuals are already making use of new technologies and public spheres in their political projects. The peasants and guerrilla armies who formed the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, beginning in January 1994 used computer databases, guerrilla radio and other forms of media to circulate their ideas and to promote their cause. Every manifesto, text and bulletin produced by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation who occupied land in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas was immediately circulated through the world via computer networks.[5]

./english/379.txt:66:In January 1995, when the Mexican government attacked the Zapatistas, the latter used computer networks to inform and mobilize individuals and groups throughout the world to support them in their battle against repressive government action. There were many demonstrations in support of the rebels throughout the world. Prominent journalists, human rights observers and delegations traveled to Chiapas to demonstrate solidarity and to report on the uprising. The Mexican and US governments were bombarded with messages calling for negotiations rather than repression. The Mexican government was forced to back down and halt their repression of the insurgents. While carrying out various forms of subjugation, they continued to sporadically negotiate, and as of this writing in late 2001, the new Mexican President Vicente Fox has agreed to continue negotiations.[6]

./english/379.txt:70:Seeing the progressive potential of advanced communication technologies in revolutionary struggle, Frantz Fanon (1967) described the central role of the radio in the Algerian revolution, and Lenin stressed the importance of film in spreading communist ideology after the Bolshevik revolution. Audiotapes were used to advance the insurrection in Iran and to disseminate alternative information by political movements throughout the world (see Downing 1984 and 2000). The Tienanman Square democracy movement in China and various groups struggling against the remnants of Stalinism in the former communist bloc used computer bulletin boards and networks, as well as a variety of forms of communications, to promote their movements. Anti-NAFTA groups made extensive use of the new communications technology (see Brenner 1994 and Fredericks 1994). Such multinational networking and distribution of information failed to stop NAFTA, but created alliances useful for the politics of the future. As Nick Dyer-Witheford notes:

./english/379.txt:94:On the whole, labour organizations, such as the North South Dignity of Labor group, note that computer networks are useful for organizing and distributing information, but cannot replace print media, which are more accessible to many of their members, face-to-face meetings and traditional forms of political action. Thus, the challenge is to articulate one's communications politics with actual movements and struggles so that cyberpolitics is an arm of real battles rather than their replacement or substitute. The most efficacious internet projects have indeed intersected with activist movements encompassing campaigns to free political prisoners, boycotts of corporate projects, and various labour and even revolutionary struggles, as noted above.

./english/379.txt: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:178:[4] On the growth of wireless, see the discussion in Best and Kellner forthcoming. It was announced in April 1997 that Boeing Aircraft had joined Bill Gates in investing in a satellite communications company, Teledesic, which planned to send up 288 small low-orbit satellites to cover most of the Americas and then the world by 2002. This project could give up to 20 million people satellite internet access at a given moment; see USA Today, 30 April 1997. In May 1998, Motorola joined the åinternet in the Skyπ Project, scrapping its own $12.9 billion plan to build a satellite network capable of delivering high speed data communications anywhere on the planet and instead joined the Teledesic project, pushing aside Boeing to become Teledesic's prime contractor (New York Times 22 May 1998). An åInternet-in-the-Skyπ would make possible access to new technologies for groups and regions that do not even have telephones, thus expanding the potential for democratic and progressive uses of new technologies. On the other hand, there are reports that the corporations proposing such projects are not pursuing them and thus, once again, state intervention may be necessary to develop progressive technologies that will serve all.

./english/379.txt:182:[6] There was, however, an assassination of Zapatista supporters by local death squads in early 1998 -- which once again triggered significant internet-generated pressures on the Mexican government to prosecute the perpetrators. Likewise, there has been ongoing government repression and sporadic violence, although, so far, the kind of massive repression of the movement favoured by many in the Mexican military and political establishment has been avoided. I should also mention here the incredibly conflicting interpretations of the Zapatista movement by its supporters and detractors, and the problem that it has been given iconic significance with all the attendant mythologization in the contemporary era. For my purposes, it represents a strong example of how new technologies can be used as an arm of political struggle and how computer-mediated technologies can help generate global support networks and circulate information of revolutionary struggles and movements.

./english/379.txt:186:[8] For an overview of the use of electronic communication technology by labor, see the studies by Moody 1988, Waterman 1990, 1992, Brecher and Costello 1994, Dyer-Witheford 1999 and Drew 1999. Labor projects using the new technologies include the US based Labornet, the European Geonet, the Canadian LaborL, the South African WorkNet, the Asia Labour Monitor Resource Centre, Mujer a Mujer -- representing Latina women's groups, and the Third World Network, while PeaceNet in the United States is devoted to a variety of progressive peace and justice issues.

./english/379.txt:188:[9] As a 1 December 1999 abcnews.com story titled åNetworked Protestsπ put it:

./english/379.txt:190:disparate groups from the Direct Action Network to the AFL-CIO to various environmental and human rights groups have organized rallies and protests online, allowing for a global reach that would have been unthinkable just five years ago.

./english/379.txt:212:Brenner, J. (1994) åInternationalist labor communication by computer network: the United States, Mexico and Naftaπ, unpublished paper.

./english/379.txt:234:Fredericks, H. (1994) åNorth American NGO networking against NAFTA: the use of computer communications in cross-border coalition buildingπ, XVIIth International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association.

./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: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:41: In order to theorize the global network economy, one therefore needs to avoid the extremes of technological and economic determinism. Technological determinists frequently use the discourse of postindustrial, or postmodern, society to describe current developments. This discourse often produces an ideal-type distinction between a previous mode of industrial production characterized by heavy industry, mass production and consumption, bureaucratic organization, and social conformity, contrasted to the new postindustrial society characterized by "flexible production," or "postFordism," in which new technologies serve as the demiurge to a new postmodernity (Harvey 1987).

./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:85: Today, critical theorists confront the challenge of theorizing the new forms of technocapitalism and novelties of the present era constructed by syntheses of technology and capital in the emergence of a new stage of global capitalism. The notion of technocapitalism attempts to avoid technological or economic determinism by guiding theorists to perceive the interaction of capital and technology in the present moment. Capital is generating innovative forms of technology just as its restructuring is producing novel configurations of a networked global economy, culture, and polity. In terms of political economy, the emergent postindustrial form of technocapitalism is characterized by a decline of the state and increased power of the market, accompanied by the growing power of globalized transnational corporations and governmental bodies and declining power of the nation-state and its institutions -- which remain, however, extremely important players in the global economy, as the responses to the terror attacks of September 11 document.

./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:109: Ultimately, however, the abhorrent terror acts by the bin Laden network and the violent military response to the Al Qaeda terrorist acts by the Bush administration may be an anomalous paroxysm whereby a highly regressive premodern Islamic fundamentalism has clashed with an old-fashioned patriarchal and unilateralist Wild West militarism. It could be that such forms of terrorism, militarism, and state repression will be superseded by more rational forms of politics that globalize and criminalize terrorism, and that do not sacrifice the benefits of the open society and economy in the name of security. Yet the events of September 11 may open a new era of Terror War that will lead to the kind of apocalyptic futurist world depicted by cyberpunk fiction (see Kellner forthcoming).

./english/380.txt:133: My intention is to present globalization as conflictual, contradictory and open to resistance and democratic intervention and transformation and not just as a monolithic juggernaut of progress or domination as in many discourses. This goal is advanced by distinguishing between "globalization from below" and the "globalization from above" of corporate capitalism and the capitalist state, a distinction that should help us to get a better sense of how globalization does or does not promote democratization. "Globalization from below" refers to the ways in which marginalized individuals and social movements resist globalization and/or use its institutions and instruments to further democratization and social justice. While on one level, globalization significantly increases the supremacy of big corporations and big government, it can also give power to groups and individuals that were previously left out of the democratic dialogue and terrain of political struggle. Such potentially positive effects of globalization include increased access to education for individuals excluded from entry to culture and knowledge and the possibility of oppositional individuals and groups to participate in global culture and politics through gaining access to global communication and media networks and to circulate local struggles and oppositional ideas through these media. The role of new technologies in social movements, political struggle, and everyday life forces social movements to reconsider their political strategies and goals and democratic theory to appraise how new technologies do and do not promote democratization (Kellner 1997 and 1999b).

./english/380.txt: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: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:217: There have been widespread discussions of how the bin Laden Al Qaeda network used the Internet to plan the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., how the group communicated with each other, got funds and purchased airline tickets via the Internet, and used flight simulations to practice their hijacking. In the contemporary era, the Internet can thus be used for a diversity of political projects and goals ranging from education, to business, to political organization and debate, to terrorism.

./english/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:272: Further, there is utopian potential in the new technologies as well as the possibility for increased domination and the hegemony of capital. While the first generation of computers were large mainframe systems controlled by big government and big business, later generations of "personal computers" and networks created a more decentralized situation in which ever more individuals own their own computers and use them for their own projects and goals. A new generation of wireless communication could enable areas of the world that do not even have electricity to participate in the communication and information revolution of the emergent global era. This would require, of course, something like a Marshall Plan for the developing world which would necessitate help with disseminating technologies that would address problems of world hunger, disease, illiteracy, and poverty.

./english/382.txt:21:The World Social Forum didn't produce a political blueprint — a good start — but there was a clear pattern to the alternatives that emerged. Politics had to be less about trusting well-meaning leaders, and more about empowering people to make their own decisions; democracy had to be less representative and more participatory. The ideas flying around included neighborhood councils, participatory budgets, stronger city governments, land reform and co-operative farming — a vision of politicized communities that could be networked internationally to resist further assaults from the IMF, the World Bank and World Trade Organization. For a left that had tended to look to centralized state solutions to solve almost every problem, this emphasis on decentralization and direct participation was a breakthrough.

./english/382.txt:25:Right now, it looks as if Lula has only two choices: abandoning his election promises of wealth redistribution or trying to force them through and ending up in a Chavez-style civil war. But there is another option, one his own Workers Party has tried before, one that made Porto Alegre itself a beacon of a new kind of politics: more democracy. He could simply hand power back to the citizens who elected him, on key issues from payment of the foreign debt, to land reform, to membership in the Free Trade Area of the Americas. There is a host of mechanisms that he could use: referendums, constituents' assemblies, networks of empowered local councils and assemblies. Choosing an alternative economic path would still spark fierce resistance, but his opponents would not have the luxury of being against Lula, as they are against Mr. Chavez, and would, instead, be forced to oppose the repeated and stated will of the majority — to be against democracy itself.

./english/385.txt:11:Rank-and-file U.S. workers of color also attended, from certain unions and locals in certain geographic areas. There were young African Americans in the building trades; blacks from Local 10 of the ILWU in San Francisco and Latinos from its Los Angeles local; Asian Americans from SEIU; Teamsters of color from eastern Washington state; members of the painters' union and the union of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (H.E.R.E.). Latino/a farmworkers from the UFW and PCUN (Pineros and Campesinos del Noroeste) of Oregon also attended. At one point a miner from the South Africa Labor Network cried, "In the words of Karl Marx, 'Workers of the world, unite!'" The crowd of some 25,000 people cheered.

./english/385.txt:13:Among community activists of color, the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) delegation led by Tom Goldtooth conducted an impressive program of events with Native peoples from all over the U.S. and the world. A 15-member multi-state delegation represented the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice based in Albuquerque, which embraces 84 organizations primarily of color in the U.S. and Mexico; their activities in Seattle were binational.

./english/385.txt:15:Many activist youth groups of color came from California, especially the Bay Area, where they have been working on such issues as Free Mumia, affirmative action, ethnic studies, and rightwing laws like the current Proposition 21 "youth crime" initiative. Seattle-based forces of color that participated actively included the Filipino Community Center and the international People's Assembly, which led a march on Tuesday despite being the only one denied a permit. The predominantly white Direct Action Network (DAN), a huge coalition, brought thousands to the protest. But Jia Ching Chen of the Bay Area's Third Eye Movement was the only young person of color involved in DAN's central planning.

./english/385.txt:29:Four protesters of color from different Bay Area organizations talked about the "culture shock" they experienced when they first visited the "Convergence," the protest center set up by the Direct Action Network, a coalition of many organizations. Said one, "When we walked in, the room was filled with young whites calling themselves anarchists. There was a pungent smell, many had not showered. We just couldn't relate to the scene so our whole group left right away." "Another told me, "They sounded dogmatic and paranoid." "I just freaked and left," said another. "It wasn't just race, it was also culture, although race was key."

./english/385.txt:33:Reflecting the more positive evaluation of white protesters in general, Richard Moore, coordinator of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, told me "the white activists were very disciplined." "We sat down with whites, we didn't take the attitude that 'we can't work with white folks'", concluded Rashidi. "It was a liberating experience."

./english/385.txt:35:Few predominantly white groups in the Bay Area made a serious effort to get people of color to Seattle. Juliette Beck of Global Exchange worked hard with others to help people from developing (third world) countries to come. But for U.S. people of color, the main organizations that made a serious effort to do so were Just Act (Youth ACTion for Global JUSTice), formerly the Overseas Development Network, and Art and Revolution, which mostly helped artists. Many activists of color have mentioned Alli Chaggi-Starr of Art and Revolution, who not only helped people come but for the big march in Seattle she obtained a van with a sound system that was used by musicians and rappers.

./english/386.txt:133:As in the case of the fishworkers' movement, movements against export-oriented aquaculture also have formed a national network, People's Alliance against Shrimp Industry (PAASI) and they have also initiated joint activities with similar struggles in the third world. Attempts are also made to generate awareness among shrimp consumers in the West, according to Vandana Shiva.

./english/388.txt:47:WF: It’s a place where that can happen. It’s a place where people are encouraging others to make that happen – where people are pressing each other about what the answers might be if you’re rethinking democracy on different kinds of levels. It’s not a place yet where you’d expect all the answers to come out and be somehow ratified by a forum. But it may come out in small ways through networks that use the forum in order to interact.

./english/388.txt:63:WF: Diversity of views, diversity of participation – those are the key things. That it’s not the same people coming every time, or the same leaders, and that it’s not the same ideas being recycled. I would think that success means that you have an increasing number of people who feel that they can participate, and that they participate to their benefit in the sense that they learn things or build new networks. So I don’t know how you would measure it, because no one has actually counted if there have been more networks created. But that’s what I would see as success.

./english/388.txt:81:Personally, I would hope that it remains a pedagogical space out of which new politics can emerge. That is to say, the WSF provides a space in which movements from all over the world can network together and make statements about the war, but not in the name of the forum.

./english/389.txt:25:• Community controlled information infrastructure be prioritized (e.g: free software, fiber networks, wireless technologies, non profit ISPs, interfaces for oral cultures);

./english/392.txt:227:Sen, ed, August 1992 − ’Issues in Internationalist Networking’. Report of a Workshop on Global

./english/392.txt:228:Advocacy Networking organised in New Delhi in March 1989 by Unnayan, Calcutta. Published by

./english/394.txt:31:organisations, networks, and individuals, mostly in India but also in other countries in South Asia -

./english/394.txt:83:networks and of information and communication technologies today – therefore think of the

./english/395.txt:527:virtual organisations and networks — where people are increasingly not belonging to organisations

./english/395.txt:601:often only temporarily, such as through myriad networks. This has historically been the case

./english/395.txt:617:— such as networks, where individuals are participants, not members; in other words, where social

./english/395.txt:664:delegated member of that organisation, and someone ‘representing’ a network that is usually far less

./english/396.txt:36:AC FIRE is an international communications venue working to contribute to bring a wide diversity of voices to the world’s media. Its mission is to: amplify the voices and ideas of women; promote the human rights of women; connect multiple voices, technologies and actions; strengthen women’s and Third World media efforts by participating in networks, and in local, regional and global initiatives; generate individual and collective commitment to movement building and action; and produce high quality, non-sexist, activist programs in Spanish and English for radio and the internet.

./english/396.txt:82:· information and communications networks are concentrated in a few countries (25% of the countries of the world do not have sufficient fixed capacity of lines for the development of the new technologies, since is calculated that in those countries, the capacity is barely one telephone per 100 persons.),

./english/396.txt:106:It combines conventional radio with Internet, and contains a strategy that transcends the users of Internet, to be multiplied in diverse formats of communication, through rebroadcasts in local radios, international shortwave radio, magazines, newspapers, electronic networks, Web pages, etc.

./english/396.txt:118:FIRE is about an international radio that broadcasts a critical content that combines sound with text and images with colors with an innovative treatment of the information. This interactive concept of radio is the creative process of a group of women that learn day to day to take advantage of the technological resources, in order to open channels that enable conversations within the networks and that allow women to create new forms of inclusion and disclosure of issues and perspectives for the sake of advancing their own human rights and those of all of humanity.

./english/396.txt:170:Sponsored by UNIFEM, Feminist International Radio Endeavour (FIRE) and the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Network of the World Association of Community Radios (AMARC) also organized three training sessions in Internet broadcasting for women and girls at the Special Session.

./english/396.txt:172:Through FIRE and CIMAC, the Beijing + 5 Latin American Regional Women’s Articulation developed a media initiative during the Special Session of the General Assembly of the U.N. It consisted of the creation of a regional electronic network of press releases based on coverage of the events in New York and on the FIRE radio broadcasts on Internet. They were sent out on a daily basis to a 250 e-mail list of networks of activists, communicators and journalists throughout the region. Receivers of the information multiplied the news in local radios, newspapers, magazines, television and women’s networks and organizations.

./english/396.txt:180:· Wrote daily features that were sent to media in the region, to place in our WEB sites and to send to women’s electronic networks in all the countries in the region.

./english/396.txt:198:· Another contribution included by FIRE in the language proposed by the Media Caucus for the official document was the reference to access by women to radio, and access to the allocation of frequencies, which was absent in the Platform for Action of the IV World Conference in 1995. The Women’s Network of the World Association of Community Radios (AMARC) had prepared to include it

./english/396.txt:216:Productions: CIMAC and FIRE produced and distributed daily features in English and Spanish that were sent to electronic directories of media in Latin América and the Caribbean and to women’s organizations and networks. Many were features in local radio, newspapers and electronic newsletters.

./english/396.txt:228:The FIRE-PLACE was organized by the FIRE staff with the contribution of the women’s regional communications networks, the Regional Women’s NGO Articulación, WomenAction, the International Committee of NGOs (CONGO), The Women’s Network of the World Association of Community Radios (AMARC), the International Tribune Center (IWTC), UNIFEM, HIVOS, REAL SERVER, AMERISOL, Genevieve Vaughan and especially all the producers, participants and the women’s movement.

./english/396.txt:230:More than 60 reception reports from all parts of the world were received for FIRE. One of the main characteristics of almost all the letters is that in them, men and women talk about what they did to re-forward, re-broadcast, re-publish and re-distributed the information in venues in their countries, multiplying the information through radio, press written, magazines, TV and in electronic networks beyond the beyond, like the airwaves themselves.

./english/396.txt:238:· In a joint effort with the Women’s Network of AMARC, FIRE and CIMAC wrote and sent daily written features through electronic networks.

./english/396.txt:246:In this experience, FIRE´s Internet strategy came to full bloom. FIRE staff believes that this has been possible because of its communications strategy of combining “voices, technologies and actions”; also because of the way it links with other networks and their media strategies, under the concept of “interactive autonomy”; because the women’s movement insisting on having a voice of its own in the world; and FIRE staff insisting that women should own their own venues, while interacting with others. It has also been possible thanks to funding agencies and philanthropists that have believed in it.

./english/396.txt:405:New networks with a view toward the future

./english/396.txt:409:FIRE forms part of the Women’s Network of the World Association of Community Radios and of the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network. It forms part of the broad movement of women doing radio worldwide. It also coordinates with WomenAction, IndyMedia and MicroRadio.com, with many women´s communications organizations throughout the world and radios stations worldwide.

./english/396.txt:585:FIRE reaches listeners directly through its live broadcasts and multimedia web pages in Spanish and English, but also reaches wider audiences through its multimedia strategy which simply means that through networking with other media venues, there is a process of re-broadcasting, re-distribution and re-publication of its programs. These unique strategies are consistent with FIRE’s objective to “connect voices, technologies and actions, amplifying women´s voices worlwide.”

./english/396.txt:587:The international women’s movement and women’s media through their networks use the FIRE broadcasts and multimedia web features to inform themselves about various issues and events, through direct listening and reception but also by redistributing the information to other media networks, and republishing the content in other media such as websites, electronic and paper magazines, newspapers, radio and television stations. In addition, as feminist activists and journalists, FIRE has been featured in many media productions and outlets worldwide, focusing on their unique strategy of producing Internet radio from women’s perspectives.

./english/396.txt:594:Webcasts were conducted primarily in Spanish and English, with additional interviews in Portuguese, French, and Chinese, among others. Interviews were conducted live in the FIRE studio, or via phone from locations around the world, or were pre-recorded by FIRE staff and correspondents, or sent to FIRE by a variety of women’s media worldwide. In addition, FIRE produces and maintains a multimedia web page with monthly features in Spanish and English, featuring women’s perspectives on a variety of issues and events. Likewise, for many of these events, FIRE sends out press releases and written reports on its e-mail distribution networks worldwide.

./english/396.txt:612:(From Chile): Dear FIRE: I am sending you by e-mail the campaign “Listen to the Women,” produced by Radio Tierra for the initiative by the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network. On Thursday the 23rd we uploaded the forum to transmit on Radio Tierra and CLADEM, at the following website: www.geocities.com/rtierra2000. There are a total of four audio files. Perla Wilson, Radio Tierra.

./english/396.txt:648:(From Switzerland): Dear María, Katerina and Nancy: I have seen the English translation of FIRE’s web page but I had to translate it to German, as we broadcast in German. Unfortunately because of the time difference, yesterday’s broadcast was too late for our women’s news program. But I will definitely use one of your reports for my next show in two weeks. Meanwhile good luck with your wonderful work. Bianca Migglioreto, President, AMARC Women’s Network.

./english/396.txt:664:(From the USA): Wow, thanks for the dibs on these broadcasts. MicroRadio.net should definitely kick into high gear for this 10-hour broadcast. FIRE has produced great programming that we’ve carried before during the World Bank/IMF Emergency Community Broadcast we did last April. I will talk wth TecSpectr and see if we can set them up with additional server space. I also hope the FIRE staff gets in touch real soon so we can coordinate. Gretchen, MicroRadio Network. (Note: MicroRadio later broadcast the FIRE Full Spectrum Marathon against Racism for March 8,2001, downloading it from the FIRE webpage).

./english/400.txt:11:Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1998a, 1998b) have elaborated an analytic framework for the study of information warfare. While they approach the topic primarily from a military and strategic studies perspective, they claim a wider applicability for their framework, in particular emphasising its usefulness in analysing the growing importance of non-state actors such as terrorist groups, criminal networks and, of particular interest here, non-governmental organisations. This framework comprises three levels of analysis - organisational, strategic and doctrinal. The analysis of these three levels is underpinned by a general conceptual approach which distinguishes two views of information: an information processing view which concentrates on the organisation, storage and transmission of particular pieces of information; and a 'structural' view of information which addresses meaning and values, and the ways in which information is embedded and embodied in organisations, artefacts and people (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1998a). These structural and processing views are presented as complementary, rather than rival, ways of looking at information and provide a way of integrating technological and organisational emphasises in discussions of information warfare.

./english/400.txt:13:"militant activists operating in, and as, [segmented, polymorphic, ideologically integrated networks] or issue networks. Social netwars tend to be anti-establishment, but any particular one may be progressive or reactionary, left- or right-wing, mass or sectarian, public or covert, threatening or promising for a society - it all depends. Whatever the case, networks of activist NGOs challenge a government (or rival NGOs) in a public issue area, and the "war" is mainly over "information" - who knows what, when, where and why. Social netwar aims to affect what an opponent knows, or thinks it knows, not only about a challenger but also about itself and the world around it." Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1999 p.202

./english/400.txt:16:Contemporaneously with the emergence of a global 'information', 'network' or 'knowledge' economy, the influence of trade unions has waned in most parts of the world. Changes in work organisation, changes in the composition of the labour market, widespread anti-union legislation, technological change and increasingly intense global competition have all contributed to this diminution of power (Olney, 1996). These developments are forcing reconsideration of the way trade unions see and organise themselves (Hyman, 1996; Munck, 1999).

./english/400.txt:24:Many effective commercial, terrorist, criminal and social organisations to some extent now display network features, at least in part reliant on the ability to exploit current and emerging ICTs (Castells, 1996; Rathmell, 1998). Arquilla & Ronfeldt (1998a) argue further, that networks are the characteristic organisational form of information warfare and that civil society actors such as NGOs have been particularly adept at using networked organisation to enable more flexible and responsive behaviour. Decentralised networks, exploiting (both old and new) communications technologies, allow small and widely scattered actors to collaborate as required, mobilising their distinctive resources jointly to pursue shared objectives. Arquilla & Ronfeldt (1998a) particularly emphasise the importance of 'all-channel' networks, where all actors are connected to all others (a form of network particularly enabled by contemporary ICTs) and which, they assert, are particularly effective in conflict situations providing both speed and redundancy of communications.

./english/400.txt:25:This development of networked organisation is also evident among multinational corporations. Many have sought to gain competitive advantage through strategic alliances including supplier and producer networks, technology development networks and standards coalitions (Castells, 1996). Similarly, 'new' social movements of recent decades, including environmental, women's, human rights and development movements, have achieved success at least in part through their adoption of networked organisational forms that allow very diverse groups to come together in collective action where values and concerns coincide (e.g. Sikkink, 1993; Castells, 1997; Schultz, 1998; Moghadam, 2000). Such non-hierarchical networks pose particular difficulties for hierarchically organised adversaries, by obscuring obvious leadership and frequently comprising redundant actors and communications channels.

./english/400.txt:26:The development of such networks has been echoed in discussion of international labour organising (e.g. Lee, 1997; ICEM, 1996; Waterman, 1998, 1999; Mazur, 2000). Historically, international trade union organisation has tended to be both hierarchic and bureaucratic. International union structures have acted as vehicles for communications among senior trade union officers, apparently remote from the concerns of many trade unionists. Globalisation of economic activity, alongside the falling cost and increased availability of both ICTs and international travel, have opened up the possibility for new (and potentially competing) channels of communication among trade unionists. A number of possible outcomes of these developments have been identified. For example, the existing global sectoral trade union federations (known collectively as the International Trade Secretariats, ITS), can establish more decentralised regional structures, and develop networks of trade union officers and representatives in industrial sectors and transnational corporations. The development of trade union networks in particular multinational corporations has been discussed in the contexts both of EU legislation covering the establishment of European Works Councils (Turner, 1996; Ramsay, 1997; Wills, 1998) and globally (ICEM, 1996; Thorpe, 1999). These developments reduce the distance between the international organisation and the workplace organisation (ICEM, 1996; 1999). Alternatively, it has become straightforward for staff in national unions to communicate with peers internationally independently of existing international structures, potentially rendering them redundant (MacShane, 1992). On occasion, international networks of trade union members and activists may use the Internet to circumvent both national and international organisations altogether. One of the more widely reported examples of transnational labour networking during the 1990s, that of the lockout of Liverpool dockworkers, demonstrated how such networks can also allow trade union members to communicate directly with peers around the world to build solidarity and avoid obstacles of reluctant national and international organisations (Lavalette & Kennedy, 1996).

./english/400.txt:27:Each of these potential network configurations alters the relationship between local, national, regional, global and sectoral levels of organisation. However, they are all still primarily concerned with networks within trade union and labour organisations. Elsewhere, the emphasis has been on developing networks which link trade unions and organised labour more generally, with other social movements (Moody, 1997; Waterman, 1998). Labour oriented NGOs have developed networks which bring trade unions together with social groups including women's' organisations and others (Martinez Lucio & Weston, 1995; Kidder & McGinn, 1995) across traditional national and sectoral organisational boundaries.

./english/400.txt:28:While the emergence of these networks is not primarily a technological development, the growth of ICTs has played an important enabling role (MacShane, 1992; Dropkin, 1996; ICEM, 1996; Waterman, 1998; Lee, 1997). The growing use of ICTs in transnational labour networking is further evidenced by frequent passing references to email and the Internet in the literature of transnational labour organising (e.g. Carr, 1999; Frundt, 1996; Marshall, 1997). Transnational networked organisation is not, however, straightforward: the availability of a technological infrastructure and the skills to use it may be a necessary prerequisite of global network organisation (and establishing the prerequisites globally itself remains a formidable obstacle), but it is not sufficient. Networks are likely to need to adapt, for example to the particular culture and organisation of individual corporations (Spooner, 1998), while organisational, linguistic and cultural difficulties are likely further to continue to provide substantial obstacles to the development of online transnational networks, for example among trade union educators (Walker & Creanor, 2000; Walker, 2000). By the mid-1990s, effective transnational information networks remained largely theoretical (Ramsay, 1997). Neither can the development of networks always be seen as positive. In some cases emerging networks may pose threats to effective transnational organisation, for example where local labour and management form networks to compete for resources with other plants in a multinational company (Martinez Lucio & Weston, 1995). Going further, we may also speculate that decentralised networks, with a tendency to focus on the local may undermine the role of unions as aggregators of employee interests, making it harder to develop solidarity around more global issues.

./english/400.txt:29:Transnational networks comprised solely of labour activists may face fundamental problems. Apart from 'elite' actors who operate at transnational levels, most trade unionists remain located in diverse national contexts. Collective action among these nationally-situated actors requires the development of trust, reciprocity and a shared 'cultural learning'. The circumstances in which these can develop may prove to be very limited (Tarrow, 2000). Arquilla & Ronfeldt suggest (1998a) it is not necessarily the case that networked organisation is the only possible mode of organisation in information-intensive conflict, but that mastery of its techniques are essential. The combination of hierarchical and decentralised organisation ultimately may prove to be effective in transnational labour organising: campaigns in support of Guatemalan coffee workers benefitted on the one hand from the rapid transfer of information, decision making and grassroots involvement of workers and other social groups, and on the other hand with the ability to mobilise people and to provide financial and infrastructure resources possible from the more traditionally accountable IUF (Kidder & McGinn, 1995). Similar relationships between centralised hierarchies and decentralised networks can be seen in the apparently decentralised networks of 'new' social movements. For example human rights, issue-based networks may include decentralised organisations linked to local social movements typically concerned with struggling to establish or defend their own human rights, alongside organisations, such as international governmental organisations and private foundations concerned with the defence of others' rights (Sikkink, 1993; Sharpe, 2000). The environmental movement similarly includes organisations such as Greenpeace which has a highly centralised organisation in combination with a decentralised global network of local groups and activists (Castells, 1997).

./english/400.txt:31:Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1998b) have argued that the characteristic strategic approach of information warfare, enabled by information-intensive networked organisation, is that of 'swarming' in which small, dispersed and mobile forces come together rapidly to engage with an adversary before rapidly dissolving. The ability to continue swarming attacks by repeatedly dispersing and coalescing as a series of 'sustainable pulses' becomes the key feature of 'swarm networks'. Swarming in social conflict has a long history - Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1989b) illustrate this with the example of Marx's description of workers and peasants confrontation with state authorities on the streets of Paris in 1848 (Marx 1850; 1959: pp. 281-307). More recent reminders of the continuing significance of physical swarming in social conflict can be found in the case of protests against the World Bank and IMF in Seattle (Financial Times, 1999) and Prague (Anderson, 2000).

./english/400.txt:33:Arquila & Ronfeldt’s information warfare framework suggests that the corporate campaign may prove to be a characteristic strategy for trade unions for two reasons. Firstly, broadening the dispute into the public arena makes it an information-intensive battle for ‘hearts and minds’. Both sides of the conflict engage in campaigns to control what information is available and the meanings that are widely attached to it. Secondly, the approach is network-oriented both in the attempt to mobilise wider networks of social and governmental/regulatory actors (McGuiness, 1996) and in the identification of actors in the corporate adversary’s financial, supply-chain or other networks as legitimate targets.

./english/400.txt:35:The importance of ICTs in social netwar is twofold. Firstly, they provide the communications infrastructure by which networked organisation can be sustained particularly at a transnational level. Secondly, they constitute a terrain on which aspects of social conflicts are played out. Discussion of ICTs and information as terrain is separated here into their related structural and procedural aspects (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1998a). The structural dimension is concerned with ideas and values, and ways in which the Internet and more conventional media provide an arena for 'hearts and minds' battles for wider public support. The information processing aspects are seen more directly in discussions of issues such as denial of service and Internet security.

./english/400.txt:44:ICEM's founding documents make clear its primary focus on building trade unionism as a 'new power relationship to the real decision networks of the world economy - the transnational corporations' (ICEM, 1995). The emphasis is on building a global (as distinct from international) unionism that is based primarily on industrial union organisation in the rapidly growing multinationals which dominate many of the industrial sectors in which ICEM affiliates organise. These themes are developed further in a number of ICEM publications (e.g. ICEM, 1999a;1999b).

./english/400.txt:45:ICEM, and some of its predecessor organisations, particularly the International Chemical Workers' Federation (ICF) and the International Federation of Chemical, Energy and General Workers' Unions (ICEF), have perhaps been among the more alert labour organisations to the potential of information and communication technologies over the last 30 years. In 1972, the then General Secretary of the ICF was already discussing the use of computerised databases to monitor the activities of multinational enterprises and the potential of using the telex network to support international education activities (Levinson, 1972). During the early 1980s ICEF began to develop its use of commercial electronic databases as research tools when responding to affiliates' requests for information about multinational corporations. By the early 1990s, the ICEF reported using these databases in response to over 2,000 such requests and using email to improve communications with, and information dissemination to, at least some affiliates (Catterson 1992). The use of databases and email to collect and disseminate information played an important role in the international campaign to end a dispute at an aluminium plant in Ravenswood, USA. in which the ICEF played an important role (Herod, 1995).

./english/400.txt:61:In February 1998, ICEM launched a campaign to ensure that the mining multinational Rio Tinto, would "respect human and trade union rights and adhere to a set of basic standards in the field of the environment, occupational health and safety and working condition" (ICEM, 1998b). The company was targetted because of "the extreme actions of the company in seeking to de-unionise its operations and to restrict the bargaining rights of its workers" (ICEM, 1997: 0). Alongside the campaigning activities ICEM have also set about building an organisational network among those affiliates organising in Rio Tinto-owned companies. In early 2001, the Web pages were taken down following the reintroduction of collective bargaining in Australian coal mines previously on individual contracts and the beginning of discussions on a possible global agreement.

./english/400.txt:73:Given the focus of the paper - a single trade union body - the campaigns share many organisational features. The actors include ICEM and typically officers at national and local levels of affiliated unions. In cases A and D, with their primary emphasis on a specific local dispute, and relatively limited duration, the networks established through international meetings, speakers tours and use of communications technologies have not (at least yet) developed into more established networks. In one case (Campaign C) the campaign has been closely associated with the establishment of a more formal network, co-ordinated by ICEM, of affiliated unions organising in the company. Campaign C also aimed to mobilise wider constituencies including environmentalists, indigenous peoples' groups and most particularly, company shareholders in support of some union demands. In Campaign B, ICEM worked at an international level with the ICFTU and researchers in the UK and Russia to raise the situation of Russian workers in the ILO, bringing a case against the Russian government.

./english/400.txt:100:Perhaps more important than the use of the Web as a terrain are the relation of ICTs to union organisation. ICT and cheap travel have enabled more effective co-ordination of networked 'real world' responses in at least two of the campaigns, where speaking tours have built support among unions international for those unions direct involved in conflict. Ultimately, in the two campaigns (A&D) which have reached clear-cut resolution, the local demonstrations and pickets and demonstrations of wider trade union support appear to have been much more significant than the cybercampaigns. The cybercampaigns are perhaps better seen as a relatively low-cost form of corporate campaigning, raising the profile of a dispute particularly among Internet-using labour activists and in some cases also the mainstream media. These disputes did to some extent exhibit physical and virtual 'swarming' behaviour as distributed actors came together to act during the dispute, without forming a specific and enduring organisational structure.

./english/400.txt:101:The cybercampaigns examined here have all sought to broaden the campaigns, in two ways. Firstly, they have sought to globalise the disputes. One particular feature of the two tyre-industry cybercampaigns was their highlighting of differences in the treatment of workers in foreign subsidiaries and in the 'home' countries of the parent multinationals (Japan and Germany in these cases) - a tactic to which the Internet, as an increasingly global medium may be particularly well suited. Secondly, and in common with many corporate campaigns, they have identified actors in the immediate adversary's networks as being legitimate targets for protest.

./english/400.txt:103:We may expect to see such campaigning techniques used increasingly in both national and transnational industrial disputes. ICEM affiliates are now developing their own use of such techniques and the Union Network International (perhaps the most 'new economy' ITS in the nature of the workers it represents), for example, sees the use of the Internet in organising in general, and development of 'e-campaigns' in particular, as future priority areas (UNI, 2000).

./english/400.txt:104:The information warfare framework used has provided a valuable framework for examining international labour campaigning in general and the use of ICT in particular. In both the general discussion and the particular case studies it has highlighted the role of the network as an organisational form and 'swarming' - both virtual and physical - as tactics in conflict situations.

./english/400.txt:118:Castells, M. (1996), The Rise of the Network Society - The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. 1, Blackwell; Cambridge, MA

./english/400.txt:140:ICEM (1998b) ICEM Rio Tinto Network Meeting Johannesburg, 7-9 February 1998 Report, available at: http://www.icem.org/campaigns/rio_tinto/campaign_launch.html [viewed 23 Nov. 2000]

./english/400.txt:147:Kidder, T. & McGinn, M. (1995), In the Wake of NAFTA: Transnational Workers' Networks, New Internationalism, Vol. 25, pp. 14-21

./english/400.txt:154:Martinez Lucio, M. & Weston, S. (1995), Trade Unions and Networking in the Context of Change: Evaluating the Outcomes of Decentralisation in Industrial Relations, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 16 233-251

./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:169:Schultz, M. (1998) Collective Action Across Borders: Opportunity Structures, Network Capacities and Communicative Praxis in the Age of Advanced Globalisation, Sociological Perspectives 41(3), pp. 587-616

./english/400.txt:174:Sikkink, K. (1993), Human rights, principled issue-networks, and sovereignty in Latin America, International Organization 47(3) pp411-441

./english/400.txt:182:Union Network International (2000) Organising in the Network Economy, Geneva

./english/400.txt:185:Walker, S. & Creanor, L.. (2000), European Trade Union Distance Education: Problems and Potential, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Networked Learning, University of Lancaster, 17th-19th April

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

./english/401.txt:46:If we try to distil a minimum profile of emancipation as it emerges from contemporary re-orientations, it includes, as regards aims, the concern with autonomy, in terms of organization, a tendency towards network forms, and, in terms of mentality, a tendency towards self-limitation. The main differences between the modern and the postmodern emancipations appears to be that the former situate themselves within the Enlightenment tradition and secondly that they take an instrumental attitude to power, whereas the latter problematize power to a much greater degree…In some respects the minimum profile of emancipation also matches that of particularism, chauvinism and fundamentalism, which are likewise preoccupied with autonomy. There remains a fundamental tension between emancipations in a particularistic sense and emancipation in a general sense, or between emancipations and emancipation […] A working definition I propose is that emancipation refers to collective actions which seek to level and disperse power, or seek to install more inclusive values than the prevailing ones. This means that emancipation…involves a moral horizon. (Jan Nederveen Pieterse 1992:31-2)

./english/401.txt:98:· Conflating the international union organization with the international labor movement, or privileging the former above the latter, and assuming the former to be the immutable form of labor self-articulation inter/nationally. This in a period in which the network appears to be the preferred form of articulation within global solidarity movements.

./english/401.txt:100:In so far, however, as a new labor internationalism is understood as one amongst many internationals and internationalisms (concerned with democracy, alternative production/consumption, with rights, with knowledge) then RSE represents no obstacle to re-articulating the original Marxist trinity, Emancipation-Internationalism-Emancipation, in a manner appropriate for, against and beyond a globalized networked capitalist (dis)order.

./english/401.txt:152:New alliances—particularly with social movements, NGOs, and political parties opposed to neoliberal-inspired policies—have also been pursued at the international level, through participation in demonstrations such as the one in Seattle (at the WTO meeting, in 1999), in Washington (at the IMF meeting, in 2000), and in Quebec (at the FTAA meeting, in 2001); in the constitution of networks, such as the Continental Social Alliance…; and in events such as the World Social Forum…[in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2001 – PW]…CUT's discourse has been increasingly incorporating the expression “citizen union” to designate (not without internal tensions), in an adverse context, a union practice of a more ["propositional"] character, that takes as its central issues the defense of employment and of social rights, that seeks to expand its action to institutional spaces and have a more direct influence on the formulation and execution of public social policies, that seeks to construct closer links with other organizations and social movements, at local (by focusing on the question of “local government”), national (by discussing a “national project”), and international levels.

./english/401.txt:169:The union takes part in the collective-bargaining-oriented European Works Councils (Costa 2001) for unions in the shoe sector. It seems to have been in advance of the Communist-aligned national CGTP-IN in joining European solidarity demonstrations (union supported but not union controlled, precursors of what some are now calling the Global Justice Movement or GJM). And, internationally, it has links with a dozen or more organizations and networks, union or other, associated with the GJM. The latter include union and rural labor organizations in Brazil, human rights and peace organizations, solidarity networks for homeworkers and the unemployed (with contacts also involving such countries as the UK, Spain, Australia, Thailand, Chile):

./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: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:195:Following its 1999 conference in South Africa, SIGTUR undertook three campaigns: for a common Mayday 2000, around the issue of jobs; a corporate campaign against the anti-union Rio Tinto mining multinational (involving union cooperation with environmental, indigenous and human rights campaigners), and a 'global unionism' project. The authors report success on all three campaigns. The Rio Tinto campaign is of particular interest in so far as it involved a traditional international labor organization, the International Chemical, Energy and Mineworkers Federation (ICEM). By 'global unionism' SIGTUR apparently means direct cross-national ties of intensive practical exchange and solidarity, as here exemplified by an agreement between port/dockworkers' unions in Durban and Fremantle. L&W recognize four present challenges: uneven union organizational capacity and different local political traditions; the lack of resource commitment to the network by even the stronger national confederations; the necessity for unions to broaden their support base by organizing the casual, part-time and informal sector workers, as well as forming structured coalitions with women's, ecological and other such movements; and finding the right way of relating to the traditional institutionalized union internationals.

./english/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:245: These absences/silences are, to my mind, obstacles to a rethinking of labor internationalism in the era of a globalized, networked, services and financial capitalism (GNC). But they are also, it must be recognized, reflective or expressive of not only most contemporary labor studies but of the inter/national union movement itself, as 1) shaped by a century of National Industrial Colonial Capitalism (NICC) , and 2) impacted and effectively sidelined by a revolution within capitalism for which traditional union forms, practices and theories did not prepare it. Emancipation and internationalism, moreover, are not add-ons that can be bolted on to the national-industrial tractor to carry out tasks for which it was not originally designed. And even if they can be considered as part of the original toolbox of labor – as they indeed are or were – they cannot simply be drawn out of storage, or the museum, since the capitalism to which they were originally addressed was a largely pre- or early-industrial one. The full nature and trajectory of contemporary capitalism could not be predicted (despite brilliant insights by the early Marxists), and is only becoming evident as it unfolds itself and is subject to fresh analysis.

./english/402.txt:12:The experience of women within the Forum might point here in different directions. I have no figures for this year, but at both previous events, women were almost 50 percent of the participants. There are powerful feminists on the panels and in at least the IC, quite capable here of making the Forum a Feminist Issue. There are numerous panels on gender and sexuality in both the Central and Marginal programmes. Whilst the recent Latin American/Caribbean Feminist Encounter considered alternatives to the old pattern, and addressed itself centrally to globalisation, it seems to have not identified itself as such with the Forum process. Despite a discernible shift in the international women’s/feminist networks, over recent years, away from the inter/state bodies and toward the public arena, I am wondering whether the lobby has not been shifted from that old site to this new one.

./english/402.txt:16:4. A Social Movement Network: De/Centralised?

./english/402.txt:18:At two previous Forums there has been issued a ‘Call of Social Movements’. The initiative for such has come from members of the OC and IC, some being recognisable social movements, others being recognisable NGOs. Both Calls have been publicly presented and then signed by 50-100 other organisations and networks. This year, the notion of a ‘Social Movements World Network’ (SMWN) was widely circulated on the web and subject to a two-session public discussion within the Forum. This eventually produced a much shorter, one-page, declaration, proposing a continuation of discussion about the nature of such a network, with further meetings to take place during major movement events this year and next. It may be that what I received was an interim document and that there either is or will be a longer one. But, following the two dramatic previous Calls, and the larger, better-publicised, two-stage, discussion this year, one is struck by the modesty and caution of this proposal.

./english/402.txt:22:I am actually favourable to, even enthusiastic about, the creation of such a network. In part this is because there exists no such internationally. In part because it is going to provide information and ideas on a continuing basis - and to those people/places otherwise excluded from the periodic Forums. In so far as this will have an existence in ‘real virtuality’ (Manuel Castells), it may go beyond a WSF that remains largely earth-bound and institutional. Apart from the questions above, certain crucial others remain (about which I may only have yet other questions).

./english/402.txt:24:Is the network going to be primarily political/institutional or primarily communicational? In the first case, communication is likely to be made functional to the political/institutional. In the second case, we may be into a different ballgame or ballpark. In the first case, there is likely to operate a ‘banking’ model of information, in which maximum information is collected, to be then dealt out to customers in terms of power and profit. In the second case, there can operate the principle of the potlatch, or gift economy, in which individual generosity is understood to benefit the community. The understanding here is a common African saying: I am who I am because of other people.

./english/402.txt:26:Even in the best of all possible cyberworlds, however, there remain questions of appropriate modes (information, ideas, dialogue), of form (printed word at one end, multimedia at the other) and control (handling cybernuts and our own homegrown fundamentalists). There do exist various relevant, if partial, models of international social-movement, civil society, anti-globalisation networks – earth-bound or cyberspatial. Indy Media Centre (IMC) has got to be the most important here, and needs to be reflected upon both for what it can do and what it doesn’t. Finally, any SMWN is going to have to go beyond network babble and recognise that networks do not exist on one, emancipatory, model. In discussing networks, Arturo Escobar (2003) has said that

./english/402.txt:30:In the end, however, it does not too much matter in which place/space, on which model the SMWN takes shape. The existence of the web, combining low cost of entry, wide reach and great speed, provides the assurance that such a network will be supplemented or challenged by others.

./english/402.txt:40:The open secret of the electronic media, the decisive political factor, which has been waiting, suppressed or crippled, for its moment to come, is their mobilising power. When I say mobilize… namely to make [people] more mobile than they are. As free as dancers, as aware as football players, as surprising as guerrillas. Anyone who thinks of the masses only as the object of politics, cannot mobilize them. He wants to push them around. A parcel is not mobile; it can only be pushed to and fro. Marches, columns, parades, immobilize people […] The new media are egalitarian in structure. Anyone can take part in them by a simple switching process […] The new media are orientated towards action, not contemplation; towards the present, not tradition […] It is wrong to regard media equipment as mere means of consumption. It is always, in principle, also means of production […] In the socialist movements the dialectic of discipline and spontaneity, centralism and decentralization, authoritarian leadership and anti-authoritarian disintegration has long ago reached deadlock. Networklike communication models built on the principle of reversibility of circuits might give indications of how to overcome this situation. (Hans Magnus Enzensberger 1976:21-53)

./english/402.txt:52:For the rest, I am inspired by: energetic and innovative social protest, and original analyses of the local-national-global dialectic in Argentina; by the belated appearance in Peru of a network, Raiz/Root, which clearly has some feeling that the WSF is more than an NGO jamboree; by the Kidz in the Kamp who were discussing under a tree, and with informal translation, how to ensure that the emancipatory and critical forces had more impact on the Forum process; by the struggle, against all odds, of the US Znet people to mount ‘Life after Capitalism’, an event of post-capitalist propuesta within the Forum; by the increasing number of compañer@s, of various ages, identities, movements and sexual orientations, who believe that, in the construction of a meaningfully civil global society, transparency is not only the best policy but the right one.

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

./english/403.txt:27:The old media was important in publicising and drawing attention to the new, highlighting the fact that, although the Net is an important new tool, activists still largely rely on coverage in the traditional media and cannot rely solely upon the emerging communications networks (Gibson & Kelly 2000).

./english/403.txt:31:The tensions within the autonomous networks regarding media representation have allowed for an easy capitalisation by more media hungry and obedient groups (Aggy K and Andrew 2002).

./english/403.txt:35:If the enthusiastic embrace of ICT has been the norm within the social movements that aim to challenge global capital, its use has not been without controversy. Some, working from a Green perspective, are critical of those who hold that ‘technology is "neutral" and could be made to serve social justice’ (Starr 2000: 177). Beyond this, the criticisms of the place of ICT within radical politics has been couched in terms of how time and energy invested in the ‘virtual’ relates to activity in the ‘real’ world. For example, some participants have feared the possibility of a situation in which ‘information circulates endlessly between computers without being put back into a human context’ (ECN 1992). In a related manner, others have argued that the unconsidered application of electronic communications may serve to undermine more traditional forms of linkage. In the words of Randy Stoecker (2000), not only is there the risk that ‘the Internet is isolating us in front of our monitors, keeping us off the streets’, but many of the relationships that are established online will by their very nature remain superficial — ‘faceless one-dimensional stranger to stranger interaction’. Then again, if Mario Diani is right, this risk may be overtstated. Diani (2000: 393-4) makes the point that different kinds of social movement networks use ICT in different ways, consistent with their broader approach to marshalling support and effecting social change. More than this, he suggests that ‘the most distinctive contribution’ of CMC [computer-mediated communication] to social movements’, particularly those premised upon a participatory organisational structure oriented towards direct action, has been ‘of an instrumental rather than symbolic kind’. In other words, the use of ICT in such circles has largely been to ‘reinforce face-to-face acquaintances and exchanges’ (Diani 2000: 397, 391).

./english/403.txt:37:It is with projects such as the Indymedia network (www.indymedia.org), however, that it becomes possible to talk of the emergence of a distinctly social movement electronic communications forum. The first Indymedia site was established as part of the Seattle days of protest, where they proved effective in relaying images, audio recordings and written accounts of the mass blockade (Weingartner 2001). Since then, Indymedia sites have been formed across Western Europe, the Americas, and Australasia (Shumway 2001) — and most ecently, in the Middle East. Powered by ‘open publishing’ software that allows users both to upload materials and to offer commentaries on the stories, opinions and images provided by others, Indymedia can be seen as part of a broader Internet phenomenon of sites fuelled by ‘the creativity of their users, not [by] professional producers as was the tradition with earlier electronic media’ (Arnison 2002). At the same time, Arnison has argued, one of the issues presently being debated within the Indymedia network of web sites is precisely ‘what to do when they are not covering a major event’. One response to this dilemma has been to mentor new ventures into ‘real world media’. In Melbourne, for example, there is The Paper, a fortnightly publication that began around the S11 protests, and has since carved out its own identity independently of the local Indymedia collective.

./english/403.txt:51:Although ultimately inconclusive, a debate on information overload within social movements that took place around the Second Intercontinental Encuentro of 1997 helps throw further light on the question. The First Encuentro, held the previous year in Chiapas, had brought together some 3,000 activists from a range of circles — above all in North America and Europe — linked by a sense of affinity with the Zapatistas of Southern Mexico. One of the proposals arising from the First Encuentro was for an international network of communication, able to circulate news and views of the ‘One "Nos" and Many "Yeses" opposed to global neo-liberalism, and consideration of how best to achieve this was placed on the agenda for the follow up gathering in Spain.

./english/403.txt:53:The debate began with a long reflective piece penned primarily by Monty Neill (1997a), an editor of the US-based journal Midnight Notes. Following a considered account of the Zapatistas’ significance for other movements seeking to challenge global capitalism, Neill (1997b) turned to the specific proposal for a communications network:

./english/403.txt:55:Abstractly this is fine, but it begs essential questions: what is to be communicated, by whom to whom? In the "information age," it is all too easy to be deluged with information. This is not helpful unless the information is well organized for some use — which only raises the question, who will organize the information? The EZLN and its supporters have been marvellously inventive in using networks, but multiply Chiapas by even 10, never mind the thousands needed: how many channels can the mind consider? This is not the individual's problem. Sorting information requires political collectivity. It implies calculated division of labor and aspects of centralization: someone else will decide for you (presumably with your consent) what reaches you and what is the most important information. It also poses the related problem: what struggles deserve what attention, and who decides?

./english/403.txt:59:The most detailed response to Neill came from Stefan Wray (1997), who argued that what might at first seem to be political issues were often instead technical problems with software solutions. Criticising one push-based model for a global communications network (RICA 1996) that threatened to bury recipients under what he termed ‘a mountain of information’, Wray argued instead for a ‘user-based information retrieval system’. In his model, e-mail would be deposited at an archive, where automated software residing on subscribers’ computers could interrogate it by keyword, selecting only those files identified as relevant to the individual user.

./english/403.txt:91:This touches in turn upon some arguments raised in an interview that Anita Lacey and I recently conducted with another Melbourne comrade, as part of a small, ongoing enquiry into the use of information and ICT in local anti-capitalist politics. Active in a network that seeks to open up space for an ongoing dialogue between environmental and workplace activists, Colin defined useful information as ‘what can facilitate the process of building bridges and crossing borders’. Sceptical of the notion that trust — ‘the most important question’ — could be established ‘through the screen’, his biggest concern was that the enormous quantities of information available online may blind us to the knowledge and wisdom available from face-to-face encounters with those who have experienced and learned from earlier struggles against capital and the state.

./english/403.txt:135:Diani, M. (2000) ‘Social Movement Networks Virtual and Real’, Information, Communication & Society 3 (3).

./english/403.txt:145:Frederick, H. (1993) ‘Computer Networks and the Emergence of Global Civil Society’, in Harasim, L. (ed.) Global Networks: Computers and International Communication. Cambridge: MIT Press.

./english/403.txt:161:Lacey, A. (2001) Networks of Protest, Communities of Resistance: Autonomous Activism in Contemporary Britain. Ph.D thesis, Centre for European Studies, Monash University, currently submitted for examination.

./english/403.txt:165:Myers, D. (1998) ‘Social Activism through Computer Networks’, American Sociological Association's Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements, Working Paper Series 1 (3), http://www.nd.edu/~dmyers/cbsm/vol1/myers2.html, accessed 15 January 2002.

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

./english/403.txt:175:RICA (1996) ‘RICA: Proposal for Communication Network/Propuesta para Red de Comunicacion’, http://lists.village.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/spoons/archive_msgpl?file=aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_1996/96-09-24.223&msgnum=33&start=4005&end=4460’, accessed 1 May 2000.

./english/403.txt:183:Shumway, C. (2001) ‘Participatory Media Networks: A New Model for Producing and Disseminating Progressive News and Information’, http://chris.shumway.tripod.com/pmn.htm, accessed 1 August 2001.

./english/409.txt:14:The particular site was chosen because Brazils Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, the PT) is in power in the city of Porto Alegre, as well as in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The conference was organized by a network of Brazilian unions and NGOs, but the PT provided state-of-the-art conference facilities at the Catholic University of Porto Alegre and paid the bill for a star-studded roster of speakers. Having a progressive government sponsor was a departure for a group of people accustomed to being met with clouds of pepper spray, border strip searches and no-protest zones. In Porto Alegre, activists were welcomed by friendly police officers and greeters with official banners from the tourism department.

./english/409.txt:49:In the end, the conference did not speak in one voice; there was no single official statement (though there were dozens of unofficial ones). Instead of sweeping blueprints for political change, there were glimpses of local democratic alternatives. The Landless Peasants Movement took delegates on day trips to reappropriated farmland used for sustainable agriculture. And then there was the living alternative of Porto Alegre itself. The city has become a showcase of participatory democracy studied around the world. In Porto Alegre, democracy isnt a polite matter of casting ballots; its a contact sport, carried out in sprawling town hall meetings. The centerpiece of the Workers Partys platform is something called "the participatory budget," an initiative that gives residents, through a network of neighborhood councils and a shadow city council, a direct say in such decisions as how much of the municipal budget should go to sanitation versus transportation.

./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/416.txt:1:Minutes of the Repression Network meeting in Frankfurt, 03.11.06

./english/416.txt:5:First we had a discussion about using the mailing list of our Network, criticizing other Network members and dealing with political differences between us. A solution could not be found during the meeting but only the day after.

./english/416.txt:7:Then we discussed about the ideas / proposals that were published before in the repression mailing list. We agreed that the main issues for the Repression Network to deal with during the coming period would be

./english/416.txt:19:We necessarily need to think about broadening our Network. We must win more people and from more and various structures for the support of our work. We must achieve a more productive and effective work. The issues of repression should not get lost inside the ESF process.

./english/417.txt:5:the 4th European Social Forum in Athens, a list of reporting networks (the minutes circulated

./english/417.txt:8:The whole EPA however took place, from Nov 3 until Nov 5. On Nov 3 the networks met,

./english/417.txt:18:III. List networks which gave reports of their meetings

./english/417.txt:51:-> Advances could be reached especially in terms of building a network for precarious work

./english/417.txt:53:future, the thematic networks should be extended.

./english/417.txt:61: thematically expanding forum. They built networks for voluntary and collective work,

./english/417.txt:62: which made the forum possible; they included networks which have not participated in

./english/417.txt:93:c) Babels Network Greece

./english/417.txt:102:be invested in coordinating Babels networks locally/nationally and to establish an overall co-

./english/417.txt:106: within a network of activists. They started early to develop its tools (software and hard

./english/417.txt:117:Bolkestein directive etc. – 30 organizations participate in the network, Laicism in Europe will

./english/417.txt:128:ized in advance by EPA, they shouldn’t be delegated into the network. EPA should accept that

./english/417.txt:135:-> Eastern Europe should be included in all events and networks as a question of European

./english/417.txt:163:-> Networking is positive; however, some networks are not pluralistic but dominated by spe-

./english/417.txt:165:within the networks

./english/417.txt:166:-> If Political Parties become too prominent in networks, further work is often hindered.

./english/417.txt:185:tential synergies are developed and offered. Right now there are people and networks not at-

./english/417.txt:195:there was a strong focus on regional networks as political agents as well as a focus on con-

./english/417.txt:198:needs to be made a thematic priority in the networks, in terms of integration and orientation –

./english/417.txt:208:networks need to be hindered - > the Charta of Principles applies to everybody!

./english/417.txt:214:Marie, Association Grit/Greed – network migration

./english/417.txt:218:Networks were not prepared to work collaboratively with other networks/people

./english/417.txt:230:-> Although the forum was enlarged territorially, some networks and movements were lost in

./english/417.txt:237:-> EPA’s should ensure that there is space for transversal campaigns, something networks

./english/417.txt:248:-> The networks have to be willing to debate with other groups

./english/417.txt:252:The 4 th Forum demonstrated a new stage: Thematic networks emerged and new thematic dy-

./english/417.txt:274:-> Thus, the debate about alternative strategies have to be strengthened; networks don’t own

./english/417.txt:275:issues and questions; there is a need to define how much space should be given to networks

./english/417.txt:296:  Further work should be invested in coordinating Babels networks locally/nationally

./english/417.txt:320: take place somewhere else. If Political Parties become too prominent in networks, fur-

./english/417.txt:329: shouldn’t be delegated into the network. EPA should accept that responsibility.

./english/417.txt:334: to be taken, something networks cannot ensure; EPA should mobilize for a new con-

./english/417.txt:344: Europe needs to be made a thematic priority in the networks, in terms of integration

./english/417.txt:346:  Eastern Europe should be included in all events and networks as a question of a Euro-

./english/417.txt:350:Thematic networks /Platforms

./english/417.txt:351:  Thematic networks should be extended.

./english/417.txt:352:  Networking is positive; however, some networks are not pluralistic but dominated by

./english/417.txt:354: flected within the networks

./english/417.txt:357: tion and radicalization networks need to be hindered. Networks were not prepared to

./english/417.txt:358: work collaboratively with other networks/people

./english/417.txt:359:  Networks don’t own issues and questions; there is a need to define how much space

./english/417.txt:360: should be given to networks and how much space should be given to overall debate.

./english/417.txt:366:  Although the forum was enlarged territorially, some networks and movements were

./english/417.txt:381:III. List of networks which had meetings (minutes are not taken from their oral reports

./english/417.txt:382:because each networks should make its own report and send it. They can also be con-

./english/417.txt:384:  Network list as explained at Frankfurt EPA

./english/417.txt:403:  Tax justice network - Contact: info@taxjustice.net www.taxjustice.net0

./english/419.txt:13:IG. 10. Gender, racial, youth/old, east/west … balance in ESF seminars, workshops, and in EPA networks and assembly must be improved

./english/419.txt:23:IM. 3. How to articulate network themes within a more global political reflection.

./english/419.txt:24:IM. 4. Transversality cannot be solved only by the networks. How is possible to balance the work between networks and common places?

./english/419.txt:25:IM. 5. Networks not enough open or too much controlled by some organisations

./english/419.txt:26:IM. 6. How to give in each country the possibilities to participate to networks and to the process

./english/419.txt:41:IE. 3. Difficult to understand how EPA functions for external people (lack of information in the web-site, not possible to access information about networks, no agenda……)

./english/419.txt:43:IE. 5. Needs of visibility of networks, more networks but also more transversality. Risk that network become affinity political groups

./english/419.txt:64:PM. 4. Improving merging process by new methodology (first selecting themes, than having discussion by themes for merging preparation, networks actors of the merging, selfmerging, more time to work on the merging)

./english/419.txt:66:PM. 6. Make sure that information on network is spread; by website with info: who’s contact person, how to join, practical info on the network functioning

./english/419.txt:68:PM. 8. Leave a day after ESF for cooperation between organisations, networks and all the subjects to prepare co-ordinate actions to be decided in the assembly of movements if there is consensus

./english/470.txt:95:(10) Ensure that the WSF as a whole and the forums worldwide not make the mistake of trying to become an international, a movement of movements, or even just a voice of the world's movements. To be a forum, the WSF and the smaller component forums need to be as broad and diverse as possible. But, being that broad and that diverse is simply being too broad and too diverse to be an organization. The forums can and should be venues for meeting. They can and should facilitate networking among mutually congenial participants that leads to shared actions. But to be an organization that takes decisions about anything other than its component forums would transcend the forum project's degree of unity.

./english/470.txt:97:(11) Mandate that the forums at every level, including the WSF, welcome people from diverse constituencies using the forums and their processes to make contacts and to develop ties that can in turn yield national, regional, or even international networks or movements of movements which do share sufficiently their political aspirations to work closely together, but which exist alongside rather than instead of the forum phenomenon.

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

./english/472.txt:43:The fourth Forum moved to Mumbai, symbolically staking in Asia the claim to be a genuine world forum. About 80,000 people attended, making it smaller than the previous meeting at Porto Alegre, but larger than the first two, and laying to rest the fears of some that it would be impossible to attract similar numbers from the many cultures and the extreme poverty of South Asia. The atmosphere was festive, following local traditions of including musical and dramatic performance in political demonstrations. The widespread Indian NGO network brought more poor people to the Mumbai Forum than were in evidence at any of the Porto Alegre meetings.

./english/472.txt:52:Undoubtedly, such a large event makes the full consultation of all potential participants impossible. It is difficult for such a process to function in an open, deliberative way or, even more, to give such a huge constituency a say in advance planning. Critics from the direct action movement, however, insist that anarchists have adopted consensus mechanisms that give representation and create unity among a large number of tight-knit affinity groups in massive demonstrations. According to David Graeber of the activist network, Peoples’ Global Action, these mechanisms provide a model for democratic deliberation in large assemblies. But they have rarely been applied in anything more than short-term actions.

./english/472.txt:54:The debate over internal democracy has largely occurred among the participants from the North, or those exposed to the debate through their international NGO network connections. It does not much affect the thousands of participants who come from smaller grassroots organizations or who simply show up on their own. Those who come moved by a single issue can give their presentations, compare notes with others who share their concerns and be satisfied. In this way, what goes on in the small workshops and in the corridors is far more important to them than the decisions made ahead of time or the large plenaries. And those who come on their own, of whom there are many, come primarily as consumers of information. They rarely seek to influence structural decisions.

./english/472.txt:56:Along with the issue of internal democracy, the Forum debates the strategic issue of its external projection: whether it can take concerted political action as a body. The Charter adopted in 2001 ruled out joint action, but many participants, including many on the International Council, want the Forum to propose and undertake worldwide political action. The political moderates, however, especially those within the NGO community, value the Forum as an opportunity for international networking and the exchange of ideas. They do not want the forum to go beyond its provision of a “space”: it should be a talking shop for civil society and should steer clear of political intervention.

./english/472.txt:58:Other activists agree, but for a different reason: some fear that any concerted action coming out of the Social Forum will be marked by the same rigid, top-down organization that they criticize in the Forum itself. Naomi Klein, for example, would prefer the movement to remain rooted in decentralized communities, neighborhood councils and land reform, “networked internationally to resist further assaults from the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.”6

./english/472.txt:60:Some on the International Council, on the other hand, see it as a waste to hold such a Forum merely to offer the like-minded a chance to talk among themselves. They contend that the Forum should seize upon its size and energy to offer a more coordinated challenge to transnational capital. The NGO-network model has “abandoned strategic programmes for the construction of a new type of society,” writes Emir Sader, a Brazilian sociologist on the International Council.7 “They talk about thinking globally and acting locally, but the most they can do is resist.” Instead, Sader calls on the Forum to frame “global alternatives to the big problems of the world” and present a unified challenge.

./english/500.txt:22:He warned that the glorification of individualism could undermine the WSF. ''What is the value (of the WSF in the end)? It becomes too loose a network, and its annual events turn into a jamboree, a celebration of diversity. It's no use to me (in the long run).''

./english/500.txt:40:The polycentric approach this year may also see another sub-regional WSF event taking place in Bangkok, possibly in October. For Sarojeni Rengam, executive director of Pesticide Action Network's Asia Pacific (PAN-AP) office in Penang, that poses a problem.. ''For a group like ours, which covers the whole Asia Pacific region, which sub-regional event do we focus on with our limited resources, Karachi or Bangkok?'' she asked.

./english/510.txt:14:- a forum governed by rules that renew the traditional practices of collective action. These are the founding rules of the "Porto Alegre generation," appropriate for an era of networks and of recognition of diversity and cross-cutting issues: openness; acceptance of diversity as a value; horizontality in relations between participants; non-directivity and therefore absence of spokesperson, leader, or final declaration. Collected in a Charter of Principles, these choices have now become the fundamental reference for organizing Social Forums.

./english/512.txt:10:This is evidence of the increasing assimilation of the way of doing politics that is written into the WSF Charter of Principles: by horizontal action in networks, without internal struggles for hegemony, making room for civil society to emerge as a new political actor, autonomous of parties and governments.

./english/513.txt:22:Yet, what are their ideas for change? They are many and diverse, their point of convergence is the struggle against the Neo-liberal model, to build that Other Possible World, imagined as inclusive, egalitarian and based on solidarity. For this very reason, the Forum – conceived of as an open space where social movements, initiatives, proposals, networks, organisations and individuals all come together – now sets out to face the challenge of debating the different possible ways of doing things, of conceiving actions and ensuring that changes are possible.

./english/519.txt:42:The WSF has shown itself very efficient in giving impulse to the left wing’s political struggle in the beginning of this century. Innumerous declarations, platforms and calls have been coming out of the process’ events and have been fundamental to organize from the referendum on the FTTA in Brazil to the protests against the invasion of Iraq on February 15th, 2003. In each forum, social movements network meetings agree on an agenda for global mobiliza-tions, which is reference to thousands of movements and organizations. Declarations such as the “World Charter on the Rights to the City” have been produced in many forums. During the Caracas Forum, de declaration “Another integration, urgent, possible and necessary” was made. The “Ba-mako Call”, written in a seminar that took place one day before the Forum, is an important refer-ence to our days, assembling much of what the WSF has produced up to now. Some examples of “conclusions” produced “during the Forums” could be multiplied infinitely, and many would point out its efficiency as an impelling force to the organization of initiatives which are central to the left-ist movement nowadays.

./english/519.txt:48:The global movement in which the Forum’s existence is based on has brought to us three important lessons: it demonstrates the efficiency of network-like organization to articulate current struggles (which opposes itself to pyramidal structures, which are conservative and bureaucratic); the revalue of internationalism within the left; and valuing pluralism within social and political composition of any emancipation project without establishing hierarchy among its components. The Forum-like format (open-space, self-organized, structured in network and non-decision making) copes with these challenges and must be defended against any kind of past “international directions” nostalgia.

./english/519.txt:57:At the Mumbai Forum, during a panel about the WSF’s future, Sohi Jeon already warned us about the fundamental implications of this: the Forum process must incorporate the big protagonists from popular struggles in regional, national and local levels, which is the only way for us to keep grow-ing and strengthening, which is also the only way of condensing sets of networks that compose the global movement and the WSF process. Our concern regarding this topic was reflected in the last Porto Alegre Forum, in which we adopted the methodology of stimulating the convergence of themes and struggles, increasing initiatives of dialogues and meetings among different actors.

./english/527.txt:30:The WSF lacks a comprehensive analysis of all different ideological stands. Certainly it has to remain an open space for debates and for networking, but that can be facilitated when everyone knows where he or she stands. Today, there are too many contradictions that are never discussed. To take just one example from my own movement, Attac. Attac is a progressive global movement, most of us support the Bolivarian revolution of Chavez, we are more post-capitalist than neokeynesian, but many do support the neoliberal poverty reduction policies of the millennium development goals, as well as the demand for an air ticket tax. This tax is not in line with our demand for a currency transaction tax that would slow down financial speculation.

./english/527.txt:62:One group sees the WSF as an ‘open space’, a possibility for networking and for exchange. It is in favour of a ‘mural de propostas’, a collection of all proposals and alternatives, but is definitely against all attempts to make an official synthesis that pretends to represent all the proposals. They say the WSF has no mission at all to propose alternatives itself, since this would inevitably cause too many divisions and divergences. The different movements themselves have to publish their alternatives, thanks to the ideas, the energy and the motivation they can find at the WSF.

./english/527.txt:90:First, I think that all movements within the WSF have to make a critical analysis of their campaigns and their proposals. There are too many contradictions and every one should reflect on its position within the global movement and the possibilities of networking. In very practical terms one should look at the contribution to another world. This may seem obvious, but those who have read the WSF seminar list and have seen the proposals concerning apiculture or spirituality, will know that this exercise may be relevant.

./english/532.txt:5:Openness – as an organising principle and political ideology – has become an article of faith across networked social movements. From its role as a central tenet of free and open source software production to its current popularity within activist circles, the concept of openness is attracting enthusiastic adherence. Here, as part of our series on the politics of alternative media structures, JJ King takes a less credulous view of what lies beneath the dream of organisational horizontality

./english/532.txt:9:Since the founding of the Free Software Foundation in 1985 by Richard Stallman and the Open Source Initiative in 1998 by Eric Raymond, the idea of openness has enjoyed some considerable celebrity. Simply understood, open source software is that which is published along with its source code, allowing developers to collaborate, improve upon each other’s work, and use the code in their own projects. The cachet of this open model of development has been greatly increased by the high-profile success of GNU-Linux, a piece of ‘free-as-in-libre and open source software’ (FLOSS). But, taken together with the distributed co-composition offered by, for example, the wiki architecture,[1] and the potential of peer-to-peer networks like Bittorrent and Gnutella,[2] a more nuanced and loose idea of openness has suggested itself as a possible model for other kinds of organisation. Felix Stalder of Openflows identifies its key elements as

./english/532.txt:21:The values engendered by our fledgling networked culture may [...] prove quite applicable to the broader challenges of our time and help a world struggling with the impact of globalism, the lure of fundamentalism and the clash of conflicting value systems [...] One model for the open-ended and participatory process through which legislation might occur in a networked democracy can be found in the open source software movement.[7]

./english/532.txt:31:In the social movement thus defined, openness is clearly becoming a constitutive organising principle, as it connects with the hopes and desires circulating around the idea of the ‘multitude’, a term whose post-Spinozan renaissance has been secured by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Empire. The multitude is a defiantly heterogeneous figure, a collective noun intended to counter the homogenising violence of terms such as ‘the people’ or ‘the mass’. For many thinkers in the post-Autonomist tradition, this multitude is a way of conceiving the revolutionary potential of a new ‘post-Fordist proletariat’ of networked immaterial labourers. In certain circuits within the social movement, pace Schneider and Lovink, FLOSS organisation is seen as the techno-social precondition of a radical democracy in becoming. However tenuous this assemblage may be, it goes some way to explaining the way in which FLOSS and openness have become quite central rhetorical terms in the struggle to produce an identity for the networked, anti-capitalist movement. But it is also true that certain characteristics of the idea of openness have genuine organisational influence within the movement. A study of openness in this context is useful in three degrees: first, to the social movement itself ‘internally’; second, to ‘outsiders’ wanting to gain a good understanding of ‘what it is’; third as a critique of those who would seek to represent the movement with, or attempt to manipulate it through, a particular deployment of the idea of openness.

./english/532.txt:56:Some of these attitudes and principles derive from the People’s Global Action (PGA), an influential ‘instrument’ constituting a visible attempt to organise around networked openness. The organisational philosophy of PGA,[10] which was formed after a movement gathering in South America in August 1997, is based on ‘decentralisation’. With ‘minimal central structures’, the PGA ‘has no membership’ or ‘juridical personality’: ‘no organisation or person represents’ it, nor does it ‘represent any organisation or person’. It is a ‘tool’,

./english/532.txt:58:a fluid network for communication and co-ordination between diverse social movements who share a loose set of principles or ‘hallmarks’ [...] Since February 1998 [...] PGA has evolved as an interconnected and often chaotic web of very diverse groups, with a powerful common thread of struggle and solidarity at the grassroots level. These gatherings have played a vital role in face-to-face communication and exchange of experience, strategies and ideas [...][11]

./english/532.txt:68:These hallmarks function to structure participation in the PGA process. In theory, they allow the network to remain ‘open’ while designating the kinds of activities that don’t fall within its field. PGA meetings, for example, do not exclude those who don’t subscribe to ITS hallmarks, but neither would discussions explicitly contrary to them be given much attention. Certain kinds of discussion are openly privileged over others on pragmatic grounds.

./english/532.txt:70:Structures like PGA and those being experimented with more widely are part of the social movement’s general rejection of organisational models based on representation, verticality and hierarchy. In their stead comes ‘non-hierarchical decentralisation’ and ‘horizontal coordination’. ‘From this movement,’ writes Massimo De Angelis, ‘emerges [...] the concept and practice of network horizontality, democracy, of the exercise of power from below.’[13] For this ‘radical political economist’[,] this form of ‘social-cooperation’ is ‘ours’. It is ‘our’ horizontality and these are ‘our’ networks, part of a set of modes of coordination of human activity that

./english/532.txt:72:go beyond the capitalist market and beyond the state. [...] we are talking about another world. [...] the slogan on T-shirts in Genoa was entirely correct: another world is not only possible. Rather, we are already patiently and with effort building another world – with all its contradictions, limitations and ambiguities – through the form of our networks.[14]

./english/532.txt:74:In other words it is the open, networked, horizontal form of the movement that produces its radical potential for social change: the message, yet again, is the medium. In the case of the self-described ‘open publishing’ project Indymedia, for example, the open submission structure is said to collapse the distinction between media producer and consumer, allowing us to ‘become the media’. The Indymedia newswire, write the collective

./english/532.txt:93:This problem runs through the temporary constitutions and dissolutions of ‘open’ organisations that make up the social movement. The avowed ‘absence’ of decision-making bodies and points of centralisation can too easily segue into a concealment of control per se. In fact, in both the FLOSS model and the social movement, the idea that no one group or person controls development and decision making is often quite far from the truth. In both cases it is formally true that anyone may alter or intervene in processes according to their needs, views or projects; but practically speaking, few people can assume the necessary social position from which to make effective ‘interventions’. Open source software is generally tightly controlled by a small group of people: the Apache Group, for example, very open-handedly controls the development of the Apache Web server, and Linus Torvalds has the final say on the Linux kernel’s development.[19] Likewise, in the social movement, decision making often devolves to a surprisingly small number of individuals and groups who make a lot of the running in deciding what happens, where and when. Though they never officially ‘speak for’ others, much unofficial doctrine nonetheless emanates from them. Within political networks, such groups and individuals can be seen as ‘supernodes’, not only routing more than their ‘fair share’ of traffic, but actively determining the ‘content’ that traverses them. Such supernodes do not (necessarily) constitute themselves out of a malicious will-to-power: rather, power defaults to them through personal qualities like energy, commitment and charisma, and the ability to synthesise politically important social moments into identifiable ideas and forms.

./english/532.txt:99:To examine how much this ‘pretence’ is the rule within the social movement is beyond the scope of this piece. But what is clear is that each of the five characteristics of ‘openness’ described above, when subjected to scrutiny, reveal themselves as extremely compromised. The details, for example, of meetings and discussions are published and circulated, but this information is primarily received by those who are able (and often privileged to be able) to connect to certain (technological/social) networks. Likewise, the language of a ‘call’ or equivalent can determine whether a party will feel comfortable or suitable to respond to it: like PGA’s ‘hallmarks’, language and phraseology is a point of ‘soft control’, but not one that is openly discussed and studied. Furthermore, meetings may be ‘open to all’, but they can quickly become hostile environments for parties who do not or cannot observe the ‘basic’ consensus that is often tacitly agreed between long-term actors in a particular scene. This peer consensus can indeed, on occasion, so determine the movement’s ‘open’ decision-making process as to turn it into a war of attrition on difference, with divergent points of view gradually giving themselves up to peer opinion as the ‘debate’ wears on and on. The ‘block’ or ‘veto’ is in fact rarely used because of the peer pressure placed on those who would use it (‘Aw, come on, you’re not going to block, are you?’ – a common enough plaint at movement meetings). In some cases the apparently neutral ‘moderator’ role can also become bizarrely instrumentalised, giving rise to the sensation that ‘something has already been decided’, and that the meeting is just for performative purposes.

./english/534.txt:46:What role will the forum play in that process? The WSF tends to remain, to a certain degree, a place where organisations quickly organise events, but then fail to realize their potential to network and connect with other movements and struggles until the next forum the following January. Attendance is still largely limited to those with the time, resources, passports, and visas necessary to travel to a central location. Participating organisations and movements must engage in an evaluation of how they can realize meaningful articulation of these struggles throughout the year.

./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: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/544.txt:12:Since the WSF has not claimed to be working to devise coherent strategies or formulating a specific programme of action, there can be no formal yardstick to measure its success or failure. Given its abhorrence of hierarchical structures and its penchant for networking on a horizontal plane, the WSF tends to be informal in its approach. Its goal is to provide an open space for the underprivileged of the world to come and raise their voices. In that respect the WSF succeeded in its mission. A common complaint was that it was somewhat chaotic. By its very nature, a process of this kind cannot be regimented and squeeze people into tight, rigidly-organised programmes.

./english/548.txt:13:A series of panels on “Breaking Down the Ivory Tower” examined the role of universities in the creation of another world. The discussions viewed relationships between scholars and social movements, moved to an examination of the role of academics in the struggle for social justice, and ended with the formation of a transnational network of scholars and activists to promote collaborative actions around common concerns. Another group of critical scholars held a series of informal meetings and created an activist-oriented research network.

./english/550.txt:1:Toward an European network for exchanges, think and struggle against the precarisation of job and lives

./english/550.txt:12:workshops of Athens FSE about the need of a European network against the

./english/550.txt:22:network against precariousness.

./english/550.txt:25:network, its priorities and its structure.

./english/550.txt:27:Range : The opinions have been very diverse. Some think that the network

./english/550.txt:35:a network mainly or only focused on action and the organization of

./english/550.txt:42:necessity : The network must be tied to the struggles. An other

./english/550.txt:43:necessity appeared : To build the network step by step within our

./english/550.txt:56:exchange about the network until the meeting of february 3rd and 4th.

./english/553.txt:35:Since the official communication of 4 October is meant for public consumption, the most worrying content has been filtered out. If one wishes to understand the EU’s true priorities and intentions, one needs to consult the blunt draft version prepared earlier by the Directorate General Trade of the Commission (DG Trade) – this paper was kept secret by the Commission, but was leaked to the public and is available at http://www.s2bnetwork.org/download/globaleurope_draft. The EU’s priorities are still included in the public attachment to the official communication that is available from the Commission’s website: http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2006/october/tradoc_130370.pdf

./english/553.txt:219:We would like to invite all progressive forces in Europe and internationally, all our allies working in farmers’, workers’, consumer, women’s, environment, development and public services networks, to join us in the analysis of the EU’s trade policy and its assault on the vast majority of people and the environment. We would like to invite all these forces to prepare a space that allows us to start a Europe-wide debate for spring 2007 and to discuss how we can work together to resist this aggressive agenda and to work for alternatives that are based on human rights, solidarity and sustainable economic activity.

./english/553.txt:223:If you are interested in getting in touch with the Seattle to Brussels Network to work on this issue, please contact: astrickner@iatp.org

./english/553.txt:232:[4] Corporate Power over EU Trade Policy: Good for business, bad for the world, Seattle to Brussels Network 2006, p. 38; http://www.s2bnetwork.org/download/Corporate_power_over_EU_Trade_policy

./english/565.txt:138:another myriad of individuals, collectives and networks, working at

./english/565.txt:196:of them are part of international networks such as People's Global

./english/565.txt:212:equality only require "spontaneity", activist networks have thought and

./english/565.txt:264:underground fanzines how to exploit bugs in phone networks to

./english/565.txt:272:networking. Internet was a big step in bringing together analogical

./english/565.txt:338:"Connect Congress" of the "Plug'n'Politix" network. The experience was

./english/565.txt:375:but they also tend to inspire creative network designs or resource

./english/565.txt:509:network for counter-information, providing an alternative to mainstream

./english/565.txt:523:official press. The whole network is based upon volunteer work, and

./english/565.txt:654:From hackmeetings to wireless networking user groups, from free software

./english/565.txt:723:[14] People's Global Action (PGA) is an international network of

./english/565.txt:734:facilitation methods used within activist networks, visit

./english/565.txt:761:[24] The Plug'n'Politix network has a website (http://squat.net/pnp/)

./english/565.txt:780:computing power. Sharing & distributing it over networks allows to

./english/565.txt:848:french plug'n'politix network in a local squat, Espace autogéré des

./english/565.txt:854:[53] IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. It is a network protocol

./english/569.txt:31:4, It would be a mistake to make too much of these weaknesses. The 5th WSF was the occasion for many successes. The Anti-War Assembly, for example, marked a real step forward in cooperation among activists from different parts of the world. An alliance of environmental groups managed to launch a much needed week of action against climate change from Porto Alegre. No doubt other thematic assemblies and networks were able to take initiatives, though the general fragmentation makes it hard to tell. The final Assembly of the Social Movements, though regrettably not publicized in the WSF Programme, did provide a real sense of diverse activists converging together on a common agenda of struggles. And there were, as far as we know, some good debates.

./english/571.txt:6:Network Institute for Global Democratization

./english/571.txt:75:The WSF V, back in Porto Alegre in January 2005 and bigger than ever before, has also received an overwhelming amount of positive commentaries, especially by people who were already articulated within the networks that constitute the “planet of Porto Alegre”. For casual observers, the event may have seemed somewhat chaotic. For those more involved in the process it was a good (even if limited) example of the methodology that emphasized constructing processes. The particular WSF events are excellent opportunities to meet and debate, but the emphasis is increasingly in the intellectual and political activities that continue all year round.

./english/571.txt:126:(5) The idea of organising the main annual WSF in India came up in a discussion in a sauna in Helsinki, following an NIGD (Network Institute for Global Democratization) and Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs organised brainstorm session on global democracy initiatives in June 2001. Participants in these relaxed sauna discussions included Vijay Pratap, an Indian activist from New Delhi, and Cândido Grzybowski, from Ibase, Rio de Janeiro, and the WSF Organizing Committee, who took the idea to Brazil and put it on the WSF agenda. See also their contributions in Rikkilä & Sehm-Patomäki (2002).

./english/574.txt:25:My own experience was similar in Terrain F on Social Movements and Democracy. The registration of self-managed activities produced an interesting pattern of very similar seminars around themes of `new politics,’ `participatory democracy’; `knowledge, democracy and power’ from different continents, proposed by groups who had not even heard of each other. The facilitator for Terrain F brought us all together and after several meetings we created new global network of activist researchers working on the new thinking and practice around democracy, political parties and the innovative political power of social movements. Far more productive and exciting than sitting listening to worthy lectures arranged by a well intentioned committee second guessing what we want. Not everyone’s experience was so positive.

./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:24:There were 140 installations like this, and the Forum of the workshops and the seminars was as diverse, plural and colorful as those of Porto Alegre. Who walked 19th morning, along part of one of the corridors, could find debates about the increasing abortion of female embryos in India ( qualified as “ hidden femalecide”); about the international campaign against North – American bases (promoted by a 25 organizations network based in different countries); about Cordillera Peoples’ Alliance ( a Philippine woman explained, in English, that for many Asiatic communities, the concept individual, sees in each human being, a part of the community), about the new international relations system ( emerged from a refined critic about the lack of transparency and democracy in WTO, IMF and WB); about dwelling rights and livable cities ( a fiction in Mumbai), about the struggle against monarchy in Nepal ( besides the rounded faces and the hard eyes of the Nepalese, it attracted the attention the fact that they reached to understand each other, even if they were speaking so low, that many times the voices were replaced for the microphone of the room next door), about the impact of globalization among the “ untouchable” Indians ( the debates on these topics were always the most crowded and able to attract the street Forum).

./english/582.txt:26:Also in the workshops the large majority was Indian. But English confronted Hindi , as dominating language. Two volunteer translators networks ( Babels and Solidarity International) mobilized tens of activists to Mumbai. But, because of the lacking material means, there weren’t simultaneous translation system, nor in the workshops, neither in the big conferences and seminars,. To solve the problem, goodwill and patience were required: volunteer and consecutive translations were done, many times including Spanish, French and other languages

./english/582.txt:32:Sony Kapoor was one of the attractions of the workshop promoted by fiscal auditors unions from Brazil and France, to debate the need of a new international financial architecture. He is, himself, a signal that the world can be changed. He is an Indian, that lives in the UK since many years, he dresses as a young British man, he uses gel to keep his hear combed upside. He worked for international investment banks in London City. He helped to fatten up huge fortunes, and to promote speculative attacks against the South countries currencies. He earned money, traveled around the world and…he got tired. Two years ago he left the market, and founded an NGO called Tobin Tax Network and he started to denounce the financial savagery in the global capitalism

./english/586.txt:8:By its very success, the Mumbai WSF creates new challenges for the WSF process. I single out three main ones. The first is the Forum’s expansion. It is not just a question of geographic expansion, but the expansion of themes and perspectives as well. Meeting in Mumbai, the IC decided to encourage the organization of local, national, regional and thematic forums, in order to deepen the syntony of the “Porto Alegre Consensus” with the concrete struggles that mobilize such a diversity of social groups across the globe. Furthermore, the WSF has been collecting an impressive amount of knowledge concerning its organizations and movements, the world we live in, and the proposals that go one being presented and implemented to change it. This knowledge must be carefully evaluated to be adequately used and render the Forum more transparent to itself, thus allowing for self-learning for all the activists and movements involved in the WSF process. Finally, as knowledge accumulates and the large areas of convergence are identified, the need for developing plans of collective action increases. The issue is not so much to augment the WSF’s efficaciousness as a global actor — efficaciousness is not gauged by global as much as by local and national actions — but mainly to prepare responses to the attempts of the World Bank, IMF and the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos to coopt the agendas of the WSF and sanitize them in favor of solutions that will leave the ongoing economic disorder intact. Given its open-space nature, the WSF will not present proposals in its own name; it will rather facilitate the articulation between the networks that constitute it, in order to deepen plans of collective action and put them into practice.

./english/589.txt:28:Vikas Adhyayan Kendra (VAK), member of CADTM international network, is a secular voluntary organisation established in 1981 to be an interface between Scholars, Academics and Social Activists; to initiate the process of social awakening through critical reflection and alternative discourse thereby contributing to strengthening people’s struggles towards the goal of a just and more humane social order.

./english/589.txt:35:The Goa Programme Unit focuses on the prevention of child sexual abuse and the protection of the rights of the children to live in dignity. VAK has initiated a number of activities such as Campaigns, Advocacy, Open Schools for Street and Beach children, Seminars, Consultations to address the growing phenomena of pedophilia and other forms of child sexual abuse related to tourism. VAK also has initiated network of organisation on the West Coast working to prevent sexual abuse of children.

./english/589.txt:50:This entails developing and promoting more focussed advocacy, lobbying and campaigning strategies ranging from Dalit to gender rights and from rights of minorities and children to the struggles of the people for livelihood and against suppression of human and democratic rights and erosion of cultural values. The programme also seeks to promote and strengthen civil society organisations in building solidarity- action networks on critical issues affecting the lives and “rights” of the people, to challenge the structures, cultures and dynamics of violence, inequality and injustice, and for the promotion of participatory, democratic politics and economics which makes people as the centrality of the social process.

./english/589.txt:80:The RLHP action is part of a global struggle to abolish child labour and guarantee that all children get an education. At Mysore in March 2003 RLHP organised a national conference for the abolition of child labour as part of the Campaign Against Child Labour (CACL a network of 5,400 members belonging to 17 states [5]). For three days, some 1,200 children and 800 activists who had come from all corners of the country considered how best they could achieve their aim. Public authorities were questioned. A street demonstration was organised. We have to keep in mind that child labour is related to the poorer families being heavily in debt. Indebted parents who cannot pay back a private moneylender may have no choice but to let him have one (or several) of their children. The lender will make them work as long as the loan is not repaid, and in some cases the interest rate is so high that children actually become slaves since there is no way their parents could ever pay back the exorbitant amounts that are demanded of them.

./english/590.txt:20:In this sense, one of the ideas to which Cassen also attributes importance may create even more confusion: that of formulating a “Consensus of Porto Alegre”, counterpart of the “Washington Consensus”. The objective would be to announce a dozen of strategic objectives to be reached by the action of all involved. However, paradoxically the realisation of this idea, just as the definition of converging or even priority themes - formulated during the preparation of Mumbai but in view of the 2005 Forum - would lead us dangerously close to the “final document” that all claim not to wish. Moreover, one of the networks participating at the Mumbai Forum just circulated its “30 propositions to make an other world possible”. Should one mix these 30 proposition with the ten or fifteen of a “Porto Alegre Consensus”? And who would do it without constituting themselves as “board of directors” of the WSF, which some still seem to experience the need of? And what to do with all the other proposals for action not comprised in these two inventories and considered by its authors as really strategic to overcome neo-liberalism? The respect of diversity is not a condition solely for entering and participating in the Forums, but also to get out of them, without any impoverishing homogenisation having to take place. Of course, everybody has the right to produce syntheses, convergences and priorities. The “good ones” will be followed by those who are in agreement with them. What no one has the right to do, is to impose them on the others or to want to talk in the name of everybody.

./english/595.txt:12:The divide between the activities set up by centralised organisation and those that are self-organised by myriad groups, networks, unions and organisations. It should be added that the self-organised activities springing from groups, organisations and networks based in India were often in the majority. In other words, activities “parachuted” from afar do not work at the Social Forums.

./english/595.txt:28:That being said, the current situation also has another singular feature that cannot be ignored, that of the strong growth in the number of spectacularly violent acts committed by groups operating in networks. We have got to the point where every year we commemorate terrorist attacks that have left several thousand dead. Henceforth we will live through an era in which every year is marked out by the anniversaries of massacres. This feature is specific to our era : the North American empire dictates but amidst explosions, as proved not only by those in Iraq but elsewhere in the Arab world, the big cities of the North and also certain cities in the South.

./english/595.txt:30:Since this is the context in which we must situate ourselves, we must ask ourselves whether we are standing between the devil and deep blue sea ? On the one hand, there is an empire that dictates its rationale of “pax Americana” through war and the social and political organisation that it comprises and, on the other hand, there are groups that organise repeated terrorist attacks and organised Mafia type networks that operate clandestinely and determine the lives of millions of human beings who survive in conditions of slavery. Given this rationale (the term is debatable), the civil society now emerging and that we are seeking to develop must avoid becoming a hostage.

./english/595.txt:32:Naturally, we have progressed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and apartheid in South Africa. New values have been brought to the fore, a new relationship between humanity and the biosphere has been formulated, and relations of respect between men and women have been emphasised. During the last decade we have made progress on human rights. We even believed that Pinochet was going to be judged at one point ! The International Criminal Court is now a reality. Large networks have developed, hundreds of meetings have been organised and dozens of proposal papers have been produced. All the above are significant advances and the social forums and different alliances are important, but the question remains : “What are we going to do with these forums and alliances to be equal to our hopes and expectations ? Can we really topple the empire ? Will we be able to get humanity away from its position between the devil and the deep blue sea ?”

./english/598.txt:29:By contrast, the hallmark and vital source of strength of both the new movements and the older feminist, peace, green and radical trade union movements on whose traditions they build is a fundamental belief in the importance of practical, indigenous, personal knowledge. Portuguese philosopher and activist Boaventura de Sousa Santos organised a workshop at Mumbai on combining different kinds of knowledge - the theoretical and practical. He said: There is an implicit recognition running through the way these forums are organised, especially in Mumbai, that knowledge embedded in practice cannot always be codified and documented. Indeed, the horizontal, networking ways of organising these movements is in part a result of the need for practical, non-traditional ways of sharing that knowledge.

./english/598.txt:32:The sharing of knowledge is closely linked to the discovery and creation of different sources of power. The campaigning movements and networks that met in the old warehouses and newly constructed tents at the WSF site in Mumbai do not assert a rival monopoly to that of traditional political parties. Rather, they demonstrate, in practice more than in theory, a belief in diverse sources of power. One purpose of social forums is to find ways of connecting those different sources of power and making them more than the sum of their parts.

./english/598.txt:40:The purpose of the WSF is to develop this horizontal social articulation, as the networking of the global justice and anti-war movements is clumsily described. This, [the WSFs founders/ Charter of Principles] argues, requires a space to serve a common objective of creating alternatives to neo-liberalism and war. That space would function as a public square without leaders or pyramids of power. It is intended as "a factory of ideas" or an incubator from which new initiatives aiming at the construction of another world can emerge..

./english/598.txt:44:So, this is what the social forum movement aspires to: it seeks to provide a purposeful space in which activists can create new alliances and extend their networks of resistance, and help them turn their organisations into the sources of alternative policies, stronger strategies and more convincing visions. And this is our task in hosting the next European Social Forum in London: we must develop the forum so that it is not only a celebration of diversity and international solidarity, but also an innovative collective intellect nourished by peoples daily resistance to the pressures of the global market. First, as the Indians managed to do in Mumbai, we have to break from the old closed ways that so irritated Gautam Mody. But, again like the Indians, and the Italians, the Brazilians and the French, we also have to find a way of developing new ways of organising that build on whats left of the foundations of democratic organisation and collective strength that the trade unions historically laid.

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

./english/614.txt:55:Regarding the International Council that tutors the undertaking of the WSF with all the legitimacy granted by its history, it must not be converted neither in a private space of those who constitute it at the moment, nor in a closed space where what happens and what is to happen in the WSF is dissolved. Otherwise, after four years, it’s time to create spaces of democratic participation, both in the reflection on the future of the Forum (how to move forward in the consolidation of this process), and in the decision making process on the issues that affect it. And concerning these issues it results a contradiction that the social movements, who constitute the spine of the Forum, at the same time, except for some networks and some very concrete social movements (Via Campesina, World March of Women, CUT) are marginalized in these processes of refletion and decision making. Even more in moments when by the time that has passed and the consolidation of the WSF itself, its future is under debate and in which the International Council has been given executive functions that deeply contrast with its central role: to facilitate the accomplishment of the WSF and its development based on the criterias with which it has been created and respecting the Charter of Principles.

./english/614.txt:69:There is no dout that the reiforcement of the assembly, the steps that we’ll undertake in the building of ther social movements international network and the correspondence of our agreements in the global level to the local and regional spaces, are the best guarantee to maintain the Forum in good road. Because only as far as its development has as reference the social struggles and approches the problems that the movements bring into it, the Forum will not be at risk of atrophy, but it’s also clear that its opening to an umbrella of more broad and diverse social forces will, at the same time, be source of contradictions and tensions.

./english/620.txt:13:We would like to take it as given that WSF should not be limited to only a reflective space but also should facilitate global anti-imperialist struggles. However, we agree that WSF itself should not be seen to be an organisation, which either builds or leads such struggles. This distinction is important as those who are constructing this open space for movements should not end up by substituting themselves for the movements. The movements in various countries are the spearhead of struggle against imperialism – either its militaristic, coercive version or its more insidious economic version. The WSF, as a platform, enables these movements to come together -- as either one network or a multiple set of networks – in order to take this struggle forward. For this, the WSF space can be consciously constructed to bring together the concerns, experiences, information and issues of diverse movements and groups, and also catalyse the formation of networks around these issues.

./english/620.txt:15:We believe that WSF, in effect, has provided this kind of an environment and this has helped not only in revitalising the anti-imperialist struggle internationally, but also in helping different networks and groups to come together. Some of it is already visible in synchronising the anti Iraq War struggle in different countries – demonstrations, protests on the same day throughout the world -- and in working out a common understanding regarding the Cancun Ministerial. The social movement assemblies in the WSF have undoubtedly provided a focus for the above.

./english/626.txt:12:WSF 04 was not an isolated event. It was challenged. By Mumbai Resistance - a separate event held by those who felt the WSF was exclusionary and compromised. Across the highway, several organizations and people often referred to as the "extreme left" rallied to discuss many of the same issues but under a different banner. Other parallel but not challenging events were the Land First Mela - an event devoted to the creation of a stronger land rights movement, and the conference of Via Campesina - an international network of peasant organizations, agricultural workers, and indigenous communities. Events attended by many who also participated in the WSF. Events that chose separate spaces for logistic and other conveniences. Events that were all spokes in the wheel of the alternative vehicle were engaged in building.

./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:37:Second, a kind of confusion reigns, as it always has done, in the WSF. How long any of us will put up with this almost inevitable confusion remains to be seen, but so long as pluralism holds as a basic premise of the entire WSF there is hope the WSF will at least stay together, however confused it may be, and continue winning ground in the battle of ideas as it has been doing. A decision was made at the end of Porto Alegre III to rename the WSF “the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre,” since that is how the rest of the world has come to know it even though the fourth annual meeting will take place in India. More importantly, there was a general recognition that activists must have more regional social forums, build better global networks, incorporate better representation from Asia, Africa, women, and the working poor (including organized labor), and not look at the WSF of Porto Alegre as “the center of the universe.” The WSF of Porto Alegre also decided not to hold its meetings when the WEF meets, as it had done in the past.

./english/639.txt:22:The original World Social Forum didnt produce a political blueprint - a good start - but there was a clear pattern to the alternatives that emerged. Politics had to be less about trusting well-meaning leaders and more about empowering people to make their own decisions; democracy had to be less representative and more participatory. The ideas flying around included neighbourhood councils, participatory budgets, stronger city governments, land reform and cooperative farming - a vision of politicised communities that could be networked internationally to resist further assaults from the IMF, the World Bank and World Trade Organisation. For a left that had tended to look to centralised state solutions to solve almost every problem, this emphasis on decentralisation and direct participation was a breakthrough.

./english/639.txt:27:use: referendums, constituents assemblies, networks of empowered local councils and assemblies. Choosing an alternative economic path would still spark fierce resistance, but his opponents would not have the luxury of being against Lula, as they are against Chavez, and would instead be forced to oppose the repeated and stated will of the majority - to be against democracy itse

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

./english/646.txt:18:Moreover, meetings of private, elite organisations like the Bilderberg Society, Trilateral Commission and Mont Pelerin Society have tended to attract less public attention than those of the Bretton Woods institutions and other semi-public multilateral organs. Yet in matters of global governance these groups constitute highly influential networks of transnational coordination.

./english/646.txt:28:With clear support from many other organisations influential within transnational activist networks, eight Brazilian civil society groups agreed to form the Organising Committee. In March 2000 they formally secured the support of the municipal government of Porto Alegre and the state government of Rio Grande do Sul, both controlled at the time by the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT).

./english/646.txt:48:The other main organ of the WSF, the International Council (IC), was founded in São Paulo in June 2001. According to Cândido Grzybowski, director of IBASE, the idea emerged in Porto Alegre on the last day of the first WSF. During the months that followed, the OC made a list of organisations to invite to the founding meeting in São Paulo. As of June 2003 the Council nominally consists of 113 organisations, though in practice many of them have not actively participated. This number also includes the eight members of the OC. Most IC members come from the Americas and western Europe, though many also have activities in other parts of the world. Organisations based in Asia and Africa include the Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives (ARENA), Environnement et Développement du Tiers-Monde (ENDA) and the Palestinian NGO network.

./english/646.txt:50:According to some definitions, IC members should be regional or global networks rather than purely national organisations, but this criterion has not been strictly followed. Instead, in the Miami meeting of the WSF International Council in June 2003, when some official procedures for incorporating new members were finally made, nationally-based organisations were not excluded. Apart from the proper members, there are fifteen observer organisations, mostly representatives of regional and thematic social forums in various parts of the world.

./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: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/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: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: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:23:Parties vs networks

./english/671.txt:26:But the more important reason for a lack of confrontation may have had to do with the organizational forms that correspond to the two positions. The traditional parties and centralized organizations have spokespeople who represent them and conduct their battles, but no one speaks for a network. How do you argue with a network? The movements organized within them do exert their power, but they do not proceed through oppositions. One of the basic characteristics of the network form is that no two nodes face each other in contradiction; rather, they are always triangulated by a third, and then a fourth, and then by an indefinite number of others in the web. This is one of the characteristics of the Seattle events that we have had the most trouble understanding: groups which we thought in objective contradiction to one anotherenvironmentalists and trade unions, church groups and anarchistswere suddenly able to work together, in the context of the network of the multitude. The movements, to take a slightly different perspective, function something like a public sphere, in the sense that they can allow full expression of differences within the common context of open exchange. But that does not mean that networks are passive. They displace contradictions and operate instead a kind of alchemy, or rather a sea change, the flow of the movements transforming the traditional fixed positions; networks imposing their force through a kind of irresistible undertow.

./english/671.txt:28:Like the Forum itself, the multitude in the movements is always overflowing, excessive and unknowable. It is certainly important then, on the one hand, to recognize the differences that divide the activists and politicians gathered at Porto Alegre. It would be a mistake, on the other hand, to try to read the division according to the traditional model of ideological conflict between opposing sides. Political struggle in the age of network movements no longer works that way. Despite the apparent strength of those who occupied centre stage and dominated the representations of the Forum, they may ultimately prove to have lost the struggle. Perhaps the representatives of the traditional parties and centralized organizations at Porto Alegre are too much like the old national leaders gathered at Bandungimagine Lula of the PT in the position of Ahmed Sukarno as host, and Bernard Cassen of ATTAC France as Jawaharlal Nehru, the most honoured guest. The leaders can certainly craft resolutions affirming national sovereignty around a conference table, but they can never grasp the democratic power of the movements. Eventually they too will be swept up in the multitude, which is capable of transforming all fixed and centralized elements into so many more nodes in its indefinitely expansive network.