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./english/31.txt:22:Therefore it was very refreshing to finally see speakers from Rifondazione, the German Linkspartei.PDS and the Greek Synapsismos being advertised as such. This does symbolise a certain change in European politics: the buzz around the ‘social movements’ has certainly died down - in favour of a more honest turn towards the political parties of the left. That should facilitate a better examination of their role, rather than pretending they do not exist in our movement. For example, Rifondazione’s turn to government is highly problematic, to say the least - its leader, Fausto Bertinotti, was elected speaker of the chamber of deputies at the end of April. Other developments, like the formation of a new joint party in Germany, should be welcomed by all socialists across Europe.

./english/36.txt:21:7. The Organizing Committee gave more importance than in the past to the cultural aspect of the Forum. In fact the response of the artists was impressive. About 150 cultural events took place in the ESF venue. We believe that this convergence between art and politics not only helps artists (specially the young) to present their work to massive public, but also contributes to the emerging of new forms of activism and political communication.

./english/41.txt:11:Then participation in the seminar: “For another Europe: new actors, new roles?” Very many good proposals were made: for a basic income by the young, successful Left Party politician, now Member of Parliament Katja Kipping from Saxony (East Germany), for the incorporation of ecological and feminist thinking (Walter Bauer), for the conceiving of alternative institutional models and politics (Bernard Cassen), but one has to ask, and I went to the micro to do so whether we, the social movements, do not risk losing ourselves in the detail.

./english/44.txt:174:At the conclusion of a debate on repressive and fail-safe politics and their repercussions on the most vulnerable members of society, the organisations present proposed the establishment of an information, resistance and warning system given that such policies are being implemented in all countries.

./english/44.txt:260:SEMINAR “GLOBAL DRUGS POLITICS, REFUSING MILITARY AND REPRESSIVE POLICIES”

./english/47.txt:54:THE ROLE OF FEMINISM IN POLITICS - CHANGE THE RULES OF THE GAME. PATRIARCHY, CAPITALISM, EQUALITY and DIFFERENCES

./english/62.txt:11:• Hilary Wainwright: Resources for reflection: the role of activist researchers and the importance of the ways that movements understand, produce and share knowledge. TNI New politics project (English) (3 A4 pages long)

./english/62.txt:13:• Marco Berlinguer: New forms of connecting research and politicsTransform! Italia (1 A4 page long)

./english/62.txt:22:• Centre for the study of social and global justice – Nottingham http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/politics/research/research_CSSGJ.php

./english/62.txt:25:• Transnational Institite – New politics project http://www.tni.org

./english/62.txt:50:TNI New politics project

./english/62.txt:75:New forms of connecting research and politicsTransform! Italia

./english/62.txt:78:I am Marco Berlinguer , I work in a project called Transform! Italia which is trying to develop new forms of connecting research and politics. I would like to briefly focus on three issues.

./english/62.txt:79:1) We are all working and speaking about separations: between politics and knowledge, politics and research, academy and actions, etc. The different institutions voted to work in each of these areas seem suffering such a kind of dis-connection. I would like to stress that it is exactly this one the kind of work social movements are doing: reconnecting, recombining and reshaping relations. It is exactly this work of self-reflective re-connection which characterizes the “making worlds” ongoing in the convergence spaces created by the recent cycle of new social movements.

./english/150.txt:14:Those involved in Euromarch range from rank and file trade unionists, through political activists to social movement campaigners, but the most numerous and prominent participants have so far been unemployed activists. This reflects Euromarch«s central focus on unemployment and its main task which has been the mobilisation of marches and marchers against unemployment. However even within this issue there is a diversity of organisations which come under the umbrella of the Euromarch organisation. For example in France there are several unemployed organisations like Action Chomage!, APEIS, CGT (Unemployed Workers Committee) and MNCP which organise together despite their differences. The political perspectives of Euromarch activists also vary from left-wing Social Democrats, Socialists, Greens, Communists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, non-aligned etc., all of whom find Euromarch a worthwhile forum within which to pursue their particular politics. Similarly there are activists from a wide range of social movement campaigns. A list of the groups represented at the recent Cologne »Assizes« included campaigns for the rights of women, Black people, migrants, asylumseekers, pensioners, the homeless, students, school students as well as environmental and anti-fascist campaigns. Such a broad range of involvement is encouraged by Euromarch and in this vain Euromarch activist, Gitti Goetz, in her appeal for the Vienna demonstration hoped that »organizations and groups of unemployed, women, trade unionists, asylumseekers, and homeless will not only take part, but also become active themselves with their own ideas, forms of action and demands.« Such a diversity of participants is reflected by the breadth of demands which have been formulated.

./english/161.txt:173:theme that both emphasises the spread of politics throughout the whole of life

./english/161.txt:205:an emergent politics cohere, a politics which will allow us to move on and tackle

./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: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/176.txt:19: Hailed as the medium that would revive democracy, the internet is thought to exert a stronger influence in the realm of non-mainstream politics, inhabited by loose and often marginalized groups and organizations. Nowhere has this influence been considered more prominent than in the case of the ‘movement for alternative globalization’, whose collective identity, geographical scale and organizing structure

./english/176.txt:41: The advent of the internet brought this lack of research and theorizing more urgently to our attention. But even though the role of the internet in mainstream and institutional politics has been widely researched, the academic community seems to have ‘neglected the role of ICTs in the extra-institutional sphere of ‘politics’ in which loosely structured groups and social movements play a prominent role’ (van de Donk et al. 2004, 2). This omission is quite remarkable considering that the Internet has been hailed as a medium favouring subversive, extra-institutional and loosely formed groups (Ibid).

./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:128:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 92In terms of social movement research, this also highlights the necessity to distinguish between the different internet applications and examine their effects separately, as they favor different modes of communication. Thus, email tends to foster interpersonal communication, while the web adheres more to a broadcast model of communication. Email lists fall somewhere in-between, facilitating the narrowcasting of messages and information. Therefore, bundling up all these applications under the category ‘Internet’ cannot adequately capture the role of new communication technologies in social movement activity. Another major inference provided by this study concerns the possible relationship between internet use and the respondents’ political experience or degree of involvement in politics. The basis for this assumption is supplied by the associations between internet use and the respondents’ age, as well as the context through which they were mobilized. In that respect, the survey results showed that older participants tend more than the younger ones to be mobilized through the email lists or websites of political or voluntary organizations. On the other hand, younger participants tend to be mobilized more through face-to-face contact with friends or relatives. To an extent, this seems as a counter-intuitive result. It can however be explained, if we consider that older activists may refrain from participating in the day-to-day meetings of the political or voluntary organizations they belong to, but still choose to stay in touch and follow the latest news through email lists and the organizations’ websites. For younger activists, on the contrary, participation in a social movement may constitute an opportunity for or be a result of face-to-face socialization with friends and relatives. The interpretation of these results would be aided significantly, if information about the respondents’ political experience and prior participation in the ‘alter-globalization’ or other movements was available. For instance, a study of participants in the anti-war demonstration of the 15th of February 2003 both in Europe and in the USA has revealed that more experienced activists tended to get their political information online, contrary to first-time demonstrators (Bennett, Givens and Willnat 2004, page numbers not available). In my study, even though the respondents’ age can be considered as an indication of their political experience, it is far from conclusive. To address this gap, more information about the political experience of the respondents is being sought through a follow-up study to the 2003 survey. As for the relationship between internet use and mobilization context, the results have revealed that respondents who have used at least one internet application in any mobilization context tend to be mobilized more through political or voluntary organizations than non-users of the internet. On the other hand, respondents who Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 93were mobilized by face-to-face contact in

./english/176.txt:130: This may be suggesting that respondents already in contact with a political or voluntary organization use the internet more than respondents who are not as involved in politics. Still, such an interpretation should be made with caution as it ultimately questions the much-celebrated potential of the internet to revive democracy by facilitating and encouraging the participation of previously indifferent or marginalized individuals. Therefore, this assumption needs to be corroborated with additional empirical data, as the evidence supplied by this survey is just indicative. In that respect, more information concerning the respondents’ political experience could again help us build a sounder basis for interpreting these results.

./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/192.txt:29:mainstream politicians are out of touch with both the spirit, content and the style of the inclusive non-party politics now emerging under the ESF umbrella. Any professional politician observing the audiences of 1,000 or more people raptly listening to debates on globalisation, the power of corporations, racism, food or the environment would do well to reflect on the narrowness of their own political agenda and the genuine transnationalism now clearly informing European youth…Out of the connections being made between radically different groups, it is possible to see in years to come the emergence of a genuine new politics of the European left.

./english/192.txt:33:In part this disagreement reflects differences in national context. In Britain the war dominates politics and is far and away the biggest mobilizing issue. Without the prominence of the war and the leading involvement in the ESF of the British peace movement, the Forum would have been a far less dynamic affair, and the final demonstration would have been little larger than the participation in the Forum itself.

./english/192.txt:34:But there is more involved here. The war in Iraq is also the dominant issue in world politics. This is not simply because of the divisions that it has provoked among the major powers. The Bush administration's unilateral assertion of military power, the brutality of the occupation, its accompaniment by the imposition of the full neo-liberal economic programme on Iraq - all of this for many activists sums up what is wrong with corporate globalization.

./english/192.txt:46:The unwelcome presence of the IFTU at the ESF was thus a consequence of building a Forum that reached deep into the mainstream of the labour movement. The foolish decision by a handful of protestors (in this case mainly members of British and Middle Eastern far left sects) to shout down a platform mainly composed of the convenor of the Stop the War Coalition and Iraqis opposed to the occupation was thus a refusal to engage with this mainstream. It represented exactly the kind of sterile sectarian politics from which the rest of us are trying to escape.

./english/192.txt:53:5. It is, in any case, the future about which we need to be thinking. The next ESF will be in Athens in the spring of 2006. What political lessons does the experience of London offer? The most important is that, as the Italian comrades pointed out after Florence, the great strengths of the movement are radicality and diversity. We have managed the near-miracle of developing a movement that embraces an extraordinarily wide social and political range but that has mounted a challenge to capitalist imperialism as a system. This was very evident in London: as at Florence, many of the largest and most dynamic meetings were dominated by the politics of the radical left.

./english/193.txt:7:One of the most debated aspects at the ESF was how to develop strategies of social transformation beyond a simple negation of the existing neoliberal from of globalisation. In the face of changing conditions, altered modes of capitalist production, transformed social relations and social forces, the left has had to think through its self-understanding, its inner contradictions, its strategies. Ever since there has been discussion about non- or anti-etatist political forms and strategies or more institutionalised ones – and what the relations between them should look like, if there are some. We could remember the split between Marx and Bakunin, or later between Marxists and Anarchists. We could remember the different concepts about the relations between the movement, in the singular, the supposed male workers movement, and socialist or communist parties, ranging from Lenin to Luxemburg to Trotsky to Gramsci to Mao and so on. We could also remember the movement of ‘68, its march through the institutions or into an alternative space/niche for new modes of living. And of course the relation between autonomy and institutional politics was a problem for the second feminist movement in the 1970s and 80s well as for the peace movement and the ecological movement – just think about the German Greens. There is a lot of experience that should not be forgotten. Maybe that was one reason for a – not political but - generational uniformity discussing that problematic at the ESF.

./english/193.txt:9:Ever since the disruption of state socialism and the spread of neoliberal hegemony across the world we live under a far-reaching process of capitalist transformation. Its contradictions and the engagement of people all over the world had led to the emergence of a movement of movements – this time we keep the plural. In the last years we have seen a kind of consolidation of that process, and the World and the European Social Forum (like other fora) have a remarkable part in that consolidation. But there are very different ideas about how to continue and which political forms are appropriate for a new kind of radical social transformation. There is a consensus about plurality and the richness of diversity, but also a comprehension of the need for coherence. Very often the problem is discussed in the form of simple dichotomies like the opposition between institutional politics and autonomy, between movements and parties, between avant-garde thinking and basic democracy, between civil society and state and so on. But these essentialisations are false oppositions, because all these oppositions in concrete life are contradictions in motion.

./english/193.txt:14:John Holloway’s book Change the World without taking Power has deeply influenced parts of the alter-globalisation movement. His question is whether the left should concentrate its struggle on the state, to influence it, even to take state power – or to reject the state? Holloway treats the state as an entity separate from society, its alienated form of organisation. He identifies parties as parts of the state, reproducing the alienated form, working ‘in the name’ of us, this way excluding us from decisions. The outcome is betrayal. As the state they exclude us and separate us from each other as state citizens. Moreover the state is the form of negative movement to repress social self-determination and self-organisation. So we have to stop reproducing these forms of social relations dominated by capital and state: ‘if we stop tomorrow, capitalism will no longer exist’. That means turning the back to the state, creating autonomous spaces, burning holes into capitalism. As the negation of capitalism is part of everyone’s everyday experience we could build on that to create our own spaces. In Holloway’s understanding the state is just an instrument for repression of disobedience and rebellion – some kind of Leninist approach to the state (or an unconscious anarchism). But what about the partial victories and achievements of the left, like the regulation of the working day, the welfare state and so on, as contradictory as they are? In the whole history of left defeats, it seems that small victories were assured by some kind of state politics too. It is obvious that this alone is not enough but it makes clear, in the sense Poulantzas offered, that the state is not a closed entity but a materialisation of changeable relations of social forces, therefore a redefinition of institutions might be possible.

./english/193.txt:16:For Hilary Wainwright, a socialist feminist and editor of Red Pepper, simply negating capitalism in a conscious moment means trying to make the enemy disappear, to dematerialize it in a moment of consciousness. She doubts that one could change the world without transforming power. Therefore she calls on us to Reclaim the State (the title of her latest book). The fact that state-oriented politics in the past and today have led to defeats is an important experience. But a defeat does not mean necessarily that the attempt was wrong. There is still a need for institutions to stabilize our fights against neoliberal forces and also against specific state apparatuses. And we need public resources, which were an important aspect especially for the feminist movement. Without the jobs created in the state sector, without organised care for children, women were not able to come out of their households, step into the public, create their own spaces and take part in making politics. At the same time the feminist movement posed many of the questions stated by Holloway. So the task is neither to simply reject the state, in a way mirroring the wrong view of old etatist politics, nor to rely on the state, but to fight In and Against the State (the title of a book by Holloway in 1979), to change state relations.

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

./english/193.txt:22:Fausto Bertinotti, Secretary of the Italian Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (the refounded Communist Party), states the problem that revolutionary politics are no common political project today. The problem of capitalism existing is not articulated as political problem. Therefore the task for a radical left party is to make it a problem. But it is clear that taking the power does not mean the abolition of capitalism and revolutionary transformation. The first step is to raise some limitations to capitalism. In the face of a deep crisis of representation it is important to regain a large participation in the elections in favour of a regime change. This is still limited to the old model of representation and participation every four or five years, but tries to create or sustain spaces for everyday participation and self-organisation at the same time. But politics go further than state and parties. From Marx, we know that capitalism produces and reproduces the separation of state, bourgeois society, and economy, what leads to different forms of alienation. Therefore for a real social transformation the reconstruction of revolutionary subjects is needed, not as a monolithic one. For Bertinotti in an atrophied perspective ‘auto-organisazione’ and the reinvention of politics (as party politics) is the same. Holloway questions that: using a party (as part of the state) to construct the revolutionary subject means separating the people, means building hierarchies, means decision making in our name instead of self-construction of the subject. Changing the world therefore, a young Italian woman stated, means changing ourselves. ‘I want to be powerful – not take the power.’ Holloway: ‘Our power is no counter-power but anti-power.’ But, ‘we can not turn our back to the state, because the state will shoot us in the back, somebody else answered. To face capitalist power and state force not anti-power but counterpower is needed to defend our autonomy.

./english/193.txt:25:There is a ‘desire for self-determination’, John Holloway continues.3 Self-determination starts as a movement out of the ruling social relations rooted in everyday experience (otherwise the struggle for communism would be meaningless). State and self-determination are incompatible, because the former is the negation of the last. The state is ‘a process of decision making in place of’. There is no room for a dialectical ‘as well however’, for saying we must construct a form of self-determination, however it is important to struggle within the state as well. Both forms of struggle cannot be pursued peacefully side by side, because they move in different directions. The state is the permanent and active intervention against self-determination. But there might be some room for a ‘but nevertheless’: while creating forms of autonomy, in ‘specific situations the struggle through the state could give us access to means for strengthening our struggle for self-determination’. But the desire for self-determination is a movement against and beyond representation, state and labour. This desire can not wait until a party reaches power, it can not wait, because capitalism is destroying us, undermining the conditions of reproduction: ‘ya basta’ and ‘que se vayan todos’. Self-determination has to start immediately, nevertheless this is a slow process – ‘we will walk not hurry, because we will have to go far’ – this understanding of politics breaks with linear temporalities.4 Therefore the communist revolution starts now but like an utopian star it remains an urgent (but hardly achievable) need.

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

./english/193.txt:41:Parties have a dual character: in the parliamentary system they are part of the state, therefore transforming social conflicts into institutionalised forms of consensus building, integrating oppositional forces into the ruling power structure. Radical parties could try to discredit the consensual uniformity, to extend the legal forms, to break with rules of the political field, but up to a specific degree they have to play the game. Nevertheless parties are also part of civil society and for a left radical party its strength depends essentially on the existence and organic connection to active social movements. Otherwise a left party is going to isolate itself, lost in the structures of parliamentary politics without the transformative power of movements as their mobile spine and vital space for imagination. Left radical parties have to reflect their privileged position in ruling political systems, divide power with social movements systematically, giving them institutional forms of influence over party decisions and (financial) means. The more successful they are, the more they have to ‘disempower’ themselves vis-à-vis the movements, recognising that they are not the centres of hegemonic counter-power, nor a privileged political form for social transformation. Such a party could be some kind of ‘institutional backbone’ (Spehr 2000), an infrastructure (Brand 2004) for social movements, creating and securing spaces for activities from below.

./english/193.txt:43:Parties like movements need institutionalised spaces for self-reflection and critique beyond the daily tasks. The connections might be intensified via interchanging personal, representatives of movements on (open) electoral lists of the party, active participation of party militants and movements on all levels of decision making, obligatory reports to militants and movements etc. (see Spehr 2004). Progressive parties in power could hold a strong defensive potential against repressive attacks, strengthening offensive political movements, assuring social achievements by giving them a legal form (for a possible future when the movement may be weaker). If they create a closed bureaucracy feeling independent from the movements, cutting the vital organic relations for negotiating compromises with the social bloc in power, the ‘party becomes anachronistic’, losing ‘its social content’ (Gramsci, Gef.7, H.13, 1579). ‘If the radical left tries to cooperate with the majoritarian left (participating in governmental coalitions or other strategic alliances), under conditions of neoliberal hegemony, it is under suspicion [and in danger] of renouncing its own positions for taking part in policy making processes’, pretending to ease the pain of politics otherwise implemented without their participation. Even because of its radical [ethical] standards applied to politics in such situations, ‘the radical left is seen as especially untrustworthy measured with these own standards’ (Brie 2004; Candeias 2004, 340).

./english/193.txt:47:Parts of the movements think that the parties are something apart, alienating us from each other and from our desire to self-determination, becoming an apparatus that decides for us and betrays our will. But they don’t see that in separating the parties from the movement they promote bureaucratisation, parties lose active participation, become a mechanical closed form, with political aims that are an expression of their dried up social basis, just the functionaries remain. Turning our backs on state-oriented politics and parties reproduces the bourgeois division between state, civil society and economy, instead of understanding the ensemble of social relations not only as determining but also as one channel that is available for the transformation of the whole social organization. We have seen what happens when parties and movements cut off their organic connections or when movements disappear and parties continue to exist. The ‘arrogance of the party’ (ibid., H.14, 1696) that develops in such situations was quite visible at the ESF (Wainwright 2004), enlarging the gap between some parties trying to dominate the ESF and the radical movements. This was also visible on the huge demonstration of about 100.000 participants, where only a few (British) groups were represented in the final speeches (Pomrehn), incessantly invoking solidarity with the resistance in Iraq and Palestine – which for many movements is absolutely unbearable.

./english/193.txt:53:The relation between parties and movements, between state-oriented politics and autonomy is not an outward one; they are not separated from each other, but are not identical either. ‘We have to run the risk of contamination’ and vice versa, as Luciana Castellina put it (2004). The common perspective Roger Martelli formulated in 2000: ‘It is not about taking power, but giving it back to society’ or even taking it back (re--appropriating), starting a real process of what we in German call (Selbst)Vergesellschaftung – a process of (self)societalization. The goal is to build an alterglobalisation movement as a real democratic power able to achieve it objectives. The issue of how get there is still and will remain a very controversial process – dealing with antinomies means to understand the contradictions of the multitude.

./english/193.txt:58:Brand, Ulrich, ›Paradoxies of socialist party politics in times of neoliberal globalisation‹, Manuscript Berlin 2004 [forthcoming]

./english/193.txt:59:Castellina, ›Luciana, Bring back politics‹, in: Eurotopia, pilot issue October 2004, 8-9, www.eurotopiamag.com

./english/193.txt:79:2. For Tariq Ali there are two modes of revolutionary politics in Latin America today: the Zapatista movement, retired in the jungle of Chiapas, and the ‘successful’ case of Venezuela: “There is an idealistic slogan within the social movements, which goes like this: ‘We can change the world without taking power.’ This slogan doesn’t threaten anyone; it’s a moral slogan. The Zapatistas - who I admire - you know, when they marched from Chiapas to Mexico City, what did they think was going to happen? Nothing happened.” (www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1223)

./english/193.txt:83:4. The temporalities of party politics are contradictory, in Holloway’s understanding: they seek power, trying to take advantage of political conjunctures, while asking their members to wait until the party is in power, and then until they change the world for us.

./english/194.txt:14:Finally, there it is the political problem. A good editorial in yesterday's "Guardian" reproaches the British political elite for their absence from the forum and underlines how from the experience of the ESF we can expect "the emergence of a genuine new politics of the European left". The success of the Respect meeting, the presence of living forces of the alternate left within the Forum, tell us that this possibility is now there [the writing is on the wall]. And largely depends precisely on the behaviour of this left itself.

./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: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:3:The London ESF and the Politics of Autonomous Space

./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:13:With respect to the politics of autonomous space, the London ESF was a tremendous success. Never before have there been so many diverse, disjunctive, yet complementary initiatives not entirely within or without, but rather straddling various mobile and often elusive boundaries. Some, like Beyond ESF, were more confrontational, while others, like the Indymedia Center or Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination were neither for or against, but rather involved their own innovative forms of political and cultural production across the terrain of the forum and, indeed, the entire city itself. Although autonomous, these spaces were not entirely cut off from official events. In addition to the highly public oppositional actions, many of us moved fluidly- as much as London 's expansive Underground system would allow- from Alexander Palace to Middlesex University , from the Camden Center to the LSE, and back again.

./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:33:Unfortunately, rather than accept the basic legitimacy of direct action to make publicly visible contradictions and disagreements within the forum process, some ESF organizers have chosen instead to denounce the recent actions as undemocratic and, even more alarming, racist. Their discourse sounds eerily like past statements from James Wolfensohn, George Bush, or Tony Blair. Why do they support direct action only when directed against others? On the other hand, it is unfortunate that activists chose an anti-Racist workshop to make their demands heard on Saturday night, although this has more to do with the fact that Ken Livingstone was speaking than anything else. There is simply no justification for the arrests on Saturday night or Sunday, and even less for the subsequent campaign of delegitimation. Yet all is not lost. There is still plenty of time for ESF organizers to react more constructively, and begin to incorporate the lessons learned leading up the next forum in Athens . On the other side, before the inevitable calls for abandoning the forum come again, we might wait and see, recognizing that the politics of autonomous space allow us to remain true to our own values, forms, and practices, while tactically intervening within the official forum to move out from our radical ghettos and simultaneously spark constructive change.

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

./english/201.txt:63:I'm not sure I know the answers. I know there'll always be a fair smattering of unthinking raving at any event dedicated to radical politics. But I know, too, that my patience is wearing thin with it, and that I'm not the only one . Would I, I asked myself several times over the weekend, bring a non-political or uncommitted friend here and try and convert them? No. Why not? Because I'd be too embarrassed at much of the paper-selling, flag-waving, chanting, unthinking grandstanding that was on display in far too many parts of the forum. This movement needs to move on to serious thought and action pretty fast: events like this should be showing the way. Overall, this one didn't.

./english/205.txt:50:A criticism that has been made (for a while in the so-called ‘global South', more recently in the ‘North') is that despite its principles of horizontality and refusal of representation, the period of the great demos belied a return of representational politics: they took place in the ‘North', amidst a young, white majority that claimed that ‘resistance is everywhere', but in the end of the day dealt with problems that were not close to their protagonists. This is, on the one hand, an oversight of the specificities of the European context – things like squats and social centres are not simply demands of ‘spoiled white brats', but a struggle of a youth that has been made precarious by the structural transformation of capitalism and the welfare reforms, and a struggle that (at least potentially) opens up to those of migrants, sans papiers and the unemployed. On the other hand, it does have an element of truth: the emphasis of these demos seemed always to be on struggles elsewhere, where the dark side of capital was more immediately visible, and they lacked a clearer definition of what the lines of conflict ‘at home' were. The resistance to capital is indeed everywhere, even in its core areas (and it's never enough to repeat that the core-periphery dynamic is repeated like a fractal all across the globe, also in those areas generically thought of as peripheral); one of the subjectivities formed in that period, however, is especially concerned with grassroots organizing processes in places like Asia and Latin America, in which structures such as the PGA European support group, for obvious material reasons, have been playing a relevant role in helping establish links, opening up discussions and helping with fundraising.

./english/209.txt:5:Let me try to explain the peculiarities and mysteries of left politics in Britain – essential to understanding the UK ESF ( www.fse-esf.org ). There has until recently been an unconscious `Little Englandism ' on parts of the left (occasionally it has been quite conscious, like the leading left MP of the 1970's and 80s who proudly declared that he did not have a passport). This has led to an almost complete disengagement from the debate and campaigns around the proposed European constitution. Some engage but only to defend national parliaments as the means of achieving democracy against a ‘bureaucratic Brussels '. But engagement with the Europe-wide thinking about different levels of democracy, from the local to the continental, is only just beginning. The hosting of the ESF is proving an important catalyst.

./english/209.txt:13:Another peculiarity of British politics which has presented a challenge to the organisation of the ESF in London is the democratic weakness of local government. In Florence and Paris it was, after all, the support of left dominated municipalities to the tune of millions of Euros which made the Forum possible. Paradoxically, the weakness of local government in London became a source of undue local authority control of important aspects of the ESF process. The peculiar politics of London and its relation to national politics is another essential part of any guide to the London ESF.

./english/209.txt:17:Livingstone has an attractive charisma as an anti-politician politician, with a strong record at the GLC of working closely with social movements. In a typically low key way his personality and politics will be an important part of the London ESF, at least in terms of its presentation in London . He himself has long been unusually pro-European for a politician on the British left. In terms of British politics, the London ESF will enable Livingstone to associate himself with a high profile, alternative Europeanism, a confident contrast to the indecisive European stance of Tony Blair. The event then plays a part in Livingstone's long term game plan of presenting an alternative direction for Labour to Tony Blair.

./english/209.txt:33:The British left is in a state of extreme fluidity. It is searching, experimenting (and making many mistakes) with ways of building an alternative to Blair. A European space will provide a unique stimulus to new thinking, new ways of organising and seeing politics. People on all ‘sides' sense there is something big at stake, bigger than their own organisational or national interests. Maybe I'm over-optimistic but I think that this time next year we on the British left will see the London ESF as a turning point away from the restrictive politics of the British, and especially the English left. Potentially the London ESF will be historic. One of Europe 's historically most industrially powerful labour movements is struggling, clumsily, to remake itself and significant parts of it know they cannot do it alone.

./english/210.txt:5:But speaking of the ESF as an event connected to “internal relations” and balances of power we can't say the same. First of all the aim that was put down last year in Bobigny – to use the ESF to build a broad spectrum of anti-neoliberal powers inside the UK based on the antiwar movement – has failed. Anti-neoliberal forces are split between what was called the horizontal and the verticals. The event itself was organized under the influence of the Market: closed doors, a lack of transparency, a close relation to neoliberal powers, exclusions, “managerial” logistics, expensive, not collective and a close relation to the metropolitan police. It followed the “No Money, no honey” politics of the Mayor of London and, because he was the only one with the money, he could influence the way it was organized. And he never felt that he had to be accountable to anybody and especially to the European organizers – and he was helped for this by the left dominating powers of London . Things were so bad that activists thought that a specific seminar was a not a space to debate but a public relations operation of the Mayor.

./english/210.txt:9:Hijacking the Sunday Demo comes as a result of the lack of real discussion on the priorities of the Movement and behind that stand the lack of a methodology, the lack of discussion after the defeat of the antiwar movement, and a lack of theoretical practice from one hand and understanding and working with differences on the other. British politics may not be very inclusive but this is a European problem for most of our counties. And because inclusiveness is one of our core problems we must absolutely not repeat the British way.

./english/210.txt:11:The dominating left parties of course tried to use the ESF (mostly because of their own politics and not because they are just a party) to use and gain power inside the process, because some political parties still believe that they are the avant-garde of a defeated Left.

./english/210.txt:17:Campaigning against the war and inventing International Days Against the War, hoping (and praying) that people will come out in the same way of 15th of February is just not doing politics and is far away from the needs of the societies.

./english/210.txt:19:The 19th of March was decided to be a day against European neoliberal politics. We support an international march that day in Brussels and wouldn't like to watch another attempt of forcing the Movement to demonstrate under slogans it did not choose and in ways against direct democracy that it does not live by.

./english/212.txt:10:The first European Social Forums (ESF) set the stage for the construction of the European alterglobalisation movement and successfully centred political debate on neoliberal globalisation. Since the first World Social Forum (WSF) held in Porto Alegre in January 2001, the Social Forums, and the ESF in particular, have become the most visible public expression of the alterglobalisation movement. Basing themselves on the Charter of Porto Alegre, which has become an indispensable reference, the Forums have become quasi-permanent processes of crystallization of new forces and struggles that were previously rather disparate. Prior to the Forums the latter acted in dispersed fashion, promoting alterglobalisation in a precocious albeit strategically unfocused way. Today, critical movements benefit from a wide array of tools of struggle and common objectives. This crystallization has been accompanied by geographic expansion. The first three WSFs in Brazil created the conditions for the incorporation into the alterglobalisation movement of powerful social forces from South America, notably the peasant and indigenous people’s movements. The Bombay WSF in 2004 likewise integrated Indian social movements into the global struggle. The geopolitics of alterglobalisation thus mirrors the process of neoliberal globalisation, though its scope is still less all encompassing. It is to be hoped that the WSF planned for 2007 in Africa will play a similar role to the 2004 WSF in India. The global movement still needs to expand its reach to Eastern Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. China remains outside of this process, for an undetermined period of time. Completing this geopolitical expansion of alterglobalisation will require the promotion and development of Local Social Forums in a number of countries. LSFs are prominent organising tools favouring the embedding of the Forum process. The same can be said of the National Social Forums that have emerged in a number of countries. This process constitutes a major step forward in the struggle against neoliberal globalisation. Nonetheless, its future development depends on moving forward to new stages, thereby avoiding the threat of exhaustion, immobility and lack of creativity. In this respect, self-criticism and criticism are indispensable components of the dynamic of the Forums. We have to be lucid about the state of the process. ATTAC, acting as a movement on an international level, has been committed since its inception to the construction of the Social Forums. As such, it has a double obligation. Firstly, to reflect lucidly and uncompromisingly on the insufficiencies and some of the recently witnessed drifts of the movement. Secondly, to stimulate new thinking and propose new forms of action designed to strengthen and amplify the global movement. The WSF has already undertaken to reinvent its formula in 2005. The success of this reshaping will be judged in January. The same kind of effort must occur on a European level.

./english/219.txt:37:At a time when the new European Commission shamelessly boasts a high profile of laissez-faire politics, we must start a process of mobilisation in all European countries in order to impose the recognition of both collective and individual social, political, economic, cultural and ecological rights for men and women alike. To enable all the peoples of Europe to join this process, we must build a movement that overrides our differences and groups all the forces of the peoples of Europe ready to be involved in the struggle against European neo-liberalism.

./english/228.txt:10:We believe that its success depends on our capability to bring forward and debate in the European and Greek societies Resistance to war, neoliberalism, racism, the attack against political and social rights, environmental disaster and at the same time focusing on our governments that apply these politics of fear and poverty. We can see fragments of this world “that is possible” through denying neoliberal world and debating in our Forum.

./english/229.txt: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:36:More than a hundred thousand people were present at the three European Social Forums: events such as these do not often occur in the political history. They have created new spaces and ways of participation, in which the old differences between elaboration and social practice, between political, TU and social areas have gradually disappeared, making room for values, ideas and participation, and creating communally new expressions of “making politics”. It’s our common responsibility not to squander all of it.

./english/233.txt:25:· Also very successful was the ‘European Cultural Forum' bus which took the ESF to the streets, going around London with politics and performance for the general public

./english/233.txt:45:· Small working sessions should have more weight in the programme than plenaries. (It is understood that the WSF will in future lean towards seminars rather than plenaries). However, there is a space for ‘big-name' talks, partly for people new to politics who particularly want to hear them, but also to reflect major debates between thinkers and tendencies. Plenaries are best done in the form of a debate (which might sometimes have three rather than two speakers), rather than having 6 speakers who tend not to systematically engage with each other. There should always be plenty of time for discussion

./english/234.txt:5:The third European Social Forum has shown the necessity of a change in the organizing formula and process of the forum itself. After Paris-Saint Denis, the European global-movement entered into a new phase. We have to report, on one side, the still positive presence of the constitutive elements of its "birth act" - the crisis of the consensus on the war and liberal politics, the tendency towards the coordination of initiatives on an European scale, criticism of the political representation of social struggles – but also, on the other side, that we did not reflect enough on the social composition of the movement and on the motivations of practice.

./english/236.txt:15:Promoted and addressed in this way, the Forum has the potential to attract individuals (particularly young people) who are sceptical of the forms of politics that present absolute certainties or fixed utopias. It can also increase the Forum's potential as a catalyst for the creation of similar pedagogical spaces that can inspire and support “non-politicised” people in the wider society to start asking certain questions and to become aware of their political existence, expanding the role of the Forum as a catalyst for change beyond its boundaries. We can cite two initiatives that, using the Forum as an icon for resistance, have worked in this direction:

./english/236.txt:17:• The twelve-session Open Space Seminar Series on the theme “Are other worlds possible? Cultures of politics and the World Social Forum” that was organised by Jai Sen, Mukul Mangalik and Madhuresh Kumar at Delhi University in India during August-December 2003, under the auspices of the History Society, Ramjas College. One of the outcomes of this project was the publication of the book Are Other Worlds Possible? The Open Space Reader compiled by Jai Sen and Madhuresh Kumar; another was the formation of two autonomous discussion groups among students from different universities in the city; and a third is a forthcoming set of books based on the transcripts of the seminars.

./english/237.txt:17:However, worrying trends emerged in the formative stages of the UK ESF process which raised questions about the motivations of the groups holding the reins of the event, namely Socialist Action, the Socialist Workers Party and the Greater London Authority (GLA). We quickly witness a lack of spaces for open dialogue, the delegitimisation of local working groups (including the London Social Forum), vertical company structures for the event and, most disturbingly, the silencing of dissent in the process and non-consensus based decisions. The UK ESF was sold as a gathering for those opposed to war, racism and corporate power, global justice, workers' rights and a sustainable society” but essentially it became a giant market place of commodified politics, with blatant backroom dealing in seminars and the privatisation of the event management.

./english/238.txt:3:Babels and the politics of language at the hearth of Social Forum

./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:45:At a deeper level, in its efforts to bring to life these principles of ‘learning from practice', ‘solidarity, ‘horizontality' and ‘equality', Babels embodies the two main positive achievements of the Social Forum process. The first is its Gandhian philosophy of ‘being the change we want to see', also known as ‘pre-figurative politics'. In other words, Babels attempts to put into practice the very egalitarian and internationalist principles of the ‘good society' the alter-globalisation movement calls for in facilitating communication across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

./english/238.txt:47:The second contribution of the Social Forums is that through organising as much as possible ‘outside' of the capitalist sphere of competitive market relations, alternative systems of social and economic organisation based on need and solidarity – and not profit and private ownership – are being developed out of necessity . Annual Social Forums assembling tens of thousands of people from across different continents simply cannot take place unless we develop alternative means of international ist communication to the high cost and qualitative limitations of the market. At the same time, Babels must not be seen as a ‘low cost service provider' directly threatening the ‘communicatariat' of working interpreters and translators. Instead, it is an act of political solidarity indispensable to the Social Forums and the development of a global transformative politics and movement.

./english/238.txt:61:To begin with, we must all accept and attempt to address the fact that the ideals of diversity and inclusion within the Porto Alegre Charter still remain largely unrealised in many Social Forums, especially the ESF. Like Florence and Paris before it, the large majority of the 20,000 participants – and interpreters – at this year's London ESF were again mainly white, able-bodied Western Europeans. This failure over three years to significantly expand popular participation of those either living in or originating from Central and Eastern Europe and the global South, not to mention from the disabled and deaf communities, cannot be simply explained away by the systematic refusal of visas (the disgrace of London), problems of disability access or the gargantuan cost of international travel from outside the EU – the ‘politics of language' has also played a central part.

./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/246.txt:39:Since the first WSF one has heard many cries about culture being left out of the discussions, about it not being transversal to the debates etc. While this is certainly true in the sense of the previous paragraph, it is also a bit nonsensical: if we understand culture in the broader sense used above, how could it be outside? This normally means that the people making these demands want more discussion on the specificities of culture in a globalised capitalist world – which ends meaning equalling culture and art or the industry of entertainment, and this can be as much a part of the problem as it is a part of the solution. All the debates I remember at the first three WSFs which were ‘on culture’ had to do with protections for the national audiovisual industries against Hollywood, or politics of national exception, or politics of national protection to endangered cultural heritage, particularly that of minorities. Although these may of course still be useful instruments in a struggle of resistance against homogenisation, they do not tackle the problem of commodification as such, nor do they tackle the ‘lateral’ importance given to cultural debates in the left. By treating culture as art, they assume without question distinctions we have shown to be very characteristic of the society we want to transform. By placing culture as an exception that can only be adequately dealt with by the nation-state, they not only close more questions than they open, but also compartmentalise ‘culture’ as a subject for specialists, as one of the many issues – and not a particularly vital one – to be debated at a forum. This is mirrored by the way, for instance, free software is also ‘a bit on the side’, something for those who use or develop it to discuss; while in some other corner some people talk about digital inclusion, and yet another group somewhere else talks about the persecution and criminalisation of social movements by the mass media, or the monopoly of information held by big transnational conglomerates.

./english/247.txt:27:Of course the everyday details of the proposals were not all perfect during these three years of the process. Certainly, the environmental illiteracy of the majority of people is one of the main causes, added to by technical and administrative problems. But we believe that the difficulties faced in the IYC only reflect the social-environmental problems through which we are (ourselves) confronted in daily life, in the distancing of humans from nature, in the general lack of environmental literacy, and in the total fragmentation of debate, which means that a lot of people still don ' t see politics in the environment or, worse still, they think the search for the solution to our problems should just be made at debate tables and not in daily practices.

./english/259.txt:13:In my last contribution to the CSGR Newsletter (issue 10, September 2003), I closed with reference to Henry David Thoreau’s statement that ‘[t]he thoughtful [wo]man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace’. The implication was that one dimension of a glocal radical politics that contests the moralities of capitalism, neoliberalism and militarism is that it is opening spaces for intellectual endeavours to contribute to, and be part of, activist praxis.

./english/259.txt:17:2. that the institutional academic environment is a space where the power relations contested in global radical politics are reproduced; and

./english/259.txt:26:As such, the meeting’s proactive focus interacted substantially with the local contexts in which it took place, highlighting the ‘real world’ complexities influencing activist practice and research. Important issues that came up included: relationships between Catalan separatist politics and a radical activist politics that focuses on transnational issues; the integral significance of maintaining physical spaces for the existence and enhancing of alternative communities and organising practices; and current processes and events in Barcelona that are demolishing existing inner-city communities in the process of gentrifying and cleansing the city, particularly in relation to the city’s 2004 business and tourism-oriented Cultural Forum.

./english/259.txt:40:Independently of this an ‘anarchist:academics’ e-list emerged from a meeting at the Anarchist Bookfair in London, October 2003. Currently there is some cross-over of participants occurring between the two lists and the beginnings of discussion regarding shared interests and intent. The theoretical and pragmatic interests of these events and discussions, groups and individuals, are reflected in a process of ‘talkshops’ supported by CSGR due to take during 2004, under the title of academia, activism and postanarchism: theory and practice in (anti-)globalisation politics. All these initiatives build and magnify existing UK-based theory:practice initiatives such as Signs of the Times (www.signsofthetimes.org.uk) and Shifting Ground Collective (www.shiftingground.org). It is tempting to see in them some renewed vigour in the recursive relationship between theory and practice, as well as between the ivory tower of academia and the real world ‘out there’.

./english/266.txt:207: Corporations and Politics

./english/269.txt:27:Instead of sitting still to settle all these doubts, we decided to set off and work them out on the move. We chose a method that would take us on a series of itineraries through the metropolitan circuits of feminized precarious work, leading each other through our quotidian environments, speaking in the first person, exchanging experiences, reflecting together. These derives through the city defy the division between work and life, production and reproduction, public and private, to trace the spatial-temporal continuum of existence, the double (or multiple) presence. More concretely: for a few months an open and changing group of us went almost every week on a wandering tour through the important spaces of daily life of women (ourselves, friends, close contacts) working in precarious and highly feminized sectors: language work (translations and teaching), domestic work, call-shops, sex work, food service, social assistance, media production. In order to structure our reflections a bit, we chose a few axes of particular and common interest to guide us: borders, mobility, income, the body, knowledge and relations, empresarial logic, conflict. Talking, reflecting, video camera and tape-recorder in hand, we went with the hope of communicating the experience and the hypotheses we might derive from it, taking our own communication seriously, not only as a tool of diffusion but as primary material for politics.

./english/269.txt:59:One thing leads to another. From the derives to more derives, from workshops to thousands more dialogues and debates, demonstrations, public spaces, the possibility of accumulation. Beyond the politics of the gesture: density, history, links, narration, territory… to be continued.

./english/272.txt:3:Notes towards a politics of knowledge

./english/272.txt:9:We are at a distinct and historically significant moment in the politics of knowledge - in the relation, that is, of understandings of knowledge to the transformation of political and economic power.

./english/272.txt:12:One way of understanding the political importance of this new self-consciousness of social movements as producers of knowledge is to highlight its origins. Also a sense of where this new political mentality has come from will give us a clearer idea of the distinctive political role of activist intellectuals. The creation, in practice at any rate, of a new politics of knowledge can be traced back to the late 60’s and 70’s and the new kind of social movements which began to emerge at this period - across the world in some form but most strongly in the US and Europe. In their diverse ways, the student and anti-Vietnam war movements, the radical militancy of workplace trade unionism, and perhaps most innovative of all, modern feminism, were in good part a response to the dead ends of previous historic paths to social progress: whether the model of the Soviet Union or the model of social democratic Sweden, or welfare Britain. These movements in their resistance to imperialism, to Fordist production, to gender subordination were also struggling to go beyond, transform or caste aside `actually existing’ institutions of social reform. Consequently, they found themselves transforming society without any precise directions or recipe. As a result they became, more or less self consciously engaged in a continuing process of experimentation, comparable to the scientific process.

./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:32:These could be understood as two of the functions of the World Social Forum and Social Forums more generally. Certainly, this is the direction in which the developing methodology of the WSF – and hopefully the ESF – is moving. There is growing self awareness of Social Forums as useful contexts in which practical and theoretical knowledge can be shared in order to identify the next action to be taken. Enhancement of the movements’ role as producers of emancipatory knowledge – knowledge integral to the work of social transformation - provides a useful criteria for the workings of the methodology. For it implies a mobilisation process that reaches out to all those involved in struggles for social justice, grass roots movements – not simply co-ordinating groups and NGO’s; it implies open, democratic and empowering discussions through which there can be a real exchange of different kinds of knowledge, from different sources – not simply speeches to a more or less passive audience; it implies ways of organising the event which reveals connections, commonalities and differences between movements so that knowledge of power structures and strategies of transformation from different angles are debated and compared – not simply parallel, separate themes; it implies a tough mutual interrogation and debate of each others knowledge, imbued as it is by values and politics – not simply the co-existence of different perspectives. Only these kinds of activities will move the dialectic of knowledge and action on.

./english/274.txt:20:Clearly if one wants to seriously put forward the idea of revolutionary social change one has to move conceptions of how such an alternative arrangement might work out of the realm of inconceivable thought and into the realm of possibility. This can help to explain why it is musicians, writers, and artists who have been commonly drawn to radical politics – the flexibility of creativity makes it easier to imagine that alternative social arrangements are possible. The task at hand for those of us who advocate radical social change is making that sort of flexibility and utopian social vision seems like an achievable possibility to the vast majority of the population – and that will happen not through saying or proclaiming that is so, but through a concrete demonstrations that such forms have existed and present a realistic alternative to the current

./english/275.txt:21:What we are interested in here, however, is not so much the specific ‘lines’ developed in these traditions as a particular understanding of what politics is, and hence of the nature of the social situation that we find ourselves in as activists. We have developed this separately7 around the proposition that Marxism is, at its core, a theory of organised human practice, and thus an alternative theory of social movements, very different in its shape from the academic school of that name. In this paper, we want to explore an outline of that understanding and see what it can have to offer other activists, whether Marxist or not.

./english/275.txt:100:All this being said about theory, let us remind ourselves of the multiple sites and agents involved in the production of theory by noting how these approaches to experience and theory are bound up with the politics of movement practice.

./english/275.txt:101:Wainwright refers to this aspiration of basing oneself in, but going beyond (existing) human experience as the epistemology of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Much of the novelty of these movements, for Wainwright, can be attributed to the politics of knowledge they articulated. This was characterized by a valuation of the experiential, practical, tacit knowledge generated by humans through their being in – and acting in – the world. This practical-tacit knowledge, limited though it is by the particular situatedness of a given ‘knower’ (and, equally importantly, by their degree of connectedness to other knowers), constitutes a valid source of insight into the workings of the social world with all its contradictions and constraints, and offers a touchstone which enables us to go beyond reshuffling ideological cards: ‘Experience, rather than simply yielding facts which confirm or falsify general laws, provides clues to underlying structures and relationships which are not observable other than through the particular phenomena or events that they produce.’46

./english/275.txt:102:The relationship between experience and theory, then, can be understood as one where ‘experiential knowledge’ is valid as ‘clues, signposts and stimuli to deeper understanding and theoretical innovation’.47 In particular, this takes the form of the experience of a situation as problematic, or of a way of doing things as not working. Moreover, the relationship between experience and theory in this politics of knowledge is also a dialogical one where the deepening of understanding that theory may bring about takes place through the socialization of experiential common sense: ‘Much of their practice indicates a belief in the possibility, through social organization, of extending and combining fragmented knowledge to gain not ‘a complete picture’, but rather a better understanding of the social mechanisms at work, so as to direct their efforts in order that their intentions might be more efficiently fulfilled’.48

./english/275.txt:115:The critical problem for this vast array of struggles is to shift gears, transcend particularities, and arrive at some conception of a universal alternative to that social system which is the source of their difficulties … The oppositional movements of socialism, communism, environmentalism, feminism and even humanism and multiculturalism have all constructed some sort of universalistic politics out of militant particularist origins51

./english/275.txt:119:The movement from particularity to universality entails a ‘translation’ from the concrete to the abstract. Since a violence attaches to abstraction, a tension always exists between particularity and universality in politics. This can be viewed either as a creative tension or, more often, as a destructive and immobilizing force in which inflexible mediating institutions … claim rights over individuals and communities in the name of some universal principle52

./english/275.txt:125:The compulsion towards insurgent architecture arises from this situation: ‘without translation, collective forms of action become impossible. All potential for an alternative politics disappears’.54

./english/275.txt:146:In the aftermath of defeat, movements shifted rapidly towards particularism and ‘identity politics’, a process aided by the new cultural capitalism’s willingness to commercialize particular kinds of revolt and by a process of academicization which favoured symbolic competition and distancing. This identity politics, it should be said, was not restricted to feminism or to black politics: in many ways the cadre Marxism of the early 1970s formed its own kind of identity politics, fiercely claiming universality in theory but often bitterly exclusivist in practice.

./english/275.txt:179:Cox, Laurence 1998 ‘Gramsci, movements and method: the politics of activist research’ in Fourth international conference on alternative futures and popular protest, edited by Colin Barker and Mike Tyldesley. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University.

./english/275.txt:219:Hutton, Patrick 1981 The cult of the revolutionary tradition: the blanquists in French politics, 1864-1893. Berkeley: University of California Press.

./english/275.txt:263:Thompson, Willie 1997 The Left in history: revolution and reform in twentieth-century politics. London: Pluto.

./english/276.txt:17:Local rationality refers to the various oppositional ways of being and doing that people develop in their attempt to cope with experiences of frustrations, constraints and threats of and to their needs3. Militant particularisms are those forms of struggle that erupt when local rationalities are made more unitary and coherent as subaltern social groups deploy specific skills and knowledges in open confrontation with a dominant social group, in a particular place and at a particular time, in a particular conflict over a particular issue4. Campaigns are those forms of movement activity that emerge as militant particularisms communicate with and form links with each other, develop common strategies and identities across socio-spatial boundaries – i.e. the organization of a range of local responses to specific situations in ways that connect people across multiple such situations so as to challenge the construction of those situations. Social movement projects emerge from the development of a politics which connects single-issue campaigns to an ‘anti-systemic’5 politics. Social movement projects are thus defined by the following features: (a) they pose challenges to the social totality which (b) aim to control the self-production of society and (c) possess or are striving to develop the capacity for the kind of hegemony – i.e. giving direction to the skilled activity of different subaltern social groups – that would render (b) and thus (a) possible6.

./english/276.txt:31:As a movement process unfolds, and as activists seeks to “go beyond”, I would argue that what takes place is a process of transcendence of or move from the concrete experiences of a given lifeworld towards an more abstract understanding of the workings of a social organization of human practice; from particular interpretations of these experiences to more universal interpretations – and hence also a move from a politics of particularity towards a politics of universality; and a transcendence of or move from the local towards the global in the form of social movement projects that challenge the social totality. The homologous relationship between the movement process and the experience-theory nexus can be expressed diagrammatically as follows:

./english/276.txt:37:The movement from particularity to universality entails a “translation” from the concrete to the abstract. Since a violence attaches to abstraction, a tension always exists between particularity and universality in politics. This can be viewed either as a creative tension or, more often, as a destructive and immobilizing force in which inflexible mediating institutions …. claim rights over individuals and communities in the name of some universal principle (Harvey 2000: 242)

./english/276.txt:39:The daunting task of engaging in the labour of translation and abstraction in order to build universalisms out of particularisms is referred to by Harvey as ‘insurgent architecture’: ‘The insurgent architect with a lust for transformative action must be able to translate political aspirations across the incredible variety and heterogeneity of socio-ecological and political-economic conditions. He or she must also be able to relate different discursive constructions and representations of the world … He or she must confront the conditions of and prospects for uneven geographical developments. The skills of translation become crucial here’ (Harvey 2000: 244). The compulsion towards insurgent architecture arises from this situation: ‘without translation, collective forms of action become impossible. All potential for an alternative politics disappears’ (Harvey 2000: 245).

./english/276.txt:100:The production of knowledge animates all phases of a movement process – from militant particularisms to social movement projects. However, the kind of knowledge which prevails in militant particularisms and campaigns are typically geared towards a politics that seeks ‘the amelioration of states of affairs’ as opposed to ‘the transformation of structures’ (Collier, 1994: 194). Indeed, while the development of campaigns entails the transcendence of the boundaries of militant particularisms and the development of collective identities that cut across socio-spatial divides, they are still limited forms of movement activity in that they do not address the issue of the social totality; this only happens with the development of social movement projects. The second prong of my argument thus runs as follows: social movement research moored in critical realist assumptions is particularly apt for developing knowledge which can contribute to the development of social movement projects that aims for the transformation of social structures in that critical realism deliberately targets structures as its ultimate object of knowledge and therefore has the potential to generate knowledge about how structures can be transformed. If the powers of societies or institutions are generated and constrained by inner structures, there are three questions that would define the critical realist approach to the study of societies or institutions: (i) what sort of things can be done and what sort of things cannot be done given the character of the extant structures?; (ii) if the structures had been different, would this have rendered possible the doing of other things?; (iii) how can one structure be transformed into another (Collier, 1994: 10). Thus Bhaskar argues:

./english/277.txt:1:Gramsci, movements and method: the politics of activist research

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

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

./english/277.txt:12:Gramsci, movements and method: the politics of activist research1

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

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

./english/277.txt:68:“The active mass human being acts practically, but does not have a clear theoretical consciousness of this activity, which is however a knowledge of the world, in that it transforms it. In fact, their theoretical consciousness can be historically in contrast with their practical activity. It can almost be said that they have two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one implicit in their activity and which truly unites them with all their collaborators in the practical transformation of reality; and one which is superficially explicit or verbal, which they have inherited from the past and have accepted without criticism. Nevertheless, this ‘verbal’ consciousness is not without consequences: it connects them to a given social group and influences them in their moral conduct and in the direction of their will, in more or less energetic ways, which can lead to a point in which the contradictory nature of their consciousness does not permit any action, any decision or any choice, and produces a situation of moral and political passivity. Critical self-understanding thus comes about via a struggle of political ‘hegemonies’, of opposing forms of direction, first in the field of ethics, then in that of politics, to arrive at a superior elaboration of their own conception of the real.” (Gramsci 1991: 13)

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

./english/277.txt:112:The politics of research

./english/277.txt:115:And yet the proposition that all knowledge is socially located, that our understanding of the world is closely tied to our interests and our experience, and that there is nowhere outside this “radical sociality” where we could stand, is a basic presupposition of the Marxist theory of knowledge (e.g. Goldmann 1969). It is of course anathema to positivist theories of science; in subtler ways, it is rejected by both Weber and Mannheim. Secondly, and more interestingly, in a western Marxist context this proposition has a political and active edge which it tends to lose rapidly in other formulations. It is not a theory of a passive relation to knowledge given by virtue of simple oppression; rather, it has tended to be formulated in terms of the relationship between given theories and doctrines and their authors’ political positions, organisational strategies and the social groups they sought to appeal to. Buried in the internecine polemics of the workers’ movement is a sophisticated, and thoroughly “reflexive”, conception of knowledge politics.

./english/277.txt:117:Perhaps the most interesting feature of this conception is that it draws an implicit parallel between organising modes and strategies of research. Indeed, in western Marxist formulations the two are not necessarily distinguishable, and for good reasons: to know the world, in a critical realist perspective, entails a practical intervention, in that we only know the world insofar as we engage with it, and we only engage with it from the point of view of particular interests. The “politics of research” and the politics of social movements, then, are not two separate things. In each case, a movement is being “constructed” by the bringing together of spatially, socially and temporally scattered practices, by the attempt to relate the understandings of participants to one another and to a more general idea of the nature of the movement, one which also identifies the nature of the opposition and the political implications of the demands being made.

./english/277.txt:118:To do this is then also to collude with the knowledge interests of some participants and to conflict with that of others; just as activists do, in other words, so researchers find themselves in practice agreeing to a greater or lesser extent with the way some participants see the movement, and organising their research accordingly, and disagreeing to a greater or lesser extent with other views, and organising the research in ways which tend to exclude these other definitions - of the boundaries of the movement, for example. This is, I think, inevitable if the research process is to involve any identification of an object of research, if it is to involve any method of engaging with that object, and if it is to result in any analysis whatsoever. Yet if this is the case, it becomes crucial to be able to give a clear account of the politics of a specific research process.

./english/277.txt:127:One published a selection from his ongoing research as an explicit contribution to the discussions of that time (Raschke 1991). Over a somewhat longer period, members of the party elite (Antje Vollmer, Wolfgang Thierse) were and are involved in the journal of new social movement research, the Forschungsjournal neue soziale Bewegungen. This situation is perhaps unusual in terms of the level of competence and the scale of resources available to the party, but not otherwise. As Tomás Jones has pointed out, there are strong dangers in a situation where research is guided by purely external criteria: the politics of European social movements research - and its funding - has shifted rightwards over the last two decades (1993: 7 - 8). To take the most alarming example, Diani and Eyerman’s otherwise fascinating volume (1992) on the methodology of social movements research came out of a European Consortium for Political Research session jointly sponsored by the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and ... the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, a fact mentioned without comment in the introduction to the volume.

./english/277.txt:132:My second point is perhaps simpler. It is not, I think, enough to describe the research process, even in these expanded terms, and leave it at that. What is important, for much the same reasons as in participant observation, is a way of bringing research to engage with the politics of the participants. The point in discussions of reflexivity is that the researcher’s own standpoint and knowledge interests cannot be separated from the research process. Yet if all that is done is to describe retrospectively what they did, and not why, little has been gained. It has frequently been suggested that more dialogue between researchers and participants would not be a bad thing; how much more than lip service is paid to this is hard to tell. One problem with it, as I can attest from my own research, is that it runs up against the pressure both parties are under (for rather different reasons), and seems to be superfluous to the central interests of both. A subsidiary problem is the question of comprehension. Both participants and outsiders are liable to find social theory in some respects difficult to grasp.

./english/277.txt:133:This is not, I think, so much a question of vocabulary and training as it is of content. When presented with documents written in jargon, we tend to look for the point, as we conceive it; if we find none, we give up on comprehension. To engage in dialogue with movement participants, then, researchers would need to have something to say to them that participants would recognise as a pointful statement. In other words, to solve the subsidiary problem we need to tackle the main one: to find ways of communicating that are not superfluous to what participants are engaged in, thus to produce research whose politics are of interest to the participants. Obviously the scope for this is immense, from actively taking sides in movement politics to writing for the alternative press. This engagement, however, also needs to be valuable to the researcher within the terms of their own research activity.

./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/281.txt:3:2) Exactly how would you describe your politics? (Or alternatively, describe your political development to date?) BARBARA BIGLIA: I have been involved in social movements and the autonomous feminist movement since 1986. My participation is not always committed due to personal problems, scepticism, boredom and so on. I have decided never to get involved with formal political parties or groups. (followed on next page) 65

./english/281.txt:17:Viewpoints that arise from potential subversive situations [...] are incorporated, neutralised and redefined within the discipline as methodological innovations or merely as qualitative investigative techniques (Gordo-Lopez, 2001). In other words deconstruction and qualitative methods can be used to justify reactionary practice. Deconstruction and relativism, for example, have been used by some to posit the notion that the Holocaust was an invention and to propagate their historical revisionist point of view. Has a similar process aided the reabsorption5 of critical psychology? I feel myself closest to the standpoint of ‘anti-psychiatry’ in the sense expressed by Bucalo (1997, 54), anti-psychiatry is not a theory but a practice…it is an everyday practice with which we confront other people’s experience and at the same time define our own...regarding interpersonal relations, anti-psychiatry does not limit itself to the negation of internment or the coercion of people’s subjectivities; it is furthermore an acknowledgment of those experiences/abilities within human beings. In other words being anti-psychiatry should be read as a way of being in relation to the world and the subjectivities within it. This is primarily a personal anti-psychiatry. Finally, the third set of doubts that the questionnaire evokes in me: What is the anti-capitalist movement? Is it really possible to talk about one anti-capitalist movement? For example, are the Mapuche movement, Tute Bianche or Attac part of the same struggle? Is there a lot of commonality between the anarchist perspective and NGOs’ politics? Do we fight for the same goals? Is there a common struggle? The definition of Social Movements (SM) is extremely varied and includes many groups with different styles and political positions and the attempt to find a common theory to explain them will result in homogenisation and simplification6. Even when we try to limit analysis to self-professed anti-capitalist movements we are still left with an enormous range of different groups and political options. What is the common ground? Do they work as friends or antagonists? Bearing in mind such heterogeneity, if we want to

./english/281.txt:33:spokespersons of the movement and dismiss the rest as ‘too radical’. I don't think it is necessary here to analyse the effects of these dynamics on the movement. Although it is important to note that declarations from alleged progressive intellectuals is intended to divide the movement and undermine alternative groupings. All this raises considerable doubts in me regarding the possible contributions of disciplines such as critical psychology (especially in English speaking countries), that are becoming academically acceptable. Moreover, we have to recognise that many intellectuals and academics jump on the radical bandwagon and try to take advantage of it, especially since there are so few specialists in this field. As an Italian militant involved with academia reports,13 Spring 1998 [...] explosion of the squatting phenomenon [...] many university barons show a sudden interest in ‘understanding’ squatters and I am called as a possible advisor [...] If I put myself forward as a squatting expert I will surely enhance my career prospects. Intellectual contribution to division and reabsorption In analysing the achievements and failures of Radical Social Movements we have to consider the tools, which the System employs to undermine the subversive power of activities and imagination. In my opinion two of the more successful strategies adopted by the System are reabsorption and splitting; in both, the part played by intellectuals and more specifically, academics, is determinant. Here I wish to examine these processes in more detail. When struggles gain public support the System puts into practice various strategies to re-colonize some of the more explicit demands. They take the demand, turn it upside down, empty it of meaning and use it as a slogan to shut up ‘popular protest’. Even some of the ‘human resources’ of the Movement, that is some of the activists, are reabsorbed into the body politic. This probably occurs for different reasons: some militants enter the movement not because they are completely disenchanted with formal politics but because they are not able

./english/281.txt:37:to enter it directly; some may genuinely believe they can subvert the System from within; some may not realise until much later that they are being used by shady political parties or groups; others still may feel frustrated by the ‘flawed’ strategies adopted by the Radical Social Movement or may even diverge politically from the new positions. In any case, since the System has been able to both recycle part of the movement’s demands and directly recruit some of its leaders, it can de-radicalise the militants. This is what I call reabsorption, in which both populist dictatorships and modern phallo-centric democracies specialise in, with academics as the state’s accomplice. Two painful examples can show how the process works. The first is the inclusion of ‘feminist’ discourse, within societies that arrogantly call themselves ‘first world’, into mainstream socio-political discourse. Politicians are now careful to be politically correct14 and encourage women participation in a world constructed on hetero-patriarchal philosophy. Some feminists lend themselves to such manoeuvres in order to obtain a ‘power quota’. And some may even pretend to be feminists as a matter of policy. Consequently we have positive discriminatory laws by which governments and trans-national organisations enhance their dominating positions and act as Father-figures to their subjects. So we witness in North Europe and the USA15 many gender study departments have completely compromised politics and use women as objects (rarely subjects) of study. This creates a vacuum in the intergenerational transmission belt and at the same time permits the marginalization of rebellious women who refuse to accept the lie of equality16. Moreover, Feminist philosophy has not escaped the pull of the univocal concept of power and the results are clear. It has entered into a dynamics in which the allegedly radical discourse travels on the same false path as traditional misogynist discourse... the self-serving lies of patriarchal discourse are converted into alternative discourse and projected as naturalism (Valcárcel, 1994, 81). 14 ‘Conceptual change not directly reflected in a transformation of practices and behaviours’ (Fernandéz, 2000, p 65). 15 In South Europe it is difficult make a similar analysis because there are so few Women Studies departments. 16 We are encouraged to believe that equal opportunities exist in the ‘civilised world’; we can abort unwanted pregnancies, we can work in the public domain. However, the government’s dominating attitude towards us remains intact which is typical of the hetero-patriarchal capitalist system we are living under.

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

./english/281.txt:50:in dialogue with others of a similar disposition and intellectual bent; if they have to watch their back (p 19). It is significant that even the Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ) which Hakim Bey (1985) wishes to see transformed into Permanent Autonomous Zones (PAZ) are generally characterised by two or three individuals in charge of hefty ideological decisions. So dialogues that Ussher wants to see develop become closed dialogues where it is advantageous to conform to the critical ‘party line’. The biggest problem is that, within supposedly horizontal groups, which are not explicitly authoritarian, it is difficult to recognise leadership and subject it to criticism. This is a strange process in which we are all ‘free to think’ as our unacknowledged leaders, otherwise we are out. Moreover, such groups tend to become endogamous in order to avoid contamination from other critical sources and frequently end up not co-operating with each other because they all believe they possess the deeper and more radical critique of the status quo. Theoretically there may not exist a separation between knowledge-theories and activism. We are critical academics so we must be on the same side as activists. We organize horizontally and we don’t want to manipulate the movement. But we celebrate our arrival to a meeting with half an hour of theoretical chat not understood by non-specialists. I want to mention two experiences in this regard, one from my activist space and the other from my academic milieu. The first experience comes from an assembly of activists I was involved with around ten years ago in Italy. In theory it was a closed group (just for militants with similar politics), organized horizontally as a response to an upcoming protest. The group consisted of about 30 people. Most of us, between 18 and 24 years old, learned about the meeting just a few days in advance. The meeting started with a 90-minute talk by two academic-activists who read from a written paper. After their talk they ask if there was any disagreement with their analysis. I felt as if they were mocking us. Obviously for me, as for most of my friends, it was impossible to understand let alone provide an impromptu critique of a highly complex analysis. Faced with this interrogation all we could do was to try to decide whether we should remain in the group or leave. Another example comes from a few years ago in Spain, during a meeting between critical teachers and students who wanted to change academia. All

./english/282.txt:23:In the real world, of course, the types are sometimes combined together in individuals and groups. Many of those who are drawn to this field of academic study are themselves former or continuing activists and participants in actual movements and movement organizations. It's been suggested (e.g. Morris and Herring 1987; Mayer in Lyman 1995) that part of the impulse to the American shift away from 'collective behaviour' to 'resource mobilization' and 'political process' theories was a response to the movements of the 1960s.(2) Those with feet in both camps are often aware of contradictions and tensions in their different roles. Thus Nancy Naples notes a demand placed on the authors in her collection on Community Activism and Feminist Politics, to 'find a balance between the passion they felt for the community action or activists they were working with and the detachment needed to present their analyses' (1998b: 7).

./english/282.txt:157:The 'new social movements' debate offers another illustration of this transformation of theory. In the 1960s and the 1970s, movement activists on the left struggled to engage with and understand a range of apparently connected phenomena: most obviously the rise of a 'new Left' which was critical both of Stalinism and of Social Democracy from a variety of anti-authoritarian standpoints; the increasingly obvious co-optation of the latter within the institutions of Cold War politics and their practical opposition to revolutionary movements (at least within the West); the growing significance of 'new social actors' - rural blacks in the United States, migrant workers in Italy, students in most Western countries; and the development of a range of movements and campaigns that were not easily captured by the institutional and intellectual frameworks of the Old Left - notably movements against nuclear power, women's movements, urban squatters and movements against nuclear weapons.

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

./english/282.txt:217:There is then an extent to which Eyerman and Jamison's compartmentalization reproduces - to take an example not entirely at random - much of the postwar history of European Social Democracy, with its attempt to juggle internal 'machine politics' with the 'media gurus' deemed necessary to attract the floating voter.

./english/283.txt:9:In March 2004, a number of ‘academics’ and ‘activists’, ‘academic-activists’, and ‘activist-academics’ spent a long weekend in the west of England, talking shop. This was part of a series of four weekend ‘talkshops’ supported by the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR), University of Warwick, which attempted to offer a space for a group of ‘activists’ and ‘academics’ to talk with each other on a range of issues relating to contemporary radical politics and theory. As an initiative, it started from an affirmation of the role(s) of theory/ideas/reflection/philosophy/writing in effecting and contributing to radical politics; and from a position that resistance politics also is, and requires, a ‘revolution’/rebellion of ideas.

./english/283.txt:11:In other words, it was a place for people who desire engagement with theory/philosophy as both a practice that informs radical politics and as a locale for activism. Of course, this is not at all the same thing as saying that this is the only space for activism that ‘we’ might value or engage in. Further, a hope was for the initiative to provide an opening where it might be possible for people to communicate across - and unravel - both disciplinary divides and the activist/academic boundary.

./english/283.txt:56:One specific point raised was the political significance of our affective, i.e. emotional and felt, experiences. This is in relation to both understanding the ways that Empire’s biopower is variously sustained; as well as in terms of being able to draw in and validate affective domains in articulating our politics and in driving our political engagement. This means that peoples’ personal histories and experiences are important politically; particularly those that become the moments when we make conscious and embody a sense that something is not right, and that something different is possible. It perhaps even creates a radical role for the disclosure and sharing of our individual ‘stories’ in relation to our political desires and engagement, as a ‘bottom line’ for the emergence of political community. Although, ‘we’ also face a challenge in engaging with these realities if we don’t want our political encounters to become some sort of therapy group or lapse into excessive New Age self-indulgence. Here we encountered something of a perhaps predictable gender component to peoples’ appreciation of this area of discussion.

./english/284.txt:4:De-centering the Politics of Representation

./english/284.txt:16:The intense week of readings “Against Ethnography” in the context of our course on contemporary sociocultural theory inevitably forced some of us to rethink our attraction to a doctoral program in Anthropology. This discipline is about representing, and representation is a political act, embedded in power relations, and the construction of subjectivities. Representation can take different forms. However, being Anthropology the product of the colonial enterprise, its representational practices were shaped by a comfortable hierarchy in writing, welcomed by the positivist character of the academy at the time. Is the discipline condemned to failure in its endeavor of representation? Or are the politics of representation situated, changing over time, and having different epistemological and political consequences?

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

./english/284.txt:36:From a ‘New Poetics’ to a New Politics of Writing.

./english/284.txt:40:Foucault and Deleuze call for the end of theory as a signifier, theory is reclaimed as action and not as representation: “A theory is like a box of tools (…) there is no more representation; there is nothing but action” (in Spivak1988: 70). Behind these attractive manifesto-like statements, “a post-representationalist vocabulary hides an essentialist agenda” (1989:80) that portrays subalterns as monolithic collectivities. Spivak argues that these “first-world radical intellectuals” are separating the two constitutive meanings of representation. By focusing on the political meaning, they are attacking the “speaking for” in a superficial way since they are forgetting the economic meaning. Without developing her analysis further, I just want to present Spivak as a reference point in bringing political economy into the debate of representation. The micropolitics are not separated from the macropolitics, so “theories of ideologies” based on interests are necessary to complement notions of power based on desire (1989: 74). The international division of labor has to be acknowledged, recognizing its impact in the current epistemological world order. In this sense, Spivak is performing an uneasy –yet relevant and exciting- marriage between Marxism and Deconstruction.

./english/284.txt:42:Going through her text, one has the impression of being called to practice a new “politics” -not merely poetics- of representation. However, her conclusion is drastic, the political economy of representation is not feasible since the subalterns in their very attempt to achieve epistemological status, cannot speak to the risk of being co-opted by the very same violent epistemic framework and their political-economic exploitation reinforced. I would like to ask Spivak a question though: ‘are you not essentializing the subaltern as well by ascribing to them required characteristics such as endemic voicelessness?’

./english/284.txt:51:The debate over representation allows the discipline to accept social movements as alternative knowledge producers. If the activist could ‘speak’ in the academy this would imply entering into an intense horizontal dialogue where the ‘discipline’ would be able to give up its privileges of expertise and to consent to be appropriated by other epistemologies that are using ethnographies as claiming tools of self-representation. Through engaging in this new politics towards representation, Anthropology is forced to embrace dialogical and radical practices, itself being transformed into a locus of resistance.

./english/284.txt:63:Anthropology, in trying to overcome Said’s condemnation to failure in its endeavor of representation through the reflexive process, is offering us an important contribution for engaging with one aspect of the actualité. Concretely, Anthropology today provides both analytical and everyday-life tools to work with current global social movements. Exploring reflexivity in three anthropological texts I hope to show how some of their reflexive insights are building up the possibility of a deeper intellectual and political commitment with global resistance/counter power initiatives. This paper explores the reflexive contributions by “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak, 88), “Carne, Carnavales, and Carnivalesque” (Limón, 1994) and “Beyond Culture: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference” (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997). The three of them are instantiating practices of representation that embrace listening to the subaltern, appreciate the resistance embedded in Mexican jokes, and realize the consequences of global interconnectedness for the ethnographer. I will try to briefly comment on the interesting affinity that could be traced among these developments in reflexivity and the current debates within some of the global justice movements [1].

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

./english/284.txt:89:Gupta and Ferguson call for a reflexivity focused on the politics of space. They offer a self-criticism of a discipline that relies heavily on spatial thinking and practices but has lacked the recognition of the impacts made by that spatiality. Simply said, the main proposal by this reflexive piece is that space matters for representation, and especially in a globalized world. How does it matter? Politics of otherness are intimately linked to politics of space. The anthropological enterprise –historically and recently- has operated under the premise of discontinuous spaces, drawing an equivalence of belonging among a particular culture and a particular place. This spatial conception has implications for ‘the other’ and for ‘the ethnographer’. The exotic is “located elsewhere” and the anthropologist is situated in “our society”.

./english/284.txt:93:The “deterritorialization” process of “a world of diaspora” has intensified the interconnectivity and shaken the fixity of clear-cut identities/spaces. The border between “here” and “there” becomes blurred, and “them” and “us” feel closer as well, erasing the gap between the anthropologist and its object. (1997:68-69). The ethnographer loses his/her distinctive position as the lonely traveler in search of the far away. The previous exclusivity of the ethnographer is overshadowed in a moment when everybody moves transnationally, including tourists, ‘terrorists’, company employees, journalists, immigrants, researchers, war prisoners, sweatshop workers…At the same time, the distances persist in terms of power relations, as Gupta and Ferguson point out “a politics of otherness persists that is not reducible to a politics of representation” (74). This emphasis on the “extratextual roots of the problem” connect to Spivak’s political economy of representation. The authors call for the politicization of differences produced as a result of process of domination, this opens the possibility to anthropologists to “changing more than our texts” (74-75).

./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/284.txt:107:Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. (2002) “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference” in Inda, J.X. and Rosaldo, R (eds.) The Anthropology of Globalization. A Reader, Blackwell Publishing

./english/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:165:Copyleft is, also, an axis of fundamental articulation for a politics from below adequate for our times. Some times traversed by crossroads such as the overcoming of the society of labor in forms prescribed by the social system based on waged labor, knowledge converted into the principle productive force when labor time is maintained as a unity of measure or 18th century property laws applied now to immaterial goods (pillars of our global economy) whose qualities are completely distinct from those of tangible products.

./english/293.txt:65:The debates on reproduction smattered through the whole decade of the 1970s now have new things to offer which should be brought to light.[4] From them we rescue an analysis of reproduction, of the articulation of capitalism, patriarchy, racial domination, and now more than ever, the history of colonialism, the geographical asymmetries which have produced the inequalities motivating the displacements of populations in the last decades. We also rescue the political thought and practice which thematize the body as a place of expression of domination and exploitation, and we think of the “productive body” or the “production of the (sexed) body” as a continuous process of incarnation of subjectivities which are simultaneously bound and struggling to determine the conditions of their development. We also rescue the feminist theorizing on the public and the private as a form of approaching the continuities and discontinuities between what happens in the realm of relations and homes and what happens in the more socially valued realm of employment, politics and the State. The growing integration of these realms, of employment and personal life, of education and employment, etc., as a historical process which produces differentiations and as a political criticism of the segmentations of modernity seems to us an essential path for investigation.

./english/295.txt:27:One thing that I've learned in academia is no one much cares what your politics are as long as you don't do anything about them. You can espouse the most radical positions imaginable, as long as you're willing to be a hypocrite about them. The moment you give any signs that you might not be a hypocrite, that you might be capable of standing on principle even when it's not politically convenient, then everything's different. And of course anarchism isn't about high theory: it's precisely the willingness to try to live by your principles.

./english/298.txt:28:Marc Bousquet: You’re right to call it a false opposition, since the university has never been a shelter from either commerce or politics. And yet the nostalgic idea of the university as a ‘refuge’ from social life is amazingly persistent, isn’t it? The reality is very different. Especially in the US, where nearly 60 percent of high school graduates have some experience of ‘higher ed’, it should be obvious that the university is part of the social factory. The problem is that it’s the wrong kind of factory.

./english/298.txt:116:MB: The question of tuition brings me back to what you said before about the socialising function of education debt – about students being schooled by indebtedness. That is such an immense field for future research. Randy Martin has written about it in ‘The Financialisation of Daily Life,’ in a great chapter about the politics of debt.4 Debt is a way of making the relationship to dead labour more intimate than any possible relationship to living labour.

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

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

./english/298.txt:158:Marc Bousquet is the founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour (www.workplace-gsc.com) and co-editor of The Politics of Information: The Electronic Mediation of Social Change, Alt-X, 2004 (free downloads available from: www.altx.com)

./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/300.txt:51:As critical geography grew different trends and foci emerged, came together, specialized and divided. Two examples of this are welfare geography which was firmly embedded in the quantitative modeling tradition, and Marxist geography which in general criticized that same tradition. Yet even though both developed quite a bit during this period, far less attention was paid to the inclusion of affected communities or social movements in the research process even if this was of concern during the early years of their respective development. Welfare Geography for its part developed very elaborate models to measure the spatial distribution of ‘public goods’ necessary to attain a certain level of “quality of human life” (Smith 1977; p. xi). In one of the most important works of that tradition, David Smith describes the mission of welfare geography to be “the study of ‘who gets what where, and how’” (Smith 1977; p.7). Marxist geography, as one can imagine, emerged with a more radical critique of the direction and methods of the discipline. Marxist geographers had their work cut out for them in some sense. Considering the general dearth of complex spatial thinking in Marxist thought, and the previous lack of engagement between geographers and Marxists, Marxist geographers had to engage in elaborating theoretical mechanisms that would allow the mutual incorporation of the two traditions. Besides elaborating on these general debates though, Marxist geographers began to apply their thinking to the different subfields of concern in human geography at the time, for example: geopolitics/imperialism, regional development, urban geography and planning, and human-environment relations (Harvey and Smith 1984).

./english/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: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:65:Conclusion: The Politics of Positionality

./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/303.txt:95:Routledge, Paul. 1996. Critical Geopolitics and Terrains of Resistance. Political Geography 15(6/7): 509-531.

./english/306.txt:33:We occupy. We occupy and we talk about territories. We situate ourselves as a node crossed by thousands of circuits. Circuits and accelerated currents. We are in the very mouth of the monster. We move, we decide, we talk politics. We situate ourselves and unmask our own bodies, our own lives, our own inhabiting of this city, this neighborhood, this social center.

./english/306.txt:35:While the vertiginous current of global capitalism impregnates every nook and cranny of our existance, submitting it to the virtual display window of the market-world, to the state of permanent global war, to the complete precarization of our lives, to the abysmal technocracy of the bureaucratic aparatus, to the privatization of services and of social and public goods, to isolation and solitude, to politics which can only be concieved in terms either of parties or else of super-hip politicking like that of the NGOs, to boredom and to being ‘entertained’, to the appropriation of our knowledge and to copyrights, to compulsory heterosexuality, euphoric and erroneous…

./english/306.txt:59:To make explicit this unity, this non-differentiation, between “the public” and “the personal” and to insist that it is in this complex environment that ‘politics’ is done, is, like so many feminist struggles, a matter of making visible the invisible, of denaturalizing what passes for ‘natural,’ just as is revealing the hidden economy of domestic work or the concealed anguish of sexual violence. To speak about space as a feminist is a question of valuing and politicizing the quotidian; recognizing that that which each one of us experiences --instability, violence, little annoyances, isolation– is that from which the productive and reproductive order is created, and also that from which resistance arises. Creating our own spaces is a matter of insisting that citizenship is a daily practice collectively built through the active and conscientious habitation of space.

./english/306.txt:97:we move. That is why the streets we walk around, the town squares we fill, the market, the pavement, the trees, the houses we live in, are the result of certain politics, of the replies or acceptance they get, of private interests or neighbourhood and social struggle, of new techniques of

./english/306.txt:123:But none of these configurations of power is definitive. Other ways of relating and the praxis of resistance are plotted within its bosom. Territories are reorganised and power structures are questioned. The Karakola is an operation to confront the hetero-patriarchal order and the greedy process of global capitalism, creating a space where other kinds of politics can take shape.

./english/306.txt:143:body, forms desire and saturates pleasure. Squatting is a bid to stop understanding politics as something apart from life. To make daily life, the smallest thing, a constant re-invention, a constant problematization, a constant daily creation which breaks with old conceptions of traditional politics.

./english/306.txt:203:talked about differences, we placed our irreducible bodies in the centre, we talked about a creative, active, public politics. About citizen participation and the crisis of representation. We went around the streets dressed in pink to shout: las calles de rosa son otra cosa, to put an end to dualistic systems, to speak about sexuality, about our subversive bodies, to display the para-war against

./english/306.txt:235:Since we understand power not as a site but as a series of symbolic and material practices and relationships, we believe our own conception of “the personal is political” must include “the quotidian is political.” The feminist gamble, thus, must be one that brings politics into daily life as well as daily life into politics. It has to take into account flows and daily power relationships and get involved in their transformations. To conceive the places of institutional condensation of these relationships as absolute actors, as causes rather than as crystallizations engraved in the circuits where flows of power pass, can only confuse our analysis and disorientate our practices.

./english/306.txt:237:Of course these places of institutional condensation vary greatly in magnitude and in strength, from governmental institutions, supra-governmental, transnational and non-governmental organizations, to trade unions, neighbours’ associations, the academy, cultural and other pressure groups and social collectives… but what is important is our process of cartography placing them in the same multi-relational sphere more than in a hierarchical system of one or two directions. This way, the object of political transformation is the wider field of power relationships which participate in these crystallizations. When, on the other hand, one of them is placed throughout the whole political horizon, there is little space for real transformation since often proximity, concealing the complex plot existing outside our approach, allows us to only articulate a reactive politics of refusal and denial of one or several of these institutional condensations, or else a confusing and undetermined amalgam of them, which pretends to find an uncontaminated‘outside’ as a way of escaping those relational flows-, or a normalizing politic in search of an inside of some of these manifestations of crystallisation

./english/306.txt:307:a) The need to reactivate a sense of politics that foregrounds the personal, the quotidian, bodies and sexualities, that puts life itself at its centre. The need to think and create spaces that make these political practices feasible and that take into account the task of generating real and powerful conectivities in ways that facilitate a coming together and allow the articulation of political hypotheses.

./english/306.txt:309:b) The need to think about the tools with which we provide ourselves for the generation of such connectivities; what their possibilities and limits are, what are the real practices and alliances that they allow. In this sense, to commit ourselves not to a politics that locates us either in an "ouside" or an "inside" - immaculate, pure outside: institutional, neutral inside- but to a constant negotiation which allows us to push out in multiple directions.

./english/312.txt:22:While the nation-state retains a central role in the ‘politics of research’, the last two decades have also witnessed a process of increasing internationalisation in this field. This process takes place at two levels: one level is that regarding the production of scientific knowledge; the other is that regarding the shaping of a multi-level governance of the higher education system.

./english/312.txt:28:Such an internationalisation of the politics of research has thus consisted in a process of globalisation ‘from above’ in which ruling actors and institutions have played a dominant role while the grassroots actors have remained at the margins of the process. Today, the less powerful sectors within the academia are not only excluded from the governance of the internationalisation process but are also affected by the outcomes of the process itself in terms of increasing competition, work flexibilisation and shrinkage of the research autonomy. This urgently requires the formulation of a perspective of globalisation from below which is capable of shaping an alternative to the present scenario. This perspective calls for the formation of a post-national public space of research and cultural exchange in which internationalisation would be perceived as a process aiming to develop practices of mutual recognition and encounter amongst equals rather than strategies of competition and selectivity amongst unequally empowered actors.

./english/313.txt:10:There is a growing interest and a proliferation of searches and experiences coming from the interaction among politics and investigation, among theory and practice, that conform a galaxy with gravitate common points, but also energies of contracts and oppositions.

./english/313.txt:24:I’m presenting with this article some lines to draft an initial cartography of clusters of search on the interaction among politics and investigation. The perspectives, among the many others, to build this cartography is by ordering the space on the interaction among political action and investigation referring to the process of creation, if collective or individual, and the “management” of the knowledge, if by free or by property channels.

./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:52:A substantial part of the meeting revolved around a discussion regarding the implications of naming, given that in many ways we are talking about, reflecting on, and participating in socio-political movements without names and/or with many names. This is both problematic and necessary: it is difficult to represent something that cannot be categorised, named and pinned down; by the same token, the contesting and opening up of the bounded categories fetishised by modernity is at the heart of contemporary radical resistance politics. A name implies another category with another boundary, another inside/outside border. Radical resistance politics resists fixity: embraces becoming rather than being.

./english/320.txt:64:with hegemonic forces. The concept 'militant particularism' was coined by Raymond Williams (1989: 249) and has later been developed by David Harvey (1996, 2000) to refer to the particularist origins of movement struggles. The concept refers to how 'politics is always embedded in 'ways of life' and 'structures of feeling' peculiar to places and communities' (Harvey, 2000: 55) and hence also bears the imprint of this specificity and situatedness, both in terms of the issues that are struggles over, and the practices, skills, idioms, and imaginaries that are deployed in the struggle. A militant particularism, then, can be defined as that those forms of struggle that emerge when a subaltern group deploys specific knowledges and skills in open confrontation with a dominant social group, in a particular place and at a particular time, in a particular conflict over a particular issue.

./english/320.txt:73:However, they do contain – in the local rationality that spawns them – a germ of transcendence. As activists “join the dots”, connecting different issues, linking up with different groups, and criticising the structures that cause their problems or frustrate their campaigns, they are starting to move beyond this field at the same time as they find their place within it. (Those who have already reached this point nevertheless have to argue their case with those who haven’t: Barker and Cox 2002). Such movement processes emerge when activists take the process of abstraction one step further and relate the particular issues around which local struggles and field-specific campaigns emerged to the logic of a social totality and articulate a politics which seeks to rupture and go beyond this totality, towards the constitution of a political project for an alternative social organization of human practice.

./english/320.txt:74:I propose the term social movement project to conceptualize the development of a politics which connects campaigns with what from a local or situated perspective is seen as diverse origins around a challenge to the way situations are constructed in general.

./english/320.txt:109:The politics of monetarism revolved around curbing public expenditure, tax-cuts, wage-freezes and so on – it was a call for ‘a return to the market’ and its rationale can be explained as follows:

./english/323.txt:1:Coming to knowledge, coming to politics.

./english/323.txt:5:ABSTRACT: Starting from the dispute centered around ‘positivity of politics’ and ‘negativity of

./english/323.txt:28:of articulating politics starting from our common interest in women’s studies, and informed

./english/323.txt:78:different personal genealogies of how they came to feminist knowledges/politics. For the field

./english/323.txt:84:of politics” and the “negativity of theory”, as Teresa de Lauretis phrases it – did raise the

./english/323.txt:94:structuring effects of academic formats on our critical knowledges/politics. Feminists have

./english/323.txt:178:6 hooks, bell. (1990). “Postmodern Blackness”, in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Toronto:

./english/323.txt:195:its politics – and with the ‘generation’ of contemporary feminist (re-)articulations. A crucial

./english/323.txt:202:our way of working, is a further distance from a representational model of doing politics, that

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

./english/323.txt:229:political”, the politics of everyday life and the politics of desire.9 It is perhaps in the

./english/323.txt:232:who if not feminists and queers of various kinds have put desire and pleasure at the center of politics? Who has

./english/323.txt:262:politics, who has reflected around the question of autonomy, horizontality and and and - more than the feminist

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

./english/325.txt: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:32:There are similarities and differences between queer theory and the queer movement. Both are developed from gay theoretical and political priorities, are inclusive in scope, incorporating not only gays and lesbians, but also bisexuals, transsexuals, transgenders and, indeed, anyone or anything not one hundred percent conventionally heterosexual. However, whereas queer theory seeks to destabilize all identities, queer politics often becomes an affirmation of identity, mobilized for strategic purposes. Queer identity is thus provisional and contingent, defined in relation to the heterosexual presumptions it seeks to unsettle. ‘Those who knowingly occupy a marginal location, who assume a de-essentialized identity that is purely positional in character, are properly speaking not gay but queer (Jackson, 2003: 70). This emphasis on de-essentializing identities shows already that queer theory (and for a part queer practices) hinges on some important aspects of postmodernism (Turner 2000: 30). In queer theory and movement common beliefs and traditional theories about gender and sexuality are contested and considered as constructions that can be deconstructed. Queer theory is oppositional to all binary categories (female-male, gay-straight) and wants to change the fixed character of these categories.

./english/325.txt:46:Besides Queer Nation similar organizations were set up. Most of them disappeared within some years. However, while most of these organizations are gone ‘it represented an important change in LGBT [lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender] activist politics and continues to influence how we organize and think about our struggles and communities’ (http://www.4edu.info/LGBT/ESL_16.1_queer.htm, 25-5-2004).

./english/325.txt:79:The Do-it-Yourself-activists try to realize their ideals in the here-and-now. Although the concept DiY is invented in the North, it appears that many poor groups of the South use the same strategy. The Zapatista activist Esteva has formulated this: ‘People has been disillusioned with the ballot box for a long time, here and all around the world. And yet they are disillusioned too with rebels who come with guns and say: “give us the state, we will do it better”. So what are we seeing in Chiapas? It is an alternative to both – a new notion of doing politics. You could call it radical democracy. People take their own destinies into their own hands’ (in: Kingsnorth 2003: 42-43). Nowadays the Zapatista’s ideas about ‘taking your own destinies in your own hands’ have influenced many other groups around the world. An activist from the town Durban (South Africa) told to Kingsnorth: ‘We feel it’s time for new approaches. As a movement we need doing things ourselves, you know, Zapatista-style. Taking it back: communities doing it themselves, instead of always reacting to whatever shit the government gives them’ (ibid: 102). And a women of the Brazil Landless Movement (MST) states: ‘People have to work for their own transformation, making their own answers’ (ibid: 257). In the North the DiY-activists emphasise the importance of ‘free places’: public spaces, not belonging to the commercial trade and industry (Klein 2002: 204). All these activists have in common that they create their own alternatives, protesting against the commodification of everything.

./english/325.txt:85:-personal change; politics starts in daily life. The rejection of collective identities doesn’t mean that identities are not important any longer. Is does matter whether you are a woman, a coloured person, homo or lesbian, what economic situation you have. Although the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ is used in the alterglobalization movement and DiY is described as ‘personal’ politics (Kingsnorth 2003: 327), till for a short time ago not so much attention is given to feminism and the gay-queer movement. Only some alterglobalist men recognize feminism as their forerunner: ‘The feminist movement tried to show us new insights and practices but we have generally managed to ignore them’ (de Marcellus, 2003: 6). But by the emphasis on personal politics, things are changing: ‘Self-criticism and personal change are not apolitical – refusing to be what the system requires you to be is a profound and powerful form of direct action’ (Subbuswamy and Patel 2001: 543). However, the activists recognize that they too are influenced by ‘the system’: ‘we have to eliminate all forms of oppression and domination within our own circles’ (Abramsky 2001: 562). Therefore they emphasis: politics starts in daily life.

./english/325.txt: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/325.txt:103:In the United States the queer movement started in 1990 with Queer Nation, after a long battle with the gay and lesbian movement to accept transsexuals and transgenders. This battle shows how important it is not to fight for tolerance, acceptance and equal rights for your ‘own’ (deviate) identity only and how important affinity politics is. The queer movement added a new category, one that criticizes all existing, fixed categories. With the globalization of capitalism, queer culture was globalized and late years all kinds of international queer festivals are organized.

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

./english/331.txt:46:Three broad perspectives have predominated. On the 'right' the main features of the argument tend to be economic and political. On the 'left' the arguments concentrate on the social and environmental impact of the prevailing economic climate. A third perspective loosely aligned with 'third way' politics integrates aspects of both. I will identify how the debate is currently evolving beyond these perspectives in the search for practical solutions.

./english/331.txt:122:Should we treat it as an issue involving personal responsibility in relation to the universal moral values of compassion, justice and respect, which therefore holds a clear moral imperative? If so, do we risk accusations of promoting partisan politics?

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

./english/344.txt:59:I eventually found the proposed politics of the new international, along with its proposed name, in a document buried on the website of the World Confederation of Labour (2006). I would characterise this policy as somewhat broader, though hardly more radical, than a human rights policy. I characterise it as a ‘global neo-Keynesianism’. By this I mean the promotion at global level of the old West-European model of national welfare capitalism. Two immediate and obvious challenges to this are: 1) In so far as Keynesianism was successful within nation states, what argument or evidence (as contrasted with a hope or dream) is there for its possible success at global level? and 2) given that even powerful unions were unable to prevent the destruction of this model at national level, what evidence or argument is there that a dramatically weakened international movement could establish it at global level? The answer that its promoters might provide lie, perhaps, in an even greater dependency on the ILO (itself seriously marginalised by neo-liberal globalisation) than I had previously thought. Reference to the global justice movement, on the other hand, is both brief and obscure. This new international, in other words, appears to be appealing less to the world’s workers, major new social movements and global civil society than to hypothetical patrons above.

./english/344.txt:85:Hyman, Richard. 2005. ‘Trade Unions and the Politics of the European Social Model’, Economic and Industrial Democracy, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 9-40

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

./english/362.txt:53:The common front did yield results. It created a space for these countries to achieve several decades of relatively high rates of economic growth. There was industrialisation and also gigantic efforts in education and in other fields. In political terms, it enabled these countries to transgress ethnic, local and national chauvinisms. The alliance among nations was based on politics, depending heavily on the countries' position against imperialism. That explains why someone like Nasser in Egypt was an ally of India, and not Pakistan. It was because India had an anti-imperialist position, unlike Pakistan. The fact that Pakistan was predominantly Muslim, like in Egypt, was not of any importance.

./english/362.txt:93:Regionalisation will enable the countries of the South to strengthen their capacities vis-a-vis the global system. This can be based on, for instance, history and culture, as in Latin America. The countries of Latin America have a lot in common. Two closely related languages, Spanish and Portuguese, link these countries together. The other common factor is a common enemy for over two centuries - the U.S. I do not think Islam can provide the basis for such regionalisation. But the Arab countries, with a common language, could be the basis for unity among nations. There has never been a history of these countries being unified by a single state, except in the imagination of the nationalists. But this alliance among countries must be based on politics, not merely common market.

./english/363.txt:13:All of this connects us to the rest of the world. In terms of our own history, perhaps, only the quiet revolution in community politics, along with the "indifference and unease" (Mills 1970) of the new suburbia, mark any kind of qualitative shift. In other areas, popular action is not doing so well: it's hard to imagine who or what today could mobilise the kinds of numbers that participated in the protests around Wood Quay, Carnsore or CND for a single event (1). But these local shifts exist within a global context which has thrown up something very remarkable: the "new movement" marked by the Zapatistas, Seattle and Porto Alegre, a remarkable development which is not easy to understand or explain. What's going on? Where do we fit into it? And what can we do to help?

./english/363.txt:17:History, Hunter Thompson said, is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit (1972: 65). And of course there is no way that one person can reasonably hope to grasp all these different things except at third hand. We grasp the world we're in at first hand, through the politics of our own everyday situations and conflicts, and at second hand, through other people's actions and words. But what they (and we) reflect is the echo of six thousand million people, all working with their own situations and trying to make sense of them in the process. So this paper comes with no guarantees!

./english/363.txt:60:Barbara Epstein has analysed the political contributions and weaknesses of these movements in some detail (1991). Her conclusion is, I think, important: their experimentation with large-scale participatory democracy represents an important step forwards vis-୶is the authoritarian politics of the mid-century Old Left (and, it should be said, vis-୶is the cadre politics of the surrogate Old Left of the post-1969 period). At the same time, this is achieved at the cost of the kinds of theory and strategy which are needed to actually transform structural realities against determined opposition (5). The difficulty, then, is to find a way of working which both connects effectively with movement realities and is capable of winning.

./english/363.txt:65:This is not, it should be said, an entirely new problem. The near-total identification of the Left with authoritarian politics, as anarchists and other anti-authoritarian leftists know, is an artefact in particular of the period of "organised capitalism", above all of the Cold War partition of the Left between Stalinism and social democracy, the Soviet Union and NATO. To go back to 1919, or to 1848, is to glimpse an entirely different set of possibilities.

./english/363.txt:67:In this sense, the demonstrations at Prague or Davos are "prefigurative politics" with a vengeance, prefiguring not a future ideal society but a participatory way of practicing effective politics, showing above all that it is possible to work together without a single organisation "owning" the movement, that it is possible to be radical without being sectarian, and most crucially that we can do it: we can shut down the meetings of the rulers of the earth, we can get our messages out even over the "hired bullshit", and we have not been co-opted.

./english/363.txt:77:Translating these into counter-hegemonic politics, conflictual cultural strategies and popular self-definitions, it was clear firstly that such a situation is considerably from the existing shape of Irish movements, secondly that change in that direction would require a remarkable (but not impossible) process of creation, and thirdly that in disorganised capitalism there is scope for this kind of thing. Two years back this seemed a very long-term strategy; today it seems entirely within reach. I don't want to push this particular analysis (though I've brought copies along!), so much as to say that we can and should engage in this kind of thinking: "what would we need to do if ? we were serious about the goals we proclaim and the processes we value?"

./english/363.txt:103:Within the Anglo world - the UK and white America in particular, and perhaps other "settler societies" such as Australia - the primary definition of "the Sixties" seems to have been cultural, from the "hippie moment" (Hall 1968) through the retreat to the countryside (Pepper 1991) to the politics of identity. A dominant theme is unconventional opposition to a cultural mainstream. The cultural entrepreneurs - from musicians via academics to the niche marketers - who developed both the language and the forms of organisation that structured this way of seeing things thus generated a paradoxically anti-hegemonic counter-hegemony (and, not coincidentally, a deep suspicion of large and abstract organisations with the important exception of that ultra-abstract organisation, the capitalist market).

./english/363.txt:123:Irish community politics and the "new movement"

./english/363.txt:126:Development, community politics and the valorisation of everyday skills

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

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

./english/363.txt:143:This analysis could be extended to other kinds of movements in contemporary Ireland. For the moment, I want to point to three common kinds of weakness associated with this situation, which are certainly not particular to community politics. The first, crudely speaking, is populism. In essence this consists of a process that starts from taking people where you find them and finishes by leaving people where you found them. There is of course a tension within any movement between the immediate issues that provoke mobilisation and the broader potential that is opened up at an individual level and for the movement as a whole. What is damaging though is when the two are not effectively linked, and particularly when it is felt to be "radical" to insist on "concrete needs" at the expense of broader questions of power and economics. The net effect is of course to win ha'pennies and lose pounds.

./english/363.txt:199:This is possible because of the selective and uneven nature of hegemony. Selective, because only a part (usually a limited, and limiting, part) of ordinary people's needs are met by church attendance, racist protests, the micro-politics of whose kids go to which school, late-night talk shows, and all the rest of it: hegemony consists of organising one possible expression of people's needs and practices. Uneven, because some groups do rather better out of the current situation than others, so that levels of commitment are more or less tenuous; people have more or less solid connections to the traditional intellectuals who seek to keep them in their place.

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

./english/363.txt:208:One way of thinking about the new movement is as a kind of prefigurative politics - prefiguring not so much "the new society" as a new way of doing politics, and in particular new alliances. One aspect I have found particularly interesting is a sense of a move away from comparing "cookbooks for the future" and "red / green" debates on theology - characteristic both of periods of defeat and of elitist approaches which start from where a popular movement might finish - and towards discussions of strategy and "red / black" debates (7) which are about "what do we do?". This suggests at least the possibility of allowing people to learn from and through practice, and that agreement on where to go might emerge out of the process of struggle - which is, after all, where movement intellectuals derive their understandings from in the first place, albeit sometimes through circuitous routes.

./english/363.txt:241:"Globalisation" involves a slow withdrawing of consent from this process on both sides, and this is no bad thing. One way of thinking about the right-wing domination of Irish politics (which is, both in terms of voters and parties, consistently the furthest right system in western Europe over the last few decades) is in terms of the deep effectiveness of the modes of popular mobilisation and consent developed within the nationalist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To see these breaking down is to see new possibilities opening up.

./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:21:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 5 amplify and economize communication in political organizations (Agre, 2001; Davis, 1999). For example, Agre (2001) argues that in most cases the Internet is subordinated to the existing routines and patterns of the institution using it, and that Internet applications merely amplify and economize areas that already define the institution. One observer has even gone so far as to assert that “the Internet is less applicable [to] the creation of new forms of democratic public spheres than [to] the support of already existing ones” (Buchstein, 1997:260; discussed by Agre, 2002). The problem with these and dozens of other “minimal effects” accounts of the Internet and politics is that they generally look at how established political institutions and organizations adapt the Internet to existing routines.

./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: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: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: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:37:Tarrow touches on these subpolitics and their organizational effects in describing global activism “….as unlikely to sustain high levels of confidence in government and may trigger less trusting attitudes in the public by demonstrating the inadequacy of governmental performance; but on the other hand, neither do they create enduring negative subcultures. Their variform and shifting organizations, their tendency to produce

./english/365.txt:39:The emergence of a politics that is shifting away from organizational conventions such as leadership, ideology, and government processes invites a fresh theoretical perspective. The goal of this analysis is to begin explaining how webs of contentious transnational politics operate on such a large scale, particularly among groups and individuals joined by little binding leadership or ideology, and whose protests cover such diverse political issues.

./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:47:This analysis is based on observations of various protest activities aimed at trade and development organizations and corporations. Materials developed by the research teams in these projects can be found at the Global Citizen Project (www.globalcitizenproject.org), and in the civic engagement, issue campaigns, culture jamming, and digital media sections of the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, http://www.engagedcitizen.org). These studies support a number of generalizations about the Internet and activist politics, four of which are reported here. The intriguing feature of each generalization is that communication practices are hard to separate from organizational and political capabilities, suggesting personal digital communication is a foundation of this identity- driven subpolitics. The patterns of communication that both reflect and reproduce global activism are briefly summarized here and elaborated in the remainder of the article.

./english/365.txt:48:• Permanent campaigns. Global activism is characterized by long- running communication campaigns to organize protests and publicize issues. Campaigns in activist politics are not new, but the campaigns of the current generation are more protracted. They are less likely to be run by central command and coordinating organizations such as unions or

./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: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:105:While many activist issue campaigns have secured remarkably favorable media coverage, disruptive public demonstrations -- the other major power lever of protest politics -- have generally received fairly negative coverage. The interesting exception is the Battle in Seattle, which produced fairly extensive coverage of activist messages about globalization (Rojecki, 2001). The relatively more favorable coverage of Seattle was due, in my estimation, to a combination of factors: its size and consequence took journalists by surprise, President Clinton made a public statement admitting the protesters had some

./english/365.txt: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: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:116:The rise of distributed electronic public spheres may ultimately become the model for public information in many areas of politics, whether establishment or oppositional. It is clear that conventional news is withering from the erosion of audiences (more in commercial than in public service systems), and from the fragmentation of remaining audiences as channels multiply (Bennett 2003b). Perhaps the next step is a thoroughly personalized information system in which the boundaries of different issues and different political approaches become more permeable, enabling ordinary citizens to join

./english/365.txt:119:Agre. P. (2002) “Real-time politics: The Internet and the political process”. The Information Society. 18: 311-331.

./english/365.txt:122:Bennett, W. L. (1998) “The Uncivic Culture: Communication, Identity, and the Rise of Lifestyle Politics”. Ithiel de Sola Pool Lecture, American Political Science Association, published in P.S.: Political Science and Politics, 31 (4), pp. 41-61.

./english/365.txt:124:Bennett, W. L. (2003b) News: The politics of illusion (5th ed.), New York: Longman.

./english/365.txt:125:Bennett, W. L. (2003c) “Branded Political Communication: Lifestyle Politics, Logo Campaigns, and the Rise of Global Citizenship”. in M. Micheletti, A. Follesdal, &

./english/365.txt:126:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 36 D. Stolle (eds.) The Politics Behind Products: Using the Market as a Site for Ethics and Action. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books.

./english/365.txt:128:Bullert, B. J. (2000) “Strategic Public Relations, Sweatshops, and the Making of a Global Movement”. Working Paper # 2000-14. Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. Harvard University.

./english/365.txt:132:Davis, R. (1999) The Web of Politics: The Internet's Impact on the American Political System, New York: Oxford University Press.

./english/365.txt:133:Gamson, W. (2001) “Promoting Political Engagement”. in W. L. Bennett and R. M. Entman (eds.) Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 56-74.

./english/365.txt:134:George, S. (2001) “The Global Citizen’s Movement: A New Actor for a New Politics”. Conference on reshaping globalization. Central European University. Budapest. October. (Posted on the World Social Forum site www.portoalegre2002.org )

./english/366.txt:36:This "tell a friend" phenomenon is key to how organizing happens on the net. It gives people who feel alienated from politics something valuable to contribute: their unique credibility within their particular circle of acquaintances. A small gesture to these friends can contribute to a massive multiplier effect. It is a grassroots answer to the corporate consolidation of media, which has enabled an overwhelmingly conservative punditry to give White House spin real political momentum, and the semblance of truth, simply through intensity of repetition.

./english/367.txt:7:After three editions in Brazil, the World Social Forum in 2004 will be held in India. For the Indian left, it could have been a great opportunity for rethinking politics. Unfortunately, significant sections think otherwise. So there is the risk of the Forum coming and going, but nothing positive emerging.

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

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

./english/367.txt:35:By the late 1990s, the CPI(ML) Liberation had indeed spread somewhat. But its real mobilizational power remained restricted to Bihar, and to Assam, where it had incorporated the Karbi Anglong movement. Its one MP came from Assam. In West Bengal, it proved to be a damp squib. In particular, its pretension of being an electoral alternative to the CPI(M) proved to be a total joke, with a large portion of its candidates in municipal elections getting votes in two figures. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous province, it tried to make headway by allying with the bourgeois party of Mulayam Singh Yadav, at one stage defense minister in the United Front government, especially in the petty bourgeois milieu of student politics, which remains its major recruiting ground in the cities.

./english/367.txt:75:As for the CPI(M)-led initiative, it observed a big “Day” and a big weeklong program, and then fizzled out, because it had not been interested in allowing the development of popular initiatives but of channeling them into a rigid bureaucratic structure. Outside West Bengal, with the CPI(M) lacking the twin forces of governmental power and the huge size of its West Bengal party apparatus, such dominant roles have not been played by any force. But while all forces have sought to mobilize against the war, the splits have been repeated. Basically, three loose poles have developed — the mainstream left (and sometimes the CPI(ML) Liberation along with it); the armed struggle camp and other sectarians who tag along with them; and a more mixed bag, including non-Stalinist left forces, some NGOs, some independent trade unions, and others (the NAPM West Bengal State unit’s action did not reflect the general politics of the NAPM, as I commented earlier).

./english/367.txt:93:An ideological think tank connected to some Maoist groups in India has come out with a publication asserting that the WSF is a creation of imperialism. In a nutshell, the following is a summary of the points made by the publication entitled “The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum: Lessons for the Struggle against ‘Globalization’” by the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE):

./english/367.txt:115:In fact, this shows their utter failure to understand social reality. Imperialism is not something standing outside society. We live in a capitalist world, and every mass movement will be tainted by capitalism and its ideology, especially in its early stages. Marx’s method was not to argue that Communists should enter into no movement unless it was led from the beginning by them. Rather, he stressed that Communists should enter real movements and gain influence within them. The rise of the NGOs was, in India as well as elsewhere, often due to the manipulative and bureaucratic politics of the Maoists. It is surprising that even some civil liberties activists in India, like the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, take the position that they will not collaborate with any NGO, because all NGOs are funded, ergo, agents of imperialism.

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

./english/368.txt:60:Moreover, even accessible computer communications don't magically produce collaboration --all the usual obstacles to mutual understanding and solidarity must still be faced by those involved in struggle, e.g., differences in language, politics, background knowledge, experience, national identity and relative position in the global wage/income hierarchy. The Net provides new spaces for new political discussions about democracy, revolution and self- determination but it does not provide solutions to the differences that exist; it is merely a means to accelerate the search for such solutions.

./english/368.txt:88:Over the months separating these dramatic events, the issues the Zapatistas were raising, e.g., NAFTA, poverty, land rights, justice, exploitation, environmental preservation, women's rights, democracy, and so on, tended to become more and more the subject of discussion. Issues such as the democratization of the Mexican political system, which was initially dismissed as a fantasy, became --through a multitude of political meetings, including such national events as the Convencion Nacional Democratica (CND)-- so central to public discourse as to dominate Mexican politics --to the utter dismay of the very undemocratic ruling party (the PRI). A pro-democracy movement developed the power to force a reformation, if not total revision, of the formal electoral system. Faced with the popular excitement stirred by the Zapatistas' vision of an open democratic system no longer monopolized by professional political parties and recognizing the autonomy of indigenous ethnic groups, the PRI (so internally divided as to assassinate its own leaders) began to cede ground.

./english/371.txt:38:For me, this third World Social Forum tore the veil off the face of the neo-liberal capitalism which dominates the world. Nafta and the European Union are not democratic. They are key players in corporate globalisation. The European Referendum campaign has been launched in order to build real democracy and ensure the full participation of women and young people in the European Union. For it is the old men who still dominate the politics of the world (whether left or right, whether in the west or east, in the north or south). Across the globe, capitalist globalisation is still riding triumphant. The shadows of imperialism and neo-colonialism are very evident, especially in our region, the so-called Middle East (middle to whom, by the way?). The leaders of the so-called ‘free world’ who met at Davos are moving steadily to the right, hiding their economic interests behind a religious veil, whether Christian or Jewish, using Islamic fundamentalism or post-modern terrorism to reinforce and expand their domination. The so-called ‘War against Terrorism’ has devastated Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, and is relentlessly building up plans to devastate Iran, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Korea and others.

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

./english/372.txt:55:The historical relations between political and artistic avant gardes have been explored at length by others. For me though the really intriguing questions is: why is it that artists have so often been so drawn to revolutionary politics to begin with? Because it does seem to be the case that, even in times and places when there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary change, the one place on is most likely to find one is among artists, authors, and musicians; even more so, in fact, that among professional intellectuals. It seems to me the answer must have something to do with alienation. There would appear to be a direct link between the experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being (individually or collectively)--that is, the experience of certain forms of unalienated production--and the ability to imagine social alternatives; particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity. Which would allow us to see the historical shift between seeing the vanguard as the relatively unalienated artists (or perhaps intellectuals) to seeing them as the representatives of the "most oppressed" in a new light. In fact, I would suggest, revolutionary coalitions always tend to consist of an alliance between a society's least alienated and its most oppressed. And this is less elitist a formulation than it might sound, because it also seems to be the case that actual revolutions tend to occur when these two categories come to overlap. That would at any rate explain why it almost always seems to be peasants and craftspeople - or alternately, newly proletarianized former peasants and craftspeople - who actually rise up and overthrow capitalist regimes, and not those inured to generations of wage labor. Finally, I suspect this would also help explain the extraordinary importance of indigenous people's struggles in that planetary uprising usually referred to as the "anti-globalization" movement: such people tend to be simultaneously the very least alienated and most oppressed people on earth, and once it is technologically possible to include them in revolutionary coalitions, it is almost inevitable that they should take a leading role.

./english/372.txt:57:The role of indigenous peoples in turn leads us back to the role of ethnography as a possible model for the would-be non-vanguardist revolutionary intellectual--as well as some of its potential pitfalls. Obviously what I am proposing would only work if it was, ultimately, a form of auto-ethnography, combined, perhaps, with a certain utopian extrapolation: a matter of teasing out the tacit logic or principles underlying certain forms of radical practice, and then, not only offering the analysis back to those communities, but using them to formulate new visions ("if one applied the same principles as you are applying to political organization to economics, might it not look something like this?"...) Here too there are suggestive parallels in the history of radical artistic movements, which became movements precisely as they became their own critics (and of course the idea of self-criticism took on a very different, and more ominous, tone within Marxist politics); there are also intellectuals already trying to do precisely this sort of auto-ethnographic work. But I say all this not so much to provide models as to open up a field for discussion, first of all, by emphasizing that even the notion of vanguardism itself far more rich in its history, and full of alternative possibilities, than most of us would ever be given to expect.

./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:20:I do not agree with Naomi Klein’s point of view that the forum has been hijacked, because it actually has never been "ours"; or it might have been hijacked, but in a slightly different manner. It is not that the forum has been hijacked, but that the anti-authoritarian spirit that has inspired it has been abused. The very slogan "another world is possible" comes from the Zapatistas. The cake that landed on the face of the Brazilian PT president is becoming a metaphor, in the context of South America, for the opposition of two quite different spirits and two quite different feelings regarding politics. The one which implies yet another attempt at the change in the area of conventional politics, and the one which reveals the striving for something new, for something that can be found on the other side of voting and lobbying: the collective giving up of party politics and collective struggle for the "politics without power". Is it possible and is it necessary to sustain both of these views in equilibrium?

./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:55:The last thing I want to talk about is the politics involved.

./english/376.txt:87:Next 5 Minutes 4 - International Festival of Tactical Media. Next 5 Minutes is a festival that brings together art, campaigns, experiments in media technology, and transcultural politics

./english/377.txt:5:At the Asian Social Forum, as at the World Social Forum and other gatherings, the need for strong sovereign states, the need to rebuild the state, to address politics would appear to be central. Also, the difficult negotiations within the diverse groups and locales to find 'political' consensus – to deal first with the big rogue state, the father of all rogue states, and then their own rogue states. Only then can the enormous street confrontations, the valiant successes of people's movements on the ground, push back this new hegemony, the Bush power.

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

./english/377.txt:32:Perhaps at the World Social Forum and other gatherings the need for strong (not majoritarian nor soft) sovereign states and for configurations like the NAM of old which had a political stance, which distanced itself from the former colonisers, the need to rebuild the state, to address politics would appear central. Also the difficult negotiations within the diverse groups and locales to find ‘political’ consensus to deal with first the big rogue state, the father of all rogue states, and then their own rogue states. Only then the enormous street confrontations, the valiant successes of people’s movements on the ground, can push back this new hegemony, the Bush power.

./english/378.txt:49:Moreover, the victories of the right in France and Italy were gained after mass antiglobalist actions had begun taking place. Do the movement and "big politics" exist in isolation? How can we change this situation? What can movements achieve, and what is there that requires a party? How can we build these parties and movements, so as to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past? At the forum there was no time and no place to discuss this.

./english/379.txt:1:åGlobalization, Technopolitics and Revolutionπ

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

./english/379.txt:32:Consequently, in this paper, I focus on the ways that an oppositional politics can use new technologies to intervene within the global restructuring of capitalism to promote democratic and anti-capitalist social movements aiming at radical structural transformation. I would argue that globalization and technological revolution are in some ways inevitable -- barring an apocalyptic collapse of the global economy -- but the forms that they take are not. That is, I think that the trends toward a more global economy and culture, a networked society, and the continued flow of commodities, images, cultural forms, technology and people across the globe will continue apace, as will intense technological revolution. Both take the form of what Schumpeter called åcreative destructionπ and guarantee that the next decades will be highly turbulent, contested and full of struggle and conflict. But the forms that globalization and technological revolution will take are neither fixed nor determined. Hence, I would argue that it is perfectly reasonable to oppose corporate capitalist globalization and its market model of society, its neoliberal laissez-faire ideology and its putting profit, competition and market logic before all other aspects of life. I will accordingly focus on the ways that technopolitics can and are being used for anti-capitalist contestation, while noting the limitations of this conception.

./english/379.txt:34:Technopolitics and oppositional political movements

./english/379.txt:38:Significant political struggles today against globalization are mediated by technopolitics, that is the use of new technologies such as computers and the internet to advance political goals. To some extent, politics in the modern era have always been mediated by technology, with the printing press, photography, film, radio and television playing crucial roles in politics and all realms of social life, as McLuhan, Innis, Mumford and others have long argued and documented. In representative democracies participation is mediated by technology, as the disastrous failure of voting machines and the voting-counting process in the US 2000 presidential election dramatized (see Kellner forthcoming).

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

./english/379.txt: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:78:Thus, using new technologies to link information and practice and to advance oppositional politics is neither extraneous to political battles nor merely utopian. Even if immediate gains are not won, often the information circulated or the alliances formed can have material effects. There are, moreover, striking examples of how internet-centred organizing campaigns effectively worked against the institutions and corporations of capitalist globalization. Successful struggles against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1995-1998 involved websites and e-mail campaigns against the US-supported effort to develop binding rules on how states treat foreign investors and list-serves linking the groups struggling against the åagreementπ. Obviously, the internet alone did not defeat this initiative for capitalist globalization, but it enabled the non-government organizations fighting against it to circulate information, share resources and link their struggles (see Smith and Smythe 2000).

./english/379.txt:90:Anti-Nike, McDonalds and other websites critical of global capitalist corporations have disseminated a tremendous amount of information. Many labour organizations are also beginning to make use of the new technologies. The Clean Clothes Campaign, a movement started by Dutch women in 1990 in support of Filipino garment workers, has supported strikes throughout the world, exposing exploitative working conditions (see www.cleanclothes.org/1/index.html). In 1997, activists involved in Korean workers strikes and the Merseyside dock strike in England used websites to promote international solidarity (for the latter see www.gn.apc.org/ labournet/docks/). Jesse Drew (1998) has extensively interviewed representatives of major US labour organizations to see how they were making use of new communication technologies and how these instruments helped them with their struggles; many of his union activists indicated how useful email, faxes, websites and the internet have been to their struggles and, in particular, indicated how such technopolitics helped organize demonstrations or strikes in favour of striking English or Australian dockworkers, as when US longshoremen organized strikes to boycott ships carrying material loaded by scab workers. Technopolitics thus helps labour create global alliances in order to combat increasingly transnational corporations.[8]

./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:126:Technopolitics: a contested terrain

./english/379.txt:130:A key to developing a robust technopolitics is articulation, the mediation of technopolitics with real problems and struggles, rather than self-contained reflections on the internal politics of the internet.[10] The Zapatista movement in Chiapas is addressing problems of survival and transforming social, cultural, political and economic conditions, using new technologies as an instrument of political struggle. Likewise, the campaigns against major capitalist corporations and the institutions of capitalist globalization are attempting to advance progressive political agendas and to engage key issues of the day.

./english/379.txt:134:The examples in this study suggest how technopolitics make possible a refiguring of politics, a refocusing of politics on everyday life and using the tools and techniques of new computer and communication technology to expand the field and domain of politics. In this conjuncture, the ideas of Guy Debord and the Situationist International are especially relevant with their stress on the construction of situations, the use of technology, media of communication and cultural forms to promote a revolution of everyday life, and to increase the realm of freedom, community and empowerment.[11] To some extent, the new technologies are revolutionary, they do constitute a revolution of everyday life, but it is often a revolution that promotes and disseminates the capitalist consumer society and involves new modes of fetishism, enslavement and domination, as yet but dimly perceived and undertheorized.

./english/379.txt:142:A recent twist in the saga of technopolitics, in fact, seems to be that allegedly återroristπ groups are now increasingly using the internet and websites to promote their causes. An article in the Los Angeles Times (8 February 2001) reports that groups like Hamas use their website to post reports of acts of terror against Israel, rather than calling newspapers or broadcasting outlets. A wide range of groups labeled as återroristπ reportedly use e-mail, list-serves and websites to further their struggles, causes including Hezbollah and Hamas, the Maoist group Shining Path in Peru and a variety of other groups throughout Asia and elsewhere. The Tamil Tigers, for instance, a liberation movement in Sri Lanka, offers position papers, daily news and free e-mail service. According to the Times, experts are still unclear åwhether the ability to communicate online worldwide is prompting an increase or a decrease in terrorist actsπ.

./english/379.txt:152:The internet is thus a contested terrain, used by the left, right and centre to advance their own agendas and interests. The political battles of the future may well be fought in the streets, factories, parliaments and other sites of past conflicts, but all political struggle is now mediated by media, computer and information technologies and increasingly will be so. Those interested in the politics and culture of the future should therefore be clear on the important role of the new public spheres and act accordingly.

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

./english/379.txt:164:This study has suggested that in the era of globalization and the internet political struggles are at once local and global, that there are continuities and discontinuities with struggles and movements of the past, and that we can therefore continue to draw on the most progressive ideas of the modern tradition while also developing new concepts of politics and new strategies for social transformation. A revolution of the future needs to articulate models and ideals of a post-capitalist economy, a radical democratic polity, an egalitarian and socially just multicultural society, and diverse, free and open culture. Ideals of the past can and no doubt will enter into revolutionary thought of the future, but new ideals, values and forms of everyday life will no doubt emerge. The future of revolution is thus open and requires new theory and practice as well as appropriation of the best progressive heritages of the past.

./english/379.txt:196:[10] See, for example, Mark Poster's åCyberdemocracy: internet and the public sphereπ (1995) which focuses primarily on the politics of social relations within cybercommunication (www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/writings/democ.html). This topic, expounded upon in countless internet discussion lists and publications, is interesting in its own right, but occludes the key issue of how internet communication can be articulated with the åreal worldπ.

./english/379.txt:200:[12] For further examples of how the internet is being used in the US in a variety of social movements, see Kellner 1998; on some of the ways that citizens are participating in cyberpolitics in the US, see Hill and Hughes 1998. For the new forms of multiliteracy needed to use the new technologies for education, communication, and politics, see Kellner 1998 and 2000.

./english/379.txt:214:Burbach, R. (2001) Globalization and Postmodern Politics: From Zapatistas to High-Tech Robber Barons, London: Pluto Press.

./english/379.txt:240:Hill, K. A. and J. E. Hughes (1998) Cyberpolitics. Citizen Activism in the Age of the Internet, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

./english/379.txt:244:______. (1997) åIntellectuals, the new public spheres, and technopoliticsπ, New Political Science 41-42 (Fall): 169-88.

./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:21: I wish to sketch aspects of a critical theory of globalization that will discuss the fundamental transformations in the world economy, politics, and culture in a dialectical framework that distinguishes between progressive and emancipatory features and oppressive and negative attributes. This requires articulations of the contradictions and ambiguities of globalization and the ways that globalization is both imposed from above and yet can be contested and reconfigured from below. I argue that the key to understanding globalization critically is theorizing it at once as a product of technological revolution and the global restructuring of capitalism in which economic, technological, political, and cultural features are intertwined. From this perspective, one should avoid both technological and economic determinism and all one-sided optics of globalization in favor of a view that theorizes globalization as a highly complex, contradictory, and thus ambiguous set of institutions and social relations, as well as involving flows of goods, services, ideas, technologies, cultural forms, and people (see Appadurai 1996).

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

./english/380.txt: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:113: In any case, the events of September 11 have promoted a fury of reflection, theoretical debates, and political conflicts and upheaval that put the complex dynamics of globalization at the center of contemporary theory and politics. To those skeptical of the centrality of globalization to contemporary experience, it is now clear that we are living in a global world that is highly interconnected and vulnerable to passions and crises that can cross borders and can effect anyone or any region at any time. The events of September 11 also provide a test case to evaluate various theories of globalization and the contemporary era. In addition, they highlight some of the contradictions of globalization and the need to develop a highly complex and dialectical model to capture its conflicts, ambiguities, and contradictory effects.

./english/380.txt:117: Consequently, I want to argue that in order to properly theorize globalization one needs to conceptualize several sets of contradictions generated by globalization's combination of technological revolution and restructuring of capital, which in turn generate tensions between capitalism and democracy, and “haves” and “have nots.” Within the world economy, globalization involves the proliferation of the logic of capital, but also the spread of democracy in information, finance, investing, and the diffusion of technology (see Friedman 1999 and Hardt and Negri 2000). Globalization is thus a contradictory amalgam of capitalism and democracy, in which the logic of capital and the market system enter ever more arenas of global life, even as democracy spreads and more political regions and spaces of everyday life are being contested by democratic demands and forces. But the overall process is contradictory. Sometimes globalizing forces promote democracy and sometimes inhibit it, thus either equating capitalism and democracy, or simply opposing them, are problematical. These tensions are especially evident, as I will argue, in the domain of the Internet and the expansion of new realms of technologically-mediated communication, information, and politics.

./english/380.txt: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:141:Many theorists, by contrast, have argued that one of the trends of globalization is depoliticization of publics, the decline of the nation-state, and end of traditional politics (Boggs 2000). While I would agree that globalization is promoted by tremendously powerful economic forces and that it often undermines democratic movements and decision-making, I would also argue that there are openings and possibilities for both a globalization from below that inflects globalization for positive and progressive ends, and that globalization can thus help promote as well as undermine democracy.[7] Globalization involves both a disorganization and reorganization of capitalism, a tremendous restructuring process, which creates openings for progressive social change and intervention. In a more fluid and open economic and political system, oppositional forces can gain concessions, win victories, and effect progressive changes. During the 1970s, new social movements, new non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and new forms of struggle and solidarity emerged that have been expanding to the present day (Hardt and Negri 2000; Burbach 2001; and Foran, forthcoming).

./english/380.txt:161: As the new millennium opened, there was no clear answer to Mandela’s question and with the global economic recession and the Terror War erupting in 2001, the situation of many developing countries has worsened. Yet as part of the backlash against globalization over the past years, a wide range of theorists have argued that the proliferation of difference and the shift to more local discourses and practices define the contemporary scene. In this view, theory and politics should shift from the level of globalization and its accompanying often totalizing and macro dimensions in order to focus on the local, the specific, the particular, the heterogeneous, and the micro level of everyday experience. An array of theories associated with poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, and multiculturalism focus on difference, otherness, marginality, the personal, the particular, and the concrete over more general theory and politics that aim at more global or universal conditions.[10] Likewise, a broad spectrum of subcultures of resistance have focused their attention on the local level, organizing struggles around identity issues such as gender, race, sexual preference, or youth subculture.

./english/380.txt:169: Globalization is thus necessarily complex and challenging to both critical theories and radical democratic politics. But many people these days operate with binary concepts of the global and the local, and promote one or the other side of the equation as the solution to the world's problems. For globalists, globalization is the solution and underdevelopment, backwardness, and provincialism are the problem. For localists, globalization is the problem and localization is the solution. But, less simplistically, it is the mix that matters and whether global or local solutions are most fitting depends on the conditions in the distinctive context that one is addressing and the specific solutions and policies being proposed.

./english/380.txt: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:213: A recent twist in the saga of technopolitics, in fact, seems to be that allegedly “terrorist” groups are now increasingly using the Internet and Web-sites to promote their causes. An article in the Los Angeles Times (February 8, 2001: A1 and A14) reports that groups like Hamas use their Web-site to post reports of acts of terror against Israel, rather than calling newspapers or broadcasting outlets. A wide range of groups labeled as “terrorist” reportedly use e-mail, list-serves, and Web-sites to further their struggles, causes including Hezbollah and Hamas, the Maoist group Shining Path in Peru, and a variety of other groups throughout Asia and elsewhere. The Tamil Tigers, for instance, a liberation movement in Sri Lanka, offers position papers, daily news, and free e-mail service. According to the Times, experts are still unclear “whether the ability to communicate online worldwide is prompting an increase or a decrease in terrorist acts.”

./english/380.txt:225: The examples in this section suggest how technopolitics makes possible a refiguring of politics, a refocusing of politics on everyday life and using the tools and techniques of new computer and communication technology to expand the field and domain of politics. In this conjuncture, the ideas of Guy Debord and the Situationist International are especially relevant with their stress on the construction of situations, the use of technology, media of communication, and cultural forms to promote a revolution of everyday life, and to increase the realm of freedom, community, and empowerment.[12] To some extent, the new technologies are revolutionary, they do constitute a revolution of everyday life, but it is often a revolution that promotes and disseminates the capitalist consumer society and involves new modes of fetishism, enslavement, and domination, yet to be clearly perceived and theorized.

./english/380.txt:229: The Internet is thus a contested terrain, used by Left, Right, and Center to promote their own agendas and interests. The political battles of the future may well be fought in the streets, factories, parliaments, and other sites of past struggle, but politics is already mediated by broadcast, computer, and information technologies and will increasingly be so in the future. Those interested in the politics and culture of the future should therefore be clear on the important role of the new public spheres and intervene accordingly, while critical pedagogues have the responsibility of teaching students the skills that will enable them to participate in the politics and struggles of the present and future.

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

./english/380.txt:284: Hence, a critical theory of globalization presents globalization as a force of capitalism and democracy, as a set of forces imposed from above in conjunction with resistance from below. In this optic, globalization generates new conflicts, new struggles, and new crises, which in part can be seen as resistance to capitalist logic. In the light of the neo-liberal projects to dismantle the Welfare State, colonize the public sphere, and control globalization, it is up to citizens and activists to create new public spheres, politics, and pedagogies, and to use the new technologies to discuss what kinds of society people today want and to oppose the society against which people resist and struggle. This involves, minimally, demands for more education, health care, welfare, and benefits from the state, and to struggle to create a more democratic and egalitarian society. But one cannot expect that generous corporations and a beneficent state are going to make available to citizens the bounties and benefits of the globalized new information economy. Rather, it is up to individuals and groups to promote democratization and progressive social change.

./english/382.txt: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/383.txt:102:Sousa-Santos, B. de. 1995. Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in

./english/386.txt:109:Violent civil upsurges have also shown a remarkable tendency to occur, often at slight provocations or flimsy excuses. In certain areas, including the metropolis Mumbai, such mass violence threatens to become endemic. More serious conflicts between different groups also break out periodically. These can be ethno-linguistic, inter-religious communities, inter-caste etc. The most serious challenge to the polity and to the democratic traditions is today posed by a mix of religion and politics (which in India also has a specific name viz. communalism). The form is of a conflict between the two large communities of the country - the majority Hindu and the minority Muslim. Communalism has now become a principle of ideology, organisation, mobilisation and of violent action.

./english/386.txt:135:The new politics of solidarity between Third World communities and northern consumers is part of an emerging citizen politics at the global level that is making visible the social and ecological costs of globalisation and creating new mechanisms for social control and regulation of commerce at the international level.

./english/386.txt:139:The various social movements in the country have effectively challenged the neo-liberal paradigm which more or less uniformly marginalised communities of people from resources and power. The neo-liberal globalist vision of governance through "market" faces serious challenge and the re-emergence of new politics that requires the construction of new kinds of social and political institutions which will create a real space for the articulation and mobilisation of the poor and the most socially oppressed sections of society.

./english/386.txt:141:This new politics is not an "end state" but the affirmation of the State as an instrument of peoples' power, peoples' democracy and peoples' empowerment. It also means reaffirming the States' obligation of justice for the people from where it supposedly derives its legitimacy and power according to the democratic traditions and challenging and altering the development paradigm that argues for the market as the only provider and the new answer to the problems of economic development.

./english/387.txt:9:I was invited to give one of the inaugural speeches at the Second Latin American Congress of Rural Organizations (Congreso Latinoamericano de Organizaciones del Campo, CLOC) that took place in Brazil November 3-7, 1997. There were approximately 350 delegates from practically every country in Latin America (only Uruguay and El Salvador were absent). The Congress marked a turning point in Latin American revolutionary politics as it signaled the revival and dynamic growth of popularly organized, independent struggles to overthrow the neo-liberal regimes and to create a humane and egalitarian alternative.

./english/387.txt:43:What became clear, however, in the course of the discussions was a profound difference between these militants and the public figures that the Western mass media present as “Indian spokes people.” For example, the Bolivians spoke disparagingly of the so-called “Quechua-speaking vice-president” who talks to the Indians and works for the rich foreigners. The Guatemalans were very critical of Rigoberta Menchu for her embrace of symbolic “Mayan” cultural changes divorced from the larger political-economic and human rights issues. And the Ecuadorean FONIC-I leaders spoke critically of two Indian leaders of the umbrella CONAI movement who were co-opted by the corrupt free market Bucaram regime. The leaders of the Indian movements at the CLOC congress were not falling victim to the “cultural identity” politics designed to divide and co-opt local leaders in order to undercut the movement’s demands for land rights.

./english/387.txt:82:In Brazil the MST has begun a systematic effort to organize the giant favelas or slum settlements that surround Sao Paulo, Rio, and other major cities. They have found great receptivity among the favelados, mainly because of their successful rural struggles and the fact that most favelados are recent emigrants from the countryside. The MST is not only focussing on immediate demands for land titles and infrastructure (lights, water, paved roads, public transport, etc.), but also on political education through leadership training schools and the development of an anti-­capitalist perspective based on an understanding of the exploitative nature of financial and real estate capital. They hope to avoid the previous pattern where local leaders who led a courageous struggle, then got themselves elected to the City Council, and subsequently built electoral machines based on clientelistic politics.

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

./english/388.txt: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/392.txt:17:in the World Social Forum in particular and in the dynamics and politics of civil and political

./english/392.txt:25:world politics − and planning its possible future therefore demands of us the most careful and

./english/392.txt:81:geopolitics over the past half−century, and that they continue to play.1

./english/392.txt:378:objective of his work is to draw out lessons and issues that can strengthen civil politics more generally.

./english/392.txt:379:This work in turn has also drawn him into studies of the politics of civil globalisation and in particular of

./english/394.txt:319:http://andorra.indymedia.org/new/2003/11/698.php . For a discussion of sectarian politics within the WSF

./english/395.txt:31:hallmark of old politics.

./english/395.txt:88:understanding, helping to bridge old politics and the new — in different countries and historical

./english/395.txt:96:and requires, new cultures of politics.

./english/395.txt:120:terrorists but also aimed at protestors of state politics and market operations. And the self-styled

./english/395.txt:158:also been important indications of another politics and of other possibilities. The recent toppling of

./english/395.txt:264:composite vision of the whole, and of its politics. If the leaders of the Forum have this vision, they

./english/395.txt:273:world politics and of looking beyond the Forum as a world event to seeing it as a world process.

./english/395.txt:291:what new politics is about, that we need to look at this question in some detail.

./english/395.txt:355:politics that the Forum seeks to follow and to promote.

./english/395.txt:461:world politics, the WSF Charter of Principles focuses on these because the initiative was conceived,

./english/396.txt:471:The role of new information and communications technologies in the world is ever more acknowledged because of the role they play in economics, politics, and the social and cultural spheres.

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

./english/400.txt:155:Marx ([1850] 1959) "The Defeat of June 1848" pp. 281-307 in Feuer, L.S. (ed.) Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, New York: Doubleday

./english/400.txt:171:Scott, A. & Street, J. (2000) From Media Politics to E-protest, Information, Communication and Society 3(2) pp. 215-240

./english/401.txt:80:We can reduce the four initial themes to this: the attempt to develop a post-capitalist and post-liberal (even post-socialist) understanding of Democracy, Production, Rights and Knowledge. I stress an understanding, rather than a condition or state (or State) – such as traditional understandings of Socialism, Communism or Utopia. Perhaps what is being proposed here is a change of direction, in which the destination is neither prescribed in advance, nor even known, but is to be discovered with our fellow-travelers whilst walking and talking. RSE articulates these four themes not with internationalism or solidarity in general but with a new kind of labor internationalism in particular. It must be said here that this articulation is unique. For in so far as there is a contemporary literature articulating emancipation with internationalism, it tends to be with some new cosmopolitanism, some new form of global governance or with some modest notion of 'transborder' or 'transnational' politics (Eschle 2001:Ch.5), rather than with a new labor internationalism in particular.

./english/401.txt:158:The last section of the paper considers 'Social Unionism and Labor Internationalism'. The social unionism has to do with the involvement of the union in both local party politics and in creating schools and other services for the local communities. The labor internationalism has to do with the involvement of Sintrainagro with international organizations of banana and other agro-industrial worker unions, in Central and South America, in Europe and – hopefully – in other Third World countries. The organizing activities have been in connection with the Geneva-based International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF). The motivation here has been to reduce or avoid competition between banana workers (and banana-producers or producing countries) in the face of the multinationals and an increasingly unstable and competitive world market (which has led to an IUF-Chiquita agreement on basic labor conditions and union rights in the region). The educational/social activities have been carried out with the support of Scandinavian and Spanish unions:

./english/401.txt:171:The emancipatory orientation of this perspective is based, therefore, not only upon the construction of platforms and local alliances, but also upon expansion to the global level of intervention; and this has been the strategy underlying the actions of this union and its leadership over the last decade. In other words, it is a strategy that brings together the concerns of both the ‘old’ and new types of internationalism, which then act as a vehicle for a kind of worker solidarity of the ‘revolutionary’ type and also for a sentiment drawn from experiences that are not restricted to union militancy. It is useful to bear in mind here that the main union leader was in the past very active in party politics and other associations involving cultural intervention…and membership of parties of the extreme left…not to mention an identification with [shopfloor] union currents…It is not surprising therefore, that his stance combines a ‘culturalist’ and [‘grassroots' orientation] with a great opening up in the face of present movements of global solidarity. This is evident in his discourse, which contains both radical criticism of capitalist globalization and the profound conviction that nothing is achieved without the hard work of organization and mobilization. It is thus a discourse that basically links an updated and open form of ideological radicalism with a pragmatic sense of immediate action.

./english/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:62:Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. 1976 (1970). ‘Constituents of a Theory of the Media’, in Raids and Reconstructions: Essays in Politics, Crime and Culture. London: Pluto. pp. 20-53.

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

./english/403.txt: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: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:109:Besser, H. (1995) ‘From Internet to Information Superhighway’, in Brook, J. & Boal, I. (eds.) Resisting the Virtual: The Culture and Politics of Information. San Francisco: City Life.

./english/403.txt:141:ECN (1992) ‘ECN UK internal developments’, http://www.etext.org/Politics/ECN/ecn.uk, accessed 12 August 2001.

./english/403.txt:153:Hay, A. & Hutnyk, J. (1999) ‘Languid, tropical, monsoonal time?: net-activism and hype in the context of South East Asian politics’, Saksi 6, July, http://www.saksi.com/jul99/huynyk.htm, accessed 26 December 2001.

./english/403.txt:157:Jordan, T. (2000) Cyberpower. The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet. London: Routledge.

./english/403.txt:179:Scott, A. (2001) ‘(In)forming Politics: Processes of Feminist Activism in the Information Age’, Women’s Studies International Forum 24 (3/4).

./english/405.txt:42:Under such entirely new conditions, is there any sense in appealing to old strategies that reduce politics to the "conquest" of State power ? and because of that, emphasise the necessity of identifying "historical personalities" and building dominating political parties?

./english/408.txt:16:The greatest index of the Forums success was the extensive participation of movements of the most oppressed groups of Indian society - the Dalits (untouchables) and lower castes. Some of us northerners seem to have reacted to what admittedly was an overwhelming romanticism by slipping into an easy romanticism, portraying the Dalit/lower-caste movements as a kind of spontaneous upswelling from below. But caste is an immensely complex phenomenon, and so is its politics. It is a symptom of the failure of the Indian left - what many activists I met described as its sterility and (in the case of the CPs) integration into the state - that it seems to have little connection with these movements.

./english/420.txt:22:rhetoric fits with the current state of global politics which have lost all

./english/420.txt:65:within the national context alone, because the relationship of politics to

./english/471.txt:32:Despite these limitations, the WSF’s international council believes that the Mumbai event was a milestone of social organisation in India itself, and across Asia as a whole. In both nation and continent, the Mumbai forum marks the broadening of alliances against the world’s dominant economic model and the politics of communalism and bigotry.

./english/472.txt:1:The World Social Forum and the rise of global politics

./english/472.txt:35:The founders created an Organizing Committee with representatives from six leading Brazilian NGOs and the country’s largest labor federation, the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), as well as the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST). The NGOs are broadly progressive but nevertheless part of the national and international civil society establishment; the CUT hews closely to the moderate, pro-Lula line in the PT; only the MST is distinctly on the left within Brazilian politics. This composition puts the Organizing Committee on the center-left of the political spectrum. It later created an International Council of leading activists and intellectuals, mostly European and mostly to the left of the Organizing Committee. The two bodies have not always agreed.

./english/473.txt:4:The World Social Forum pioneered new forms of global activism and democracy. Now it is being pressed to take the shape of an older politics, reports Solana Larsen in Caracas.

./english/475.txt:6:This note is to ask some hard questions about the World Social Forum, with the aim of raising some debate on it in the run-up to the world meetings that are coming up later this month. I ask these questions in the assumption of agreement that the World Social Forum, with all its limitations, is still a significant world institution, in terms of world politics and even more so in terms of civil politics, and that it is something that we need to understand and critically engage with as it evolves.

./english/475.txt:12:The step, of moving from single-centric Fora to polycentric ones, is as a step in the development of the World Social Forum - as important as the holding of the Forum outside Brazil and in Mumbai, India, in January 2004. But given this significance, and behind this the significance of the World Social Forum as an emerging world institution and as an institution of civil politics, it is important, and perhaps of no small interest, that there is hardly any debate about the polycentric Forum, either as individual meetings or as a collective. Even on the official WSF website, in its Library of Alternatives, there are only two articles and then too, the two are both in Spanish, despite the fact that the three Fora are being held in

./english/475.txt:24:* More specifically, and despite the sometimes trenchant and even bitter discussion of the manner in which the Workers¹ Party in Brazil has influenced the emergence and politics of the World Social Forum as an idea, and also about the dominating influence of political parties in the

./english/475.txt:26:http://www.ipsterraviva.net/TV/WSF2005/viewstory.asp?idnews=170.) And on the other hand, some reports suggest that his practice of politics is enervating independent social movement in the country and one opinion is that the WSF being held in Caracas is a shroud for such politics. (Rafael Uzcategui, January 2006 - OWSF Caracas: Shroud for Venezuela's social movements¹. On http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=2063.) To the opposite of fighting it therefore, the leaders of the WSF seem to be almost celebrating this profound contradiction to the very soul of the Forum (and in a carefully downplayed way, which makes it close to being cynical) because, one has to assume, they think that OChávez is on our side¹S But what are the Osides¹ in this game, in these politics ? And who is on which side ?

./english/475.txt:30:In a way, what seems to be happening is a kind of a creeping coup within the Forum; in the broadest sense, of old politics over new politics. Even if you happen to agree with or be sympathetic to Hugo Chávez, or Lula, or the CPI(M) in India, if they can take over the Forum in their respective contexts then why should other parties and politicians not do so in other contexts ? Or is it really ultimately only a question of left and right (where left is right, and right is wrong) and that the Oalternative power¹ and influence that so many have said that civil movements can exercise is, in the final analysis, not relevant ? Or do you have another take entirely, on what is happening ? If so, let¹s talk about it.

./english/480.txt:6:In this paper I argue that it is a mistake to regard the new culture of politics and the ‘open space’

./english/480.txt:9:I argue that contemporary politics, as a direct trajectory of this history, is intrinsically paradoxical

./english/484.txt:1:The World Social Forum – A New Space for Politics?

./english/484.txt:4:The author reflects about the proposals and perspectives of WSF and wonders if it is really a new space for politics. He analyzes the Forum’s process as being democratic and questions its future.

./english/485.txt:4:After the conclusion of the fourth WSF, held in India, the authors debate the politics about the open space that took place in Mubai and reflect about the importance of a geographical changing in this edition. They conclude the article saying that the changes show that the Forum is a process in a constant and growing movement

./english/500.txt:28:''I have a few misgivings about splitting the venue (the polycentric approach), but I guess it's all part of the new political experimentation in devolved democracy and real participation that I find attractive about the WSF,'' said Glasgow-based political scientist and author John Hilley, who has written about neo-liberal militarism, the WSF and Southeast Asian politics, in e-mailed comments to IPS.

./english/500.txt:38:''This is not only because so many 'left' leaders and politicians have sold out and been co-opted,'' observed Hilley. ''It is also because of the fundamental difference between the bureaucratic offices which they inhabit as parties and governments (or oppositions) and the type of open, non-hierarchical politics which the WSF is seemingly trying to construct.''

./english/502.txt:42:Under such entirely new conditions, is there any sense in appealing to old strategies that reduce politics to the "conquest" of State power ? and because of that, emphasise the necessity of identifying "historical personalities" and building dominating political parties?

./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/512.txt:28:This proposal however corresponds to a way of doing politics that is different from what is experienced at the WSF as an “open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action” (2), according to the specific nature of each struggle and the type of action of each leading participant.

./english/512.txt:30:It may be that holding the next World Forum in Africa – a new social, economic and political reality – will reduce the scope for proposing that kind of single focus. The way of doing politics that it expresses, however, is the same as lies behind four challenges that the WSF process faces if it is to continue and expand, which may be a subject to be discussed by the International Council in March. Two of these challenges could be said to come from outside the Forum, and two from inside.

./english/512.txt:41:It is not a question of bringing the Forums as such into those battle lines. In themselves they are not political actors – and thus cannot set themselves to become the new “subject of history” that the experts in politics hope to encounter. They are just a space. But they are a civil society space, for the different sectors of society to exchange ideas and experience and find avenues to effective political action, including the means to pressure and constrain governments and parties, and to contribute to bringing about changes by doing whatever is within their grasp without depending on either. Never before did civil society have an instrument of this kind with which to develop its interrelations autonomously.

./english/512.txt:52:These challenges are in fact the stronger. Coming from inside the WSF, they have greater power to undercut any resistance. Both originate in the same approach that seeks to “focus” the Forums, as mentioned earlier in this text, and in the difficulty of accepting the innovations proposed at them as regards how to do politics, which was mentioned in relation to the challenges coming from outside the Forum.

./english/519.txt:46:The socialist projects in the 20th century were, due to different reasons, defeated by capitalism. A great number of evaluations emphasizes the authoritarian, vertical and state-oriented characteristics of these projects or of their execution. Some others accentuate its link to a national or nationalist ho-rizon. Besides, neo liberal reorganization of capitalism has diffused in almost every country, the fordist period’s great concentration of workers, eliminating the basis of the industrial workforce’s previous protagonism, preventing them from intending to be the socialist movement’s center of gravity. And neo liberal globalization has engulfed peripheral states and corroding their market-control tools, conditioning the politics adopted by the government and frustrating citizen-oriented initiatives that fight for alternatives to neo liberalism.

./english/519.txt:55:The fundamental cause for the difficulties we are now dealing with comes from the increasing confrontation in international politics, established by Wash-ington and followed in group by central governments – which is, basically, a problem of correlation of forces (and, therefore, a capacity problem in concentrating forces and initiatives). If we had been able to support the mobilization level achieved in Geneva or in the protests of February 15th, 2003, we wouldn’t be facing the difficulties we are facing now. The central problem to the present global left is not, in this sense, the lack of candidates to direct the mass movements with “fair” public poli-cies - directions that should have more dissemination of their ideas – but the enlargement of self-organization and autonomous protagonism of wide popular sectors.

./english/519.txt:75:Another civilization, one superior to capitalism, will need to be qualitatively more democratic than the most democratic experiences in progress nowadays. The defense of the pluralism and autono-mous protagonism of civil society are an important aspect of this democracy. Part of the WSF his-torical role is also to stimulate the real leftist sectors’ acceptance of an environment which is favor-able “self thought”, critic and self-critic, also in the presence of its government and parties. None of the parties or politic regimes that claim themselves socialists could intend a protagonism in the wide fight movement for another world if they do not take at least this warn not only from the “real so-cialism” collapse, but also from the incorporation of social-democracy by the neo liberalism. This is a candescent issue, strongly present in Latin American and European politics.

./english/519.txt:79:We can not build another world without a wide popular democracy, without society participating directly in the exercise of power and in the economy management, without being patronized by par-ties nor governments. The rulers must be intensively controlled by the governed ones and politics must be a central activity for each citizen in their various dimensions of life. The defense of the pro-tagonism of movements and actors of civil society, registered in our Charter of Principles and given priority before the “leading” character of the socialist tradition politic parties, represents a funda-mental experience. We support all the progressive experiences, but we are not looking for new “so-cialism traffic lights”.

./english/522.txt:8:After Bamako (Mali) and Caracas (Venezuela) last January, Karachi constituted the third wing of the World Social Forum, in its “polycentric” version of 2006. Meeting from March 24-29 in the main industrial centre and port of Pakistan, it proved to be a success both in terms of numbers and of politics. The attendance - more than 30,000 - was twice as big as predicted and the forum represented an event with many new aspects for this country.

./english/522.txt:32:Fourth element of success, the presence of youth and the return of politics. Hundreds of youth, particularly from Karachi, participated in the forum as volunteers. For many among them, it was their first political experience - sometimes a little disconcerting, it seems, because of the changes of programme. More generally, the forum allowed a reaffirmation of the authenticity of the political terrain in the face of the military regime which sterilises it in the name of the imperatives of national security and faced with the fundamentalist movements which sterilise it in the name of religious imperatives. The forum has reopened the debate on the place of politics and it is not the least of its results.

./english/527.txt:38:No one will disagree on the need for more participatory democracy. However, the question on how and if movements can ally with politicians and/or political parties is much more difficult to answer. The WSF in Caracas was a case in point, since many observers and participants feared that Chavez would try to appropriate the forum. There was quite some resistance against a possible funding of the WSF by the Venezuelan government. Civil society, it was said, has to be autonomous and cannot work with governments. This debate was sharpened by a letter from Chico Whitacker, one of the Brazilian founders of the Forum. Because of the corruption within Brazilian politics, he dismissed from the PT (Worker’s Party) and fiercely defends a politisation of society, without political parties.

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

./english/529.txt:22:The overwhelming feeling of solidarity which pervaded the whole event, was especially important given the context in which it was held, -the extremely precarious and divisive Pakistani political situation. For Pakistanis to meet so many fellow actists was more important than the big picture discussion. Although some people might believe the pipe dream that what ails Pakistan, -multiple independence struggles, environmental and natural catastrophe, widespread poverty and illiteracy, and the leadership of an unelected, uniformed USA-Puppet general commanding a military junta can be solved within any existing democratic process they are wasting irreplaceable time. It’s abundantely clear that no politics can deal with, or is even recognizing what will happen to Pakistan’s, or any other economy in the world, once the price of fuel, doubles, triples or quadruples, as it may well do this very year There is no political system in the world that can deal with this, nor have any even begun to consider it.

./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:120:[7] Douglas Rushkoff, ‘Open Source Democracy: How Online Communication Is Changing Offline Politics’, Demos, 2003 [http://www.demos.co.uk/opensourcedemocracy_pdf_media_public.aspx]

./english/532.txt:138:JJ King is information politics editor of Mute and founder member of GIG [http://gig.openmute.org]

./english/534.txt:16:Reflecting these language politics, IPS's forum newspaper, Terraviva, that previously had been published in several languages, appeared exclusively in Spanish in Caracas. For the first time, the youth camp had its own newspaper called, El Querrequerre (named after a local bird that dies if held in captivity); it was published almost entirely bilingually, in Spanish and English. Community radio broadcasts provided additional sources of information on the forum further enlivening discussions.

./english/534.txt:20:Holding the forum in Venezuela was controversial, and reflects long debates within the forum over the relationship between civil society and party politics. On one hand, Hugo Chavez's government is engaging in a process of social change in line with the goals of the WSF. As such, Caracas was a logical venue for a debate on how to construct a better world. On the other hand, from the beginning, the WSF was designed to be an expression of civil society that explicitly rejected the participation of political parties, armed groups, and statist solutions. These debates over the role of state structures in fostering social justice have long run through the political left, these debates within the WSF are only its most recent manifestation.

./english/550.txt:94:has put again the politics in the streets of Roma. In the capital of

./english/554.txt:23:translate. Beyond Culture: The Politics of Translation

./english/565.txt:115:interest in politics, thus passively discarding the militant approach, a

./english/565.txt:129:also about politics; but its politics are those of pacification,

./english/565.txt:201:practice: by confronting the politics they fight against through

./english/565.txt:319:wikis, mailing-lists), grass-roots politics allow free software

./english/565.txt:345:anti-authoritarian politics, free software development and activist

./english/565.txt:438:between technology and politics generated the will to further export the

./english/565.txt:475:activist server admins have been working towards merging their politics

./english/565.txt:567:repressive politics.

./english/565.txt:667:between users, while their politics involved open flows of information.

./english/571.txt:49:The growing criticism toward Lula by the WSF participants should not, however, be seen as a straight-forward rejection of any possibility of progressive politics by parties or governments. The presence of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in the WSF 2005 caused widespread enthusiasm, often by same groups that loudly criticized Lula. The purity of the WSF civil society is not as clear as some statements of its Charter of Principles tend to imply.

./english/571.txt:51:One of the biggest challenges for the WSF process is how to find innovative ways of being political in the globalizing world. On the one hand, many would agree that traditional party politics, geared toward conquering state power, is not sufficient to change the world. On the other hand, an increasing amount of activists are getting frustrated with the prevalent depoliticized understandings of civil society. How to be political in the 21st Century? Reproducing traditional political parties on a global scale may not be possible or desirable, but we believe interesting intellectual and political work could be done to explore the possibilities and limitations of party-like transnational organizations. The following offers simply some sketchy notes of this process.

./english/571.txt:57:Global projections of institutions that are rooted in national political communities risk reproducing the problematic aspects of domestic analogies. Ever since Hedley Bull (1977, 46-51) coined the term, criticisms of domestic analogy have sometimes been used to criticize attempts to apply democratic principles to world politics. Straight-forward proposals of global parliamentary federalism often do include simplistic analogies, but we believe that there are also possibilities to democratize world politics that go beyond simply projecting democratic institutions as we know them into global contexts. As we have elsewhere explored from a non-federalist perspective the possibilities of applying also parliamentary mechanisms into global politics (see Patomäki and Teivainen 2004), here we would like to reflect on another institution that has generally emerged in nation-state-centric politics but that could also offer useful insights for transnational contexts, namely political party.

./english/571.txt:59:While one of the main challenges of the WSF is to change the meaning of politics, debates about its relationship to present and future political parties are waged in an overwhelmingly traditional language. In the debates on the possibility of global political parties, one should be cautious about simplistic dichotomies of political party/social movement that have been reproduced and to a certain extent useful in the national contexts. It is equally important to try to avoid the reproduction of the categories of Western national politics of the late 20th century. Political parties have often been seen as an eroding institution, which has increasingly become part of the state administration.

./english/571.txt:63:In the polyarchies of the West, members of political parties stand as candidates in elections and for various state offices. Thereby they gain access to the process of law- and policymaking. Other political actors may lobby representatives and officials or put pressure on them through media, for instance. Although in reality the powers of national law- and policymakers have been increasingly limited, at least there remains a relatively unambiguous idea what politics is all about. In world politics, however, it is not clear what forms political activities should assume. If the WSF became a movement, and a more formal organisation, could it also become a global political party in some sense, even in the absence of parliamentary institutions? Alternatively, should the WSF somehow facilitate the creation of global political party-like organizations? What should world political parties do?

./english/571.txt:71:The World Social Forum is a crucial process of rethinking politics and political possibilities to create “another world”. With Mumbai the WSF process itself became more global and less tied to one particular locality, the city of Porto Alegre in Southern Brazil. Gradually and hesitantly, the structures and procedures of the WSF are becoming more clearly defined and, possibly, democratic. While the WSF acknowledges that it is actually making at least some decisions on behalf of all the participants, it continues, first and foremost, to provide spaces for NGOs and movements.

./english/571.txt:91:Bull, Hedley (1977) The Anarchical Society. A Study of Order in World Politics. Houndmills: Macmillan.

./english/571.txt:99:Desai, Rajani X (2003) The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum: Lessons for the Struggle against 'Globalisation'. New Delhi: Aspects of India’s Economy.

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

./english/576.txt:14:"I am a political militant," said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva, clad in a white jacket, as he addressed a stadium full of people during the first day of workshops. "I belong here." Downplaying the roaring PT loyalists, the press would overstate the impact of a small but energetic section of protesters who chastised Lula for continuing to pay Brazil's foreign debt and for failing to buck the economic policies prescribed by the IMF. It is nevertheless true that the President, a former metalworker and union leader who many viewed as a leftist icon when he took office two years ago, had the record of his administration critically scrutinized by a variety of panels throughout the week. As in the past, Lula also visited Davos this year. He went, he said, on a mission to confront wealthy leaders with the same demand of eradicating poverty that he championed in Porto Alegre and to elaborate a "new geography" of politics in which Southern countries would not submit to being considered inferior.

./english/576.txt:34:During an event subtitled "Utopia and Politics," Nobel Laureate José Saramago and famed Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano (sitting on a typically all-male panel) held a contentious exchange about the relevance of Don Quixote for activists today. With listeners clogging the aisles of a large auditorium, Galeano celebrated the paradoxes of a world in which a novel cherished for centuries began its life in prison, "because Cervantes was in debt, as are we in Latin America." He defended the utopian impulse as a force for social change, citing Che's statement in his last letter to his parents: "Once again I feel under my heels the ribs of Rocinante," Quixote's horse.

./english/579.txt:10:The Social Forum project that first emerged in South America reflected a new historical conjuncture – not just the two-decades assault of neoliberalism on that continent but also the effective disintegration of the old left and its replacement by a more inchoate, plural and diverse set of progressive actors in civil society. Their growing radicalization in the late nineties found its organizational expression in the WSF and its associated ‘politics of the open space’. India, however, is where the old left (still largely unrepentant about its Stalinist and Maoist legacies and traditions) survives as a substantial force replete with ‘their’ mass fronts of trade unions, women, peasant and student wings. Since out of a total labour force of some 340 million, only 9 million or less than 3 percent are unionized, it is hardly surprising that there also exists a breathtaking array of social movements, single issue groups, and a spectrum of NGOs from the most progressive and radical to those whose principal function is to be the new ‘privatised’ service-providers offsetting the impact of the neoliberal state’s abandonment of its multiple social responsibilities in health, education, social security, basic needs, etc.

./english/579.txt:14:Nonetheless, after allowing for all reservations and qualifications, the end result justified the decision to hold the 4th WSF in India. Asian presence and involvement in the Social Forum project, hitherto marked by a strong Latin American and European ‘face’, has taken a leap forward. Africa and North America remain laggards. Porto Alegre last year brought together for the first time the two great global streams – the movement against neoliberalism and that against US imperialism. This confluence has been sustained and further consolidated in Mumbai. The introduction of newer themes and a stronger emphasis on some older ones also took place enhancing the awareness-raising aspect of the WSF. The Indian organizers gave some shape to the otherwise amorphous character of the ‘politics of the open space’ by holding a series of WSF-sponsored events focusing on five broad themes – imperialist globalisation; patriarchy, gender and sexuality; militarism and peace; casteism and racism, work and descent-based exclusions and discriminations; religious fanaticism, sectarian violence – themselves subdivided to include issues of ecologically sustainable development; matters of food, land and water sovereignty; media culture and knowledge; labour and the world of work; health, education and social security.

./english/579.txt:22:There remains a significant disjunction between the political realities on the ground and the kind of political context in which the holding of a WSF could be expected to have an immediate and meaningful impact. Since the beginning of 2002 the fulcrum of Indian politics has moved further to the right.

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

./english/579.txt:65:3. Though many of their criticisms are valid – pointing out the political limitations of the WSF as currently constituted, the continuing legitimacy in at least certain situations of violent self-defence, the dangers of NGOization, the ulterior motives and purposes of certain funding sources -- none of this precluded their participation in the WSF even while retaining and expressing these criticisms. Respect for the role played by some of the major groups in MR in defending the poorest sections of society in their countries (this is certainly the case in India) should not prevent one from recognising their time-warp politics nor their unfortunate sectarianism.

./english/582.txt:47:To obstruct public opinion, specially of the poorest people and of those of the lowest castes, the government instigates hate, simultaneously, to Hindus and Muslims. Arundathi accuses the supporters of the PJP, the party in power, of being responsible of a massacre that only in one day, took 2 thousand people’s life, in the Gurajat state, some months ago. Nobody was punished. In the former elections for governors of the states , the PJP and the Congress Party, also supporters of neoliberal ideas, extended the control they have over Indian politics.

./english/587.txt:16:All in all, it was a Forum that caused impact because it was surprising. Certainly, we are still just spinning our wheels in terms of methods for dialoguing and collectively constructing proposals and strategies. We are aware that, by building on the diversity of social actors and respect for pluralism, we are grasping the opportunity to bring into being a new political culture, one that is universal, cosmopolitan, inclusive; that is, a new way of doing change-making politics. However, we have set ourselves a task that calls for more daring and radicalism than first apparent. Given the crisis besetting the dominant order that grants almost exclusive rights to capital, adhesion to the message is a guarantee of the strength of the wave of citizens action. However, we must transform that into strength for reconstructing a sustainable, democratic world in solidarity, for ourselves and for future generations. That is the main lesson to be drawn from Mumbai.

./english/589.txt:29:VAK works with grass-roots organisations by providing them with data, research studies and advocacy material related to their work. Major areas of concern since 1981 have been: a) Dalits and Adivasis, b) Gender Rights, c) Livelihood Security, d) Environment and Ecology, e) Religion and Society: Secularism and Communal Politics, f) Theory and Practice of Social Transformation, and g) Ideology and Culture.

./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/598.txt:23:This does not mean that the forum is anti-party. Indeed, in Italy and Brazil many of those most energetically building the forum come from parties (Rifondazione Communista and the Workers Party, respectively) that are trying to open themselves up to the influence and activity of the social movements. Indian anti-dam campaigner Medha Patkar described the WSFs relationship to electoral politics thus: Electoral politicians are not untouchables here, but the WSF is really an expression of people power and non-electoral politics. Non-electoral politicians need to build their strength to challenge elected politicians. Those representing an alternative view of development need to realise the commonality of their ideologies and strategies.

./english/598.txt:25:In this way social forums put into practice the assertion of the womens and ethnic minorities movements of the 1970s, that movements of the oppressed and marginalised need autonomy to develop and identify their own needs, identities and sources of power. Political parties do not have a monopoly of the power to achieve change; indeed generally they have flunked the task of reform. The emergence of social forums doesnt make the political party redundant. It leaves it a distinctive contribution to the wider process of struggle carried out by a plurality of actors: the role of linking extra-parliamentary campaigning with the very different timetables and tactical necessities of electoral politics. To perform this role effectively - to act as amplifiers rather than mufflers of the movements in the streets and the workplaces - parties have to open up their methods of organising and thinking. Every way of reforming party policy has to start from an experimental approach, Rifondazione Communista leader Fausto Bertinotti told the Mumbai Forum. Practice has to come before theory. The collective intellect is the movement, and the party is helping to contribute to that, but it cannot in itself be that collective intellect.

./english/614.txt:33:· Lastly, the relation with politics and the space to political parties has been a field in which theory has not much to do with reality. Therefore, whereas the “Charter of Principles” excludes explicitly the participation of political parties, the presence of the PT, of institutional or government employees and, also, heads of state… and a media overexposed projection have been a reality within the WSF. It’s clear that it’s no longer possible to keep living this contradiction and that it’s necessary to coordinate a space of the political parties and institutions in the framework of the WSF.

./english/614.txt:35:In those countries where the social mobilizations have shaken the society the most, or the antiwar mobilizations, have put politics and the relation among the social and the political in the first place, and the relation among social movements and political parties and the institutions in the center of the debate. This is a reality to which one can not turn its back, but it’s necessary to approach it in a way that does not hurt the identity of the WSF.

./english/634.txt:42:* James Cockcroft is Research Fellow at the International Institute of Research and Education in Amsterdam, Holland and an online professor for the State University of New York. He has written 35 books on Latin America, international affairs, and human rights, including Latin America: History, Politics, And U.S. Policy (Belmont, California: Wadsworth/International Thomson Publishing, Second edition, 1998, in Spanish as América Latina Y Estados Unidos: Historia Y Política País Por País, Mexico City: siglo veintiuno editores, 2001) and Mexico’s Hope: An Encounter With Politics And History, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999, in Spanish as La Esperanza De Mexico, Mexico City: siglo veintiuno editores, 2001). In Porto Alegre III, he participated in the panel “Imperialismo e resistência popular à globalização capitalista na América Latina” (Imperialism and popular resistance to capitalist globalization in Latin America), along with Raul Pont, Prof. Janette Habel, and Michaël Löwy.

./english/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:26: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 refuse to play the messiah or the lone ranger, and instead hand power back to the citizens who elected him, on key issues from payment of the foreign debt, to land reform, to membership of the Free Trade Area of the Americas. There are a host of mechanisms that he could

./english/646.txt:112:Internal politics in the WSF has often been played out in the space different groups have been given during the main annual events. In the first forum, racial tensions created some internal conflict. Brazil may don the public face of racial harmony during Carnival or the (soccer) World Cup, but racism is present in most walks of life, including progressive intellectuals’ ranks. For many observers, both forums have been surprisingly “white” events due not only to the lack of large delegations from Africa, Asia and other parts of Latin America, but also to the fact that the average Brazilian participating in the forum is clearly “whiter” than the average Brazilian. (Rio Grande do Sul is one of the rare parts of Brazil, Latin America and the whole ‘third world’ where many locals are light-skinned people of European, including Germanic, origin.)

./english/646.txt:142:In the WSF 2003 there was, however, one particular issue that made the activists in Porto Alegre focus on Davos in passionate debate. The decision of Lula da Silva to travel to Davos immediately after the WSF 2003 in Porto Alegre raised plenty of criticism among the organisers. In his main public appearance in front of tens of thousands of admirers during WSF 2003 Lula compared his decision to travel to Davos to his decision over twenty-five years ago to get involved in trade unions. Friends had then advised him against getting involved with “dirty trade union politics”, but the fact that Brazil has a vibrant and progressive trade union movement today shows that he was right to act. Lula was, however, not explicit about whether he believed the WEF could expect similarly progressive results. At least within the IC, many remained sceptical.

./english/671.txt:24:In a previous period we could have staged an old-style ideological confrontation between the two positions. The first could accuse the second of playing into the hands of neoliberalism, undermining state sovereignty and paving the way for further globalization. Politics, the one could continue, can only be effectively conducted on the national terrain and within the nation-state. And the second could reply that national regimes and other forms of sovereignty, corrupt and oppressive as they are, are merely obstacles to the global democracy that we seek. This kind of confrontation, however, could not take place at Porto Alegrein part because of the dispersive nature of the event, which tended to displace conflicts, and in part because the sovereignty position so successfully occupied the central representations that no contest was possible.