./english/31.txt:24:IST leader Alex Callinicos appears as Globalise Resistance; long-standing SWP member Mike Gonzales was advertised as “university professor of Latin American literature”; Jonathan Neale these days never takes off his Campaign against Climate Change hat and Chris Nineham is of course “the representative of the British anti-war movement” (ie, the SWP-run Stop the War Coalition). The Greek SWP section, SEK, only puts on meetings under the name of its ‘anti-capitalist’ front organisation, Genoa 2001. Obviously the comrades think that their own sect-projects are not particularly attractive to young people from across Europe - and they are probably right.
./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:236:We remember and celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the satygraha movement – the movement of non-violent resistance and truth force – on 9/11 1906.
./english/54.txt:76:for the resistance in Iraq, for open borders and solidarity with migrants,
./english/54.txt:100:resistance to neoliberalism. More precisely, the charter is a fig leaf to
./english/54.txt:158:after speaker declared their solidarity with the Iraqi resistance, called
./english/54.txt:192:resistance, defence of Iran against US-UK attack, opposition to EU
./english/54.txt:327:East and encourages and stands in solidarity with the resistance to the
./english/54.txt:335:* mobilises a continent wide resistance to privatisation and the coordinated
./english/62.txt:57:Another, related, aspect of social movements is that we are organisng for egalitarian, democratic, socialist/communist transformation in a context where there is no clear alternative system for which to aim. We believe that there’s got to be a better way; we believe in fighting against exploitation and oppression; for common goods; for a just peace; against corporate power; for popular control and so on – many rich ideas and vision - but without a notion of an alternative system. In some way, the idea of an alternative system was related to a single vehicle and instrument.i.e. the nation state. The emergence of open systems with globalisation – and also the internet - does not invalidate the underlying principles of socialism, whther we use the word `socialism’ or not. The search is for alternative principles of allocating economic resources, producing the means of life, developing human capacities, to that of profit. And it is a search based on experiment and a sense of creating and/or prefiguring alternatives in the course of resistance, as much as on programmatic debate. There is still an important – in some senses more important function - for programmatic debate, but it has a completely different character – or should have a completely different character - drawing very many different kinds of knowledge. It therefore needing to be organised in ways that value practical knowledge as well as more easily codified forms.
./english/62.txt:81:3) Third, in this work of re-connection we are engaged with, I think we have to develop a sort of struggle in different directions, included a work on ourselves. What I mean here is that it is easy (and right) to criticize the academy, for example, for its impermeability and self-reference. But we should also focus on a kind of resistance we express in our attitudes toward the integration of more complex and elaborated tools and connections in our own actions. Yesterday I was with a media activist who expressed me a pessimistic evaluation about social movements attitude: “it is like a kid who doesn’t want to grow”, he said. I am not pessimistic like him, but I think that there a problem exists and we should explicit it.
./english/147.txt:18:There is no country in Europe where, after the defeat of social democracy, there arose resistance as effective as is in Italy. The overarching mood in Italy is to try to unify workers and all marginalized groups and strata: the unemployed, the poor, industrial and intellectual workers, whites, and people of all other races, men and women, and immigrants, in a “movement of movements.” A great acceleration of efforts started in Genoa, July 2001, where the anti-corporate globalization movement resisted the G8 Summit.
./english/147.txt:84:Led by charismatic speakers, they occupied two Paris churches. Soon after that, they formulated a model of resistance and struggle that has spread through Europe. In Germany, the initiative “no one is illegal” was decisively influenced by the events in Paris.
./english/147.txt:90:The last Noborder Camp was held in Strasbourg, July 2002. During the ten days in Strasbourg, 2,000 to 3,000 participants from over 20 countries in Europe tried to find a mutual language of resistance and action against border regimes. Strasbourg, however, apart from great importance, revealed some shortcomings of the Noborder Camps that its critics keep pointing out.
./english/147.txt:98:Much has already been written about PGA. In 1996, 3,000 activists from around the world gathered in the rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico. Their hosts, the Zapatistas, described the vision that inspired the meeting: “This intercontinental network of resistance will be the medium in which distinct resistances may support one another. This intercontinental network of resistance is not an organizing structure; it doesn’t have a central head or decision maker; it has no central command or hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who resist.” Two years later, the founding conference of PGA was held in Geneva, at which 300 delegates from 71 countries hashed out a lengthy manifesto and “hallmarks” for collaboration. The hallmarks were later changed at the conference in Cochabamba:
./english/147.txt:104:A call to direct action and civil disobedience, support for social movements’ struggles, advocating forms of resistance that maximize respect for life and oppressed peoples’ rights, as well as the construction of local alternatives to global capitalism
./english/147.txt:121:The European Social Consulta represents a shift away from pure opposition towards constructive alternatives. It was conceived as a complement to the People’s Global Action, which is itself centered, first and foremost, on direct actions of resistance. The Consulta emphasizes the “transformation of society.”
./english/147.txt:153:Globalize Resistance
./english/147.txt:155:Another network that is becoming increasingly influential is Globalize Resistance, a British answer to ATTAC. Gathered around the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, Globalize Resistance is an endeavor of the old left, under a new name, to establish itself as one of the pillars of resistance in Europe. It reflects the fact that the more intelligent part of the older old left has realized that there is something “radically new” in the movement and that it is better to abandon the traditionalist methods and to adjust.
./english/147.txt:157:Globalize Resistance has a steering committee composed of the SWP members and NGO representatives close to this political perspective. They have been present almost everywhere there is dissent and many actions in the UK, especially the anti-war ones, would have been impossible without their participation. The same note refers to the sister organization, also influenced by SWP, called the STOP THE WAR movement.
./english/147.txt:159:The criticism directed at Globalize Resistance relates mostly to their non-democratic structure, centrism, and the tricks by which old substance is presented as a new one, by way of cosmetic touches.
./english/150.txt:3:Cologne will play host this summer to the summits of both the European Union and the G8. For 3 weeks Cologne will be the centre of attention as world leaders meet to plan the next stage of their neo-liberal strategy and their opponents demonstrate resistance to these policies and themselves meet to develop alternatives to combat the increasing divide between rich and poor, between powerful and powerless. This resistance is increasingly manifest at local, regional and global levels and organisations are developing which express these tendencies. One such organisation is the pan - European Euromarch campaign against unemployment, job insecurity and social exclusion and this article aims to document its emergence and development and to begin to analyse its significance and potential.
./english/150.txt:19:A significant aspect of the protests has been their cross-national dimension. Activists from across the continent have been present at the nationally based actions and they have been able to draw attention to the commonality of the diverse struggles. Resistance to the introduction of »Workfare« style programmes has received an echo in the actions from across the continent and it is this common resistance that has enabled bridges to built between the various groups and struggles both within and across national boundaries. This bridge building was symbolised by the joint activity of unemployed activists to span the bridge at Strasbourg in May 1998. [2]
./english/150.txt:22:In its opposition to the extension and broadening of neo-liberal style policies, Euromarch can be seen as part of a growing extra-parliamentary opposition to governments of any political persuasion which pursue these types of policies and to their adoption by the European Union. This opposition encompasses campaigns and struggles in a movement which spans highly organised political and pressure group type organisations which plan their actions carefully to display their opposition, and more spontaneous struggles which are more sporadically organised and focus around everyday resistance to neo-liberal policies. The differing perspectives of participants are not so easily identified but a contrast can be made between those who see such a movement as a source of social democratic renewal and those whose aim is to develop a more fundamental challenge to the existing order by building an explicitly anti-capitalist movement. In this sense key Euromarch demands like that for a minimum income can be viewed as the basis of a »Social Europe«, but the meaning of the word »Social« is itself subject to debate and its content will be an object of struggle.
./english/150.txt:25:In this wider struggle, building international, as well as European wide, links are seen as central to the development of Euromarch. Strong links have already been made with unemployed organisations in South Korea and with the land rights movement in Brazil. Euromarch will be raising money to bring over representatives of such movements to take part in the activities and demonstration in Cologne. Moreover the understanding of the global dimension of struggles has led to an extension of the actions surrounding the EU summit in Cologne in late May to include the G8 summit in June. Contact has been made with many organisations worldwide to ensure that joint actions can be organised to bridge the three weeks which separate the two summits. These three weeks will provide the opportunity for debate and action which will be truly global in character and will represent global resistance to the policies of neo-liberalism.
./english/162.txt:1:The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges, Networked Resistance
./english/162.txt:5:Among the events of recent history, few have been as surprising, as full of enigmas, as the coordinated world demonstrations known as the Global Days of Action. Immediately upon their appearance, they overflowed the organization that had called them into being: the People's Global Action (PGA), founded in Geneva in February of 1998. (1) This transnational network of resistance had adopted a new concept of solidarity advanced by the Zapatistas, who encouraged everyone to take direct action at home, against the system of exploitation and oppression which they described as neoliberalism. As early as the month of May, 1998, the PGA helped spark demonstrations against the WTO whose effectiveness lay both in their simultaneity and in their extreme diversity: street parties in some 30 cities around the world, on May 16; four days of protest and rioting in Geneva, beginning that same day; a 50,000-strong march that reached Brasilia on May 20; protests all over India after a huge demonstration in Hyderabad against the WTO on May 2. The following year, London Reclaim the Streets launched the idea of a "carnival against capital" in financial centers across the world for the day of the G8 summit, June 18: there were actions in over 40 cities, including a ten-thousand-strong "carnival of the oppressed" by Niger Delta peoples against transnational oil companies. In the face of transnational capitalism, a networked resistance was born, local and global, tactical and strategic: a new kind of political dissidence, self-organized and anarchist, diffusely interconnected and operating only from below, yet able to strike at the greatest concentrations of power. What is the strength of such movements? The improbable and serious appeal to a "do-it-yourself geopolitics": a chance for personal involvement in the transformation of the world.
./english/162.txt:9:These kinds of actions are about as far as one could imagine from a museum; yet when you approach them, you can feel something distinctly artistic. They bring together the multiplicity of individual expression and the unity of a collective will. That is their enigma, which sets up a circulation between art and solidarity, cooperation and freedom. But this enigma stretches further, into the paradoxes of a networked resistance. Because since their surprising beginnings, we have seen the movements change, we have seen them globalize. Activists from the South and the North travel across the earth in jet planes, to demonstrate next to people without money, without work, without land or papers – but who may know the same writers, the same philosophers, the same critiques of contemporary capitalism. The intensive use of Internet by the movement of movements means that dissenting messages take the pathways used by financial speculation. Sometime you wonder whether the two can even be distinguished. What are the sources of this networked resistance? And what exactly is being resisted? Is revolution really the only option – as one could read on a banner at the carnival against capital, on June 18, 1999, in the financial center of London? Or do we not become what we resist? Are the "multitudes" the very origin and driving force of capitalist globalization, as some theorists believe? (2)
./english/162.txt:17:Conceived at the outset of the year 2000, this alliance theory was mainly concerned with distinguishing a "new economy" from the old one. It combined a network paradigm of organization, as promoted by Manuel Castells, (4) with a description of the culturalization of the economy, as in British cultural studies. But what it demonstrated was more like an "economization of culture." Everything seemed to be swirling together: "In a networked culture, the topographical metaphor of 'inside' and 'outside' has become increasingly untenable. As all sectors loosen their physical structures, flatten out, form alliances and dispense with tangible centers, the oppositionality that has characterized previous forms of protest and resistance is finished as a useful model."
./english/162.txt:21:These kinds of remarks, which came from many quarters, were already confusing for the movements. But they took on an even more troubling light when the Al Qaeda network literally exploded into world consciousness. On the one hand, the unprecedented effectiveness of the S11 action seemed to prove the superiority of the networked paradigm over the command hierarchies associated with the Pentagon and the Twin Towers. But at the same time, if any position could be called "oppositional," it was now that of the Islamic fundamentalists. Their successful attack appeared to validate both the theory of a decisive transformation in organizational structures, and Samuel Huntington's theory of the "clash of civilizations." Suddenly the protest movement could identify neither with the revolutionary form of the network, nor with the oppositional refusal of the capitalist system. Loud voices from the right immediately seized the opportunity to assimilate the movement to terrorism. And to make matters worse, the financial collapse that the movement had predicted effectively happened, from the summer of 2000 onwards, casting suspicion over everything associated with the dot-com bubble – including all the progress in democratic communication. At the same time, the secret services of the most powerful countries, and especially the US, declared themselves ready to meet the challenge of the networks, by giving themselves new capacities for autonomy, horizontality, interlinkage. (5) The difficulty of situating a networked resistance to capitalism within a broader spectrum of social forces thus became enormous – as it still is today.
./english/162.txt:25:This difficulty has not stopped the mobilizations. But what has come to a halt, or splintered into a state of extreme dispersal, are the theoretical attempts to analyze them in a way that can contribute something to their goals and capacities of self-organization. What I want to do here is to make a fresh try at this, from an anthropological viewpoint that can distinguish between the fictions of a "self-regulated market" and the reciprocities and solidarities that make it possible to live together as human beings. So we'll begin with a social and economic study of the vital need for resistance to the crises of capitalism. We will then see how this resistance can develop within the contemporary technical environment. And finally, returning to the question of alliance or opposition, we will look at some of the contributions that artistic practice makes to this networked resistance, by rediscovering languages that seemed to have been consigned to the museum. I am thinking primarily of conceptual art: a practice that doesn't produce works, but only virtualities, which can then be actualized, at each time and in each place, as unique performances.
./english/162.txt:38:What are the effects of the crisis as it stands today? One can draw a few insights from recent developments in Argentina. In the late 1990s the Argentine state, under pressure from the IMF, desperately attempted to maintain the value of the peso with respect to the dollar, and more broadly, with respect to the standard of prosperity represented by the currencies of ¥ € $. A series of structural adjustments were supposed to improve the economy's health, and insure the continuing parity of the peso and the dollar; but their effect was to exclude increasing numbers of Argentines from access to employment, basic services, food, and finally even to their money, when bank withdrawals were frozen in late November 2001. Thus the state's maintenance of the peso's exchange value, ensuring the integration of the country's elite to the world economy, no longer permitted any use value on the local level. Resistance now became a question of sheer survival, and some Argentines spoke of a crisis in the very process of civilization: "The new state project implies, in the short term, an abrupt cut-off... of the systems of social reproduction: the state gradually detaches itself from the populations and the territories; and finally, from social cohesion itself." (11) But this detachment only gives the state the power of an empty affirmation, an entirely formal language of exchange, which is valid in theory but not in fact. And the void calls out either for a democratic invention, or for an authoritarian solution.
./english/162.txt:42:This situation of suspended crisis appears likely to spread, leaving open, at least for a time, the possibility of very different responses. The illusions of the 1990s, however, are definitely over. The collapse of the stock markets, and the economic slowdown that has followed, brings a threat of deflation, unemployment and exclusion to bear on most of the world's populations. Under current political conditions, the only possible response seems to be a strengthening of the barriers that separate the privileged classes from all the others – and this, even within the richest countries. The new military posture of the United States, while directly motivated by the September 11 attacks, also represents an attempt to restructure society, and to institute a new form of discipline in the face of the void that has been left by the collapse of the speculative bubble. It is in this way that the ideological version of economic flexibility meets its own limits. This shift toward heightened military and police control takes away much of the legitimacy that flexible modes of management were able to confer on capitalist society. Still the opportunistic model of the flexible personality will probably continue to orient the behavior of privileged individuals for years yet to come, even as it subjects them to strong contradictions. Under such conditions, the various forms of resistance to capitalism will clearly intensify, not least because they find a vital energy in the feeling of absolute necessity brought on by the crisis. Now I want to deal specifically with one such form of resistance: the resistance to the privatization of knowledge, the fourth "fictive commodity" whose importance Polanyi had not yet measured. It is through the cooperative production of immaterial knowledge that we will rejoin the enigma of the networked protests.
./english/162.txt:43:Just one more thing. I do not want to accord any privilege, in what follows, to that supposedly more "advanced" fraction of the world population which is so deeply involved with electronic networks. I think the opposition between the "Net" and "Self" – between a modernizing process that enforces our abstraction from historical ad cultural traditions, or failing that, determines a desperate and regressive retreat to the fixations of local identity – is simply false. (12) More interesting is the divide between the possessive individualism of the flexible personality, and a concern for human coexistence. As we saw above, the movement of movements found one of its beginnings in a concept of solidarity arising from the Zapatista struggles, which have fundamentally to do with questions of land. But the meaning of these survival struggles of the Mayan peoples could only reach the subjects of the developed world through the Internet, where the commodification of cultural and scientific knowledge is at stake. Here the essential struggle is to overtake and dissolve the language of ¥ € $, not through a return to the closed, bureaucratic frameworks of the Keynesian state, but instead through the political development of new principles of exchange and reciprocity. Thus this fourth field of resistance, with touches closely on human language but also on technical development, seems destined to furnish elements of articulation for other struggles, in a shared search for alternatives to the systemic crisis.
./english/162.txt:79:The examples of this revenge could be as numerous as the experiences of those involved in it. That is why I want to talk about an event in which I personally took part: the carnivalesque performance and riot in the City of London on June 18, 1999. Before it took place, this day was intensely dreamed by a multiplicity of actors, sometimes connected in constant dialogue and exchange, sometimes affected at a distance by signs that promised to break their isolation and unleash their agency. The inspiration first emerged, at least in certain versions of the story, during the summer of 1998 in conversations between members of London Reclaim the Streets and the anarchist group London Greenpeace (not the famous NGO).26 It spread through the networks of Peoples' Global Action, drawing on the suggestive potency of two key ideas. One was the "street party," as a way to refuse the domination of the city by the automobile – and of democracy by traditional party politics. The other was the phrase "Our resistance is as transnational as capital": a return of twentieth-century internationalism in red, black, and green, after a long trip through the jungles of Chiapas where the Zapatista uprising began on January 1, 1994 (the day NAFTA came into being). A complex circulation through time and space, where solidarity means respect for local autonomy and differing motivations for struggle, was encapsulated in these two key ideas. A call to action, distributed widely through the Internet, put it like this:
./english/162.txt:84:J18 in London was the most exquisitely planned and spontaneously realized artistic performance in which I have taken part, an awakening to new possibilities of political struggle that would be echoed throughout the world. Thousands converged in the morning at the Liverpool tube station in the City, receiving carnival masks in four different colors that encouraged the crowd to split into groups, outwitting the police by following different paths through the medieval street plan of Europe's largest financial district, then coming together again in front of the LIFFE building, the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange, which was the symbolic and real target of this protest against the global domination of speculative exchange. The choice of site was essential. Long years of effort by far-flung organizers and intellectuals had been required to understand and describe the ways in which capital had escaped its former national bounds, in order to redeploy itself transnationally in new oppressive systems; yet until the late 1990s, that knowledge remained largely abstract, floating in a deterritorialized space like the financial sphere itself. Here it was translated into tangible forms of embodied expression: transgressive dancing, defiant music, a verbal and visual poetics of resistance. For once, individual pleasure once did not appear as the negation, but rather as the accentuation of collective struggle, confronting financial abstractions which could be understood by the participants through the immediate experience of the stone-and-glass architecture, while the significance of each of their acts was multiplied by the knowledge that other, similar events were occurring all over the planet. Spontaneous invitations for passing traders to come join the party were combined with sudden attacks on private property, generating an unexpected, threatening, sympathetic and immensely confident image of revolt – a way to finally start answering the decades-old pleas for help from oppressed peoples in the South, while also responding to the unbearable social divisions that transnational capitalism imposes on countries like Britain. Of course this carnivalesque outburst was just one moment in a longer process of struggle, prepared by untold numbers of people under far harsher conditions. But the language of protest that emerged here nonetheless marked a turning point. It was the immediate inspiration for the larger and more complex confrontation in Seattle, six months later, which finally forced the messages of the global resistance movements through the frosty screens of the traditional media, opening the political crisis of global capitalism's legitimacy. A crisis which has not ceased to morph and mutate into the increasingly violent forms that it is taking today.
./english/162.txt:122:You are here: Home » mdr » Publications » The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges, Networked Resistance
./english/172.txt:11:The current situation is full of opportunities but also dramatics dangers. Opposition and resistance to the war and occupation of Iraq have exposed the British and US strategy as a failure. The world is facing the nightmare of a new war in Iran. The arbitrary decision of the EU to cut funds to the National Palestinian Authority is unacceptable and exacerbates the whole situation. The oppression of Kurdish people has still not come to an end.
./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/192.txt:51:It is, moreover, puzzling that some arrests rather than others have attracted attention. For example, during the registrations at Conway Hall on Thursday 14 October a very aggressive police squad cleared Red Lion Square of the queues and arrested a Socialist Workers Party organizer. Two Globalise Resistance activists were stopped leaving the final demonstration under the Terrorism Act 2000. One of them was arrested and fined £80. An individual who appears to have been part of the group that tried to storm the stage in Trafalgar Square was also arrested and fined the same amount. But only his case attracted sympathy and attention, for example from some leading French activists. Once again, a double standard seems to be at work.
./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:37:This link to concrete situations of resistance in time and space on the ESF is sometimes difficult to achieve. In many seminars and workshops you just get flat, already known analyses, simple propaganda and wishful thinking. Again and again the common enemy (neoliberalism, transnational corporations, the US, the WTO etc.) is condemned – in this sense the perspective on the ESF seems too unified; the few times debates became concrete consensus was melting away – the different approaches and goals were too diverse: a necessary result emerging from the contradiction of the ESF (and WSF) process itself as open space for discussion and self-education, without a real attempt to develop some applicable and visible alternatives. Therefore the Forum is no movement in itself (in contrast to Thomas Ponniah’s view8), but maybe a space for a new political consciousness and sovereignty, the modern form of articulation and association of structurally fragmented groups, classes and movements. However, because there is no alternative social project formed, the actual representative crisis of neoliberalism does not lead to a weakening of its hegemonic position. Pierre Khalfa supposes that diversity paralyses. 9 But its not diversity as such – which might enrich the movements – but a lack of deep analysis, including the production of neoliberal hegemony from below, in combination with non-committal plurality. This undermines a generalization of experiences, views and understandings (without closed unification under one primary force) preventing us from achieving coherent approaches and strategies. On the one hand there are more or less successful local social movements, creating autonomous spaces and transforming subjectivities, sometimes re-appropriating the essential means of reproduction from below, but hardly touching the relations of power on national or even transnational level. On the other there are global events for the altermondialist, national and transnational NGOs, some national parties, getting some media presence, shaping the public discourse, but far away from the everyday experience of the people, acting in some kind of representative vacuum without really questioning the ruling political form (Brand 2004). There is a need for intermediate political forms. At the heart of the problem lies the relation between representation and participation. A permanent movement (in the strict sense of the word) is difficult to sustain, movements are fragile forms with periods of higher or lesser activity, they develop out of concrete situations of dissent with the ruling mode of production and living, with a perspective of (molecular) social transformation, while the struggle for this transformation has to be a very long-standing one. Out of this results a need for institutionalisation to bridge times of less activity, disintegration, defensive situations and to overcome defeats, save experience and knowledge for the next generation of activists etc. A renewed concept for left political parties could be one possibility to create intermediate institutionalised political forms.
./english/193.txt: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:60:Gill, Stephan, Power and Resistance in the New World Order, New York 2003
./english/193.txt:77:1. ESF-seminar on Strategies of social transformation, co-organised by: Transform! (Italy); the Transnational Institute; Critique Communiste (France); the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Germany); Project K; Socialist Resistance (UK); and Red Pepper (also UK), October 16.
./english/193.txt:93:9. ESF-seminar on the Future of the Movement – Strategies and Perspectives, Alexandra Palace, October 15, coorganised by Italian ESF-coordination, Attac France, Genoa 2001, Attac Suisse, Red Pepper, Global Resistance (UK), Cultural Resistance and others.
./english/199.txt:21:On Friday afternoon I went back to Beyond ESF, where I spent the afternoon meeting with PGA-inspired folks. Our most interesting discussion involved a new direct action concept: the "Chain Re-Flaction". While many of our friends were busy planning for the upcoming G8 actions in Scotland , we decided to take up a discussion that was begun at the last European PGA conference in Belgrade . The idea is to move beyond the Global Day of Action, which is in danger of becoming a tired cliche, toward a new vision of locally rooted, yet globally linked actions coordinated through a webpage. For example, the first action might be held in South America somewhere, say Cochabamba or Buenos Aires , and the torch of resistance would then be passed along to another continent, perhaps Asia , where an action might be organized in Mumbai. After each action, activists would send reports and reflections to the website, generating an accumulation of knowledge and experience: hence "Re-Flaction." Whether or not this particular concept works, the main point is the need for innovation. Either we begin to recreate ourselves, or the train will soon stall out.
./english/199.txt:31:Moreover, the 2002 action had a concrete impact. At the International Commission meeting that spring in Barcelona , we learned there were no plans for a VIP room the following year. On our side, many of us in the Movement for Global Resistance in Barcelona realized we could have a positive effect by creatively engaging the forum from the outside. Thus began our part in a series of discussions at the Strasbourg Border Camp, Leiden PGA conference, and elsewhere around creating an autonomous space in Florence with "one foot in, and one foot out." Several different spaces ultimately emerged, including the Hub and projects organized by the Disobedientes and Cobas. Although the Hub in particular was perhaps more outside than inside, and was also widely criticized for its marginality, the autonomous space concept had caught on, and would be reproduced in different guises and to varying degrees at subsequent forums in Porto Alegre , Paris , and Mumbai. The autonomous space model has perhaps come to its fullest fruition this year in London .
./english/203.txt:7:Despite an overall success and some significant achievements at the European Social Forum (ESF) in London, the relationship between the peace and anti-globalisation movements and the trade unions seemed to crack under some controversial issues, like the EU constitutional treaty, new-born labour organisations in Iraq and the resistance to occupation.
./english/203.txt:19:The dissent on Iraqi armed resistance (simple ‘terrorism' for some) seems to be another current matter of division. At the 70,000-strong anti-war demonstration in Rome two weeks after the Forum, some parts of the peace movement, like community centres and the direct action group ‘Disobedienti' did not take part because they don't agree with the criticisms that many make of Iraqi armed resistance, while they only want protests to oppose foreign military invasion. “We are facing a lack of positive, reciprocal contamination on basic social matters” observed Gianfranco Benzi, who is responsible for Cgil's relations with social movements. “We have to start a new dialogue” he added, “Otherwise without some concrete projects we risk losing the common ground of action and the achievements we have made so far.”
./english/205.txt:11:The London bid for the ESF was presented in Paris during the second edition as the result of an agreement between the Socialist Worker's Party (SWP) and the Greater London Authority (GLA). It was discussed and approved at a closed meeting, one of those that still abound in Social Fora everywhere – like those that prepare the agenda of the Social Movements' Assemblies. The decision to present London as an alternative was never debated among British movements; in fact, the GLA (and the group behind, a small Labour tendency called Socialist Action, basically composed of advisers to the mayor, Ken Livingstone) had never shown any interest in the process at all, whilst the SWP, by means of its myriad front groups (Globalise Resistance, Stop the War Coalition, Project K etc.), although active in the WSF and the ESF, had made systematic efforts to stop the spontaneous process of organization of Local Social Fora, in places such as London, Manchester, Leeds and Cardiff. The GLA's involvement was a demand made by certain key actors in the European process, such as Attac France, to make sure the event was financially viable. The beginning of the organizing process in December in London came as a surprise to many.
./english/205.txt: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/205.txt:58:It's no exaggeration to say that this debate was one of the most successful at the ESF, resulting in a call out for the European-wide organization of a Mayday parade of the precariat in 2005 like the ones in Milan and Barcelona this year. It's also clear, however, that some problems remain: for example, the lack of a theoretical solution for the evident differences between immaterial and material precarious labour; or the question of how this new European movement identity relates to other struggles elsewhere (which is a central problem for a truly ‘global' resistance that goes beyond mere ‘international solidarity'). It also remains to be seen what the paths this transformation might take are – many possibilities, including neo-trade unionism, are open. One thing is certain, though: the intensity of the debate and attention doesn't mean per se the guarantee of the existence, or creation, of this new subjectivity; it should be observed that a few of the groups that signed the ‘Middlesex Declaration' have had little contact with the idea, let alone done any work on the area; therefore, for those who left London celebrating the victory of their position, the lesson of Bologna '77 should be applied to movement building as well: lavorare con lentezza.
./english/219.txt:27:We express our solidarity to the Greek sailor Giorgos Monastiriotis, who was condemned 3 years and 4 months when he refused to take part in a military mission in the Gulf and thus participate in the war against Iraq . We demand the immediate drop of any charges against him. We express our solidarity to all soldiers of all nationalities who refuse to take part in the occupation and the repression of Iraqi resistance.
./english/226.txt:20:When it came to it they ignored the day. At the preparatory meeting of the social movements in London it was them as well who, together with their French colleagues, prevented a mention of the 60th anniversary of the liberation from Hitler's fascism on 8 May 2005, during the final appeal and a call to participation in antifascist actions, as was demanded in the name of the International Resistance Fighters and their delegates from Germany and Austria. It is however essential to emphasise the antifascist character of the movement.
./english/228.txt:8:Our goal is that the 4th ESF in spring 2006 in Athens becomes a major political event and a process for the Greek and European movement against neoliberal capitalist globalization. We will attempt to widen the already open space of Forums for all social movements, campaigns, acts of resistance, organizations and collectives in Greece , the Balkan area and Europe . We aim to connect this process with mobilizations on specific matters those days on which the 4rth ESF will take place, so in this way we can have a strong grassroots emphasis to the Forum.
./english/228.txt: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/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/237.txt:43:As we began looking at the variety of limited spaces on offer in London, aside from occupied social centres, one of the groups, the Wombles, decided to find an area large enough for a convergence space. With the collaboration of Middlesex University Students Union they managed to put on a five-day/night event for several thousand people with presentations, workshops and discussions from groups all over Europe. It was “Part conference, part direct action, part celebration of self-organised cultures of resistance”. Significantly, one of their main focuses was on precarity, with this space playing host to the first ‘Assembly Of Europe’s Precariat’ as well as well as the VOICE Refugee Forum.
./english/237.txt:51:Ultimately in whatever form, the AS’s strove for a horizontal social dialogue amongst all participants in the ESF. People that spent time at, or came specifically to the AS’s, shared their struggles and resistance strategies. How to create free transport, liberate goods and services, mobilise for campaigns, use free software and dissections of radical theory. They found actions to support the border crossing of ‘stateless peoples’, questioned consumption, the sterile, styrofoam environs of Alexandra Palace and clowned about in parody at the March for Capitalism.
./english/238.txt:71:Because of this, and a number of serious problems over accommodation and reimbursement for volunteers, Babels issued a number of critical public statements and nearly pulled out of the London ESF on several occasions. That fact that Babels stepped back from the brink each time was partly due to the fact that reaching a consensus to walk away is far harder than agreeing to get involved, especially in a a network bringing together people from different backgrounds and perspectives. Moreover, the UK coordinators of Babels who agreed to participate in this year's ESF did so with their political eyes wide open. The reality is that the Social Forums – and especially the ESF – are not politically ‘pure' spaces where everyone works together in mutual respect and harmony. They are instead political battlegrounds where self-interested factions fight for leadership and control and are met with resistance from those opposed to vanguardism. Babels thus currently accepts that the innovations and alternatives being generated by projects like itself and and Nomad come not only through the annual process of organising the ESF and WSF, but also in struggle against those within them. And whatever the shortcomings of the organisation of this year's ESF, we still managed to gain an enormous amount of knowledge and experience that we will now share with future processes, particularly through adding value to the Lexicon and Sitprep projects. Most importantly, pulling out would have stopped the ESF from taking place – this was not a decision that Babels alone should have the power or right to make.
./english/241.txt:20:The second, content aspect covers the reflections and thinking among movements and groups, as well as leading intellectuals of resistance, addressing critiques and working out strategies for movements and what kind of world we want.
./english/241.txt:53:The Guide has an explicit political commitment to the present cycles of protests and the ESF and it surroundings. It was born from the consciousness of this process of resistance and reaction rather than from a perspective that is merely communicative or contemplative. It is not intended to ‘give’ voice to the excluded populations, considered other from us, but to establish cooperation among ourselves, with the acknowledgement of our own exclusion from the outset. It is not constituted through a separated consciousness, but it makes the research one more tool in the process of confronting the system that excludes us.
./english/244.txt:33:Alex Hache is working on a PhD about how social movements communicate their fights and resistances, and collaborating in www.redactiva.tk and www.euromovements.info
./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/259.txt:30:For myself as an anthropologist (+ecologist/dancer/woman/activist), this emphasis was particularly relevant. Perhaps because social and cultural anthropologists have tended to work in cultures outside their own which, in the context of post-colonialism and ‘development’ has meant experiencing stark political and economic inequalities, they/we have long been grappling with the ethical circumstances of their/our work. For many, this has carried an attendant desire to effect some sort of ‘public service’: to speak out – to do something – about observed injustices. We become part of the contexts we work within, we are taken up as political currency within these contexts and we would be naïve to imagine that by being part of a ‘northern’ academic tradition our research is thereby, or should be, apolitical. But we face enormous institutional and other obstacles to our ability to contribute: ranging from a lack of support from formal academic institutions to publish work in local contexts, to threats of litigation of we publish analyses that expose local resistance to powerful international NGOs, donors and corporations.
./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:28:Of course there’s nothing automatic about this logic but activist researchers can play a vital role in strengthening it. Instinctively this is the role that many activist researchers, whether in independent, movement oriented research projects or in academia, or through movement forms of investigation, played in the movements of the 1970’s. In fact this role for the movements was more important than activist research about the movements – though they often went together. Activist intellectuals sought to be in a close involvement with the movement and thereby to be in a position for their research and their intellectual labour to contribute to the process of political experimentation implied by this idea of the role of knowledge in deepening resistance. In this way they were/are able to follow up the insights of frontline activists and with systematic investigation deepen knowledge of the power structures and their points of vulnerability and strength, as a resource for the movement planning the next stage of strategy.
./english/272.txt:30:There are wider implications of this approach to the politics of knowledge and of the movements becoming aware of the importance of the knowledge they produce for the efficacy of their power to transform. First is the importance of organised moments of reflection, on what movements have learnt in the course of their resistance, on studying the reaction of the power structures, on the insights of those at the frontline, ensuring that the new knowledge sheds light for the working out of their next strategic steps. There is also the importance for movements (and for innovative, `movement – oriented parties) of surveys, investigations, consulta, that could ensure that strategic discussions are rooted in the practical knowledge and insights of those engaged in resistance; including those involved in struggles and networks beneath the surface, without a public, political expression.
./english/272.txt:34:But by discussing the future of the World Social Forum I am going ahead of myself. The reason why it is necessary to summarise what we can abstract with hindsight from the practice of the earlier movements is because these movements went through a significant defeat. As a result many threads of thought were broken and forgotten. (What I’ve said here is only a fraction of relevant thoughts). Not only did they suffer a significant defeat this but this defeat produced a distorted legacy. I’m thinking here of the legacy of a post-modernism which separated the movements’ concern with language and culture from their roots in resistance and action to change the material realities which language describes. Defeat also halted a half-finished process of new thinking and the emergence of subjects of socialist or radically transformative change. The movements rarely had the infrastructure and resources to survive, other than in memory, writing, scattered personal networks and the occasional project. There are exceptions which prove the point: for example Rifondazione Comunista in Italy has been able to maintain some political continuity between the innovative movements of the 70’s and the equally innovative movements of today and is as a result very different – in many but not all ways – from most conventional parties of the left. But generally, a weakening or defeat of the social movements left a vacuum and in many places, the traditional left, whether a warmed up Leninism or a defensive parliamentary socialism, moved back into an influence disproportionate to their size and political credibility with their limited and stifling approaches to knowledge.
./english/272.txt:38:This process of knowledge production in a process of resistance linking action, knowledge and power is perhaps the most important continuity between the new movements of the 70’s and the movements of today. In a context where the web, amongst other factors, makes the plural nature of knowledge, along with decentralised forms of co-ordination, commonplace apolitical, or cross political, ideas, this location of knowledge in the context of power and resistance is vital to the political radicalism of social movements and activist researchers within them.
./english/274.txt:65: There are many possible avenues that this type of an approach and project could take. And to emphasize the point, the goal would not be to formulate the “one true and correct plan” for radical social change, but to amass the experience and knowledge of existing projects and cooperative forms – to gather a knowledge base that can be drawn from according to the needs and particulars of the situation and setting. This is the task not of creating a rigid or deterministic blueprint for social change, but developing a toolbox of knowledge and skills that can be utilized and adapted in changing circumstances. These type of conversations and projects are beginning to crop up with greater frequency as that post-action let down leaves many with a sense of wanting to create sustainable forms of resistance, projects which are grounded within our communities and the daily lives.
./english/275.txt:15:For some, though not all, activists, this learning process continues, as we find that the system2 is itself part of the problem, and that its resistance to our struggles for change is not accidental or contingent but, at some level, fundamental to its nature. Thus we come to see ourselves as connecting our own issues with those of others, and of creating solidarity in opposition to given power structures. (For some activists this learning process is part of the bitter experience of defeat after having acted ‘by the book’; for others it is part of an intellectual conviction that the problem goes deeper than at first perceived; for others again it is the fruit of a conscious choice not to settle for concessions on our own issue at the expense of other, equally significant, issues.
./english/275.txt:165:Abramsky, Kolya 2001 Restructuring and resistance: diverse voices of struggle in western Europe. No place of publication: self-published.
./english/276.txt:95:The experiential knowledge that propels people to activism, then, should be conceived of as being a valid form of knowledge ‘not simply as a source of empirical instances, or falsifications of a general law; but as clues, signposts and stimuli to deeper understanding and theoretical innovation’ (Wainwright, 1994: 67). More specifically, if this practical, experiential knowledge is socialized, i.e. shared between actors, and combined with and interrogated through theoretical knowledge, the outcome of the process might be more adequate maps by which to chart out a course on the terrain of resistance:
./english/281.txt:61:Plows, A. J. (1998) ‘Colective identity through Collective Action-Enviromental Direct Action in Britain’. Paper given in M.A. University of Wales Bangor: UK, photocopies. Sardella, P. (2001) ‘Donna e bello’ in Brilli F.(eds) Gli anni della rivolta. 1960-1980: prima, durante e dopo il '68. Milano: Punto Rosso. Schumann, G. (1998) Mujeres en kurdistan. Hondarribia: HIRU. Subbuswamy K., Patel R. (2001) Cultures of domination: Race and gender in radical movements. En Abramsky K. (Eds.) Restructuring and Resistance. Diverse voices of struggle in Western Europe Self-published. Pp 541-543 Telefono Viola Manicomio. La chiusura dei manicomi prevista per la fine del '96 e' un bluff. En http://www.ecn.org/telviola/MANICOMI.HTM Traful M. (2002) Por una politica nocturna, Madrid: Debate Ussher J. (2000) Critical psychology in the mainstream: a struggle for survival, in Sloan T. (Eds.) Critical psychology. voices for change, London: Macmillan, p: 6-20 Valcárcel A. (1994) Sexo y filosofía. Sobre ‘mujer’ y ‘poder’, Barcelona: Anthropos Vázquez, N. and Ibáñez, C. and Murguialday, C. (1996) Mujeres montaña, vivencia de guerrilleras y collaboradoras del FMLN. Madrid: Horas y Horas. Wall, D. (1999) Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement Radical Environmentalism & Comparative Social Movements. London: Routledge.
./english/282.txt:102:The relationship between activist and academic theorizing is not simply that of a static contrast. As social processes, they are closely intertwined, in processes of colonization and resistance which operate in both directions. 'Theory', in the sense of the symbolic languages generated by these processes, is then affected in important ways both by the primary social locations of activist and academic theorizing and by the processes of (conflictual) dialogue which occur between them.
./english/282.txt:104:Processes of colonization and resistance
./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:50:We need to talk with each other about the ideas we have for how social change can happen, and how we desire the world to be/become. In particular, how do we get beyond dead-end (and boring!) dichotomies such as reform versus revolution, capital versus resistance, academia versus activism, theory versus practice ...? And also, how do we find ways of coherently tracking and thinking through the (scale)relationships between micro and macro, personal and political, local and global, private and public, etc.?
./english/284.txt:8:“Can we consider reflexivity as resistance?”
./english/284.txt:12:where the academy is transformed in a locus of resistance”
./english/284.txt:48:Anthropology is being more explicit about its interests in resistance and social movements, especially in the global context. At the same time, anthropology as the discipline representing alternatives –with a self-critical approach of its own history- is being perceived as a friendly-ally by movements and activists.
./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:56:Can Global Resistance Movements Speak Through Ethnographies?
./english/284.txt:61:It would be inaccurate to portray anthropological practices as merely linked to the colonial endeavor. It is key to remind ourselves of the long involvement by this discipline in social justice issues ranging from its contents (focus on economic, political, and cultural power dynamics) to some of its militant activities. Acknowledging the long history of Anthropology as an overtly politicized space -with renowned as well as more anonymous figures struggling against racism (e.g. Boas), war (e.g. Wolf), the prison industry complex (e.g. Davis), colonialism (e.g. Kenyatta), gender oppression (e.g. Haraway), and more that I would love to know-, the current stage of the discipline allows for yet another ‘politicizing’ of knowledge. My argument is then that the level of reflexivity achieved by this discipline offers the possibility of engaging in resistance through the very practice of ethnographic work.
./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:71:Spivak’s call for a deep engagement with the subaltern leads to a strong epistemological shift. She insists on the persistence of the “epistemic violence” product of the colonial process where Europe is erected as the undetermined Subject holding the explanatory power, and the colonized are relegated to be the Others –the Objects waiting to be explained- whose voice and agency have been stolen. Through recognizing the international division of labor and power, one is able to perceive its impact on the current ‘epistemological world order’. She is offering an epistemology that takes the subaltern into account not only as a case study, but as a source of knowledge and ‘expert’ production-the subaltern must be heard. Among global resistance movements in North America and Europe there is a lot of internal discussion about this topic. Mainly due to the mass media, the ‘spearheading role of southern social movements has been obscured, portraying the ‘anti-globalization movement’ as a negligible affair of ‘white-US and European-middle class kids’. However, in much movement discourse there exists an explicit attempt to recognize the role of grassroots communities from ‘poor’ countries as referential examples of movement building –from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, to the unemployed/piqueteros in Argentina, to peasant women in India- showing a similar effort to revert the canons of expertise. In this process, civil society from Europe and the US become the ‘students’ of their southern ‘teachers’ challenging colonial patterns.
./english/284.txt:82:This positionality is key to understanding the goal of this piece which is to disarticulate discourses of misrepresentation and prejudices about the Mexican low-wage workers in the US. Against interpretations of the Mexican language as “crude”, “ordinary” and the Mexican male as “an animal whose ferocious pantomimes are designed to terrify others” (Ramos in Limón, 1994: 124) he is trying to put forward an alternative analysis. Instead of beasts’ roars, Limón find voices of resistance. He wants to rethink them as revolutionary narratives. The marginalized peoples’ jokes, plays and cooking are ways through which the participants are transforming themselves into mastering subjects challenging the norms of a dominant social order. Their activities become ideological devices, antagonistic performances against a hegemonic culture and society. Limón discerns a grammar of insurgency encoded in apparently crass sexual jokes. Similar to Mexican language, the space of the rancho is transform into a “temporary forum of non-alienation” (135), into an interim non-capitalist space.
./english/284.txt:83:Limón is alerting us to practices of representation of the ‘dominated’ which reinforce existing power structures (124). Instead of backing up the status quo, he proposes “an archeology of subjugated knowledges and practices [ ] in an effort to demonstrate their power” (125). His ethnography is about presenting the strength of these counter-hegemonic spaces and practices. From his situatedness of explicit affinity Limón is developing a ‘solidarity account’ that empowers the subjugated knowledges to become voices of resistance. In that sense, Limón is ‘listening’ to the subaltern ‘speak’.
./english/284.txt:85:This reflexivity of the insider blurs the line between the observed and the observer. In a similar fashion, many of the anthropologists active in global justice movements (Barcelona, Buenos Aires, NYC, …) are embodying a more reflexive position than that of the traditional “participant observer,”. We could call this emergent ethnographic actor ‘the participant who observes’. The goal is to develop accounts of the power of grassroots movements, presenting voices of dissent and alternatives where corporate media sees marginal and unworthy people. Limón’s reflexivity is offering the possibility to envision and conceive of ethnographies of resistance from within.
./english/284.txt:96:A similar sense of being translocal and internationally-connected is shared by global justice movements. Part of the strength of this global network of local struggles comes from highlighting spatial thinking and developing global consciousness amongst diverse communities. Popular slogans that stress this linking are, for example: “we are everywhere” or “our resistance is as global as capital”. Gupta and Ferguson make reference to a transnational public sphere and the creation of forms of solidarity and identity based on this reconceptualization of space, and a more connected reterritorialized experience (1997: 68). The complex interrelations between the ‘globals’ and ‘locals’ has become not only an interesting intellectual exercise but a key project in developing effective political praxis. How exchanges might flow (of information, experiences, ‘technology’, etc.) along multiple axes between ‘historically inteconnected’ places, is then an important point of reflexivity for the ‘globalized and globalizing’ anthropologist.
./english/284.txt:100:This paper is a work in process. As a follow up on my second essay “Can the Activist Speak in the Academy? Decentering the Politics of Representation” and embracing the feedback provided, this paper attempts to respond to the question of ‘why Anthropology’ (and other disciplines) –is being perceived as a friendly ally by some current global justice activists [3]. This review of two theoretical pieces and a chapter of ethnography can give us a glimpse. The argument is that reflexivity offers a great tool of resistance contributing radical epistemologies, horizontally empowering practices, and networked awareness of global interconnectivity. Reflexive thinking and action can engage in a de-centered, horizontal and networked way with spaces of resistance, and at the same time making ethnographic practice a locus of antagonistic production of knowledge.
./english/291.txt:153:From here arises the need to turn this situation around, in the sense of demanding securities and rights in the bosom of flexibility. It would be a matter of demanding and constructing flexicurity, as a contribution to a sort of new welfare state for intermitency. The dispositifs and demands are multiple: assure the access to knowledge generated by all, to housing, to real mobility (through free transportation and the abolition of migration regulations), to health and to care; generate a universal basic income that ends with the economic overturning of the bipolarity of temporary workers, a regularity in their incomes that would give them negotiating power when they accede to a remunerated job and when they refuse to accept determined laboral conditions and that permits the organization of strong networks of resistance in the times of non-work; to study the creation of new labor rights that respond to the new realities of temporary workers and would be aimed at avoiding the new forms of abuse due to this condition and to recognizes the wisdom and dexterity acquired across the length and width of these labor and vital trajectories enriched by mobility (changes of activity, of country, continuous education).
./english/292.txt:145:resistance, that are confronted everyday with new forms of regulation:
./english/293.txt:133:The drift permits us to take the quotidian as a dimension of the political and as a source of resistances, privileging experience as an epistemological category. Experience, in this sense, is not a preanalytic category but a central notion in understanding the warp of daily events, and, what is more, the ways in which we give meaning to our localized and incarnated quotidian. It is not exactly an observation technique; it does not aspire to ‘reproduce’ or approach daily experience as it habitually occurs (an ideal of classical anthropology which has proved difficult to realize) but rather to produce simultaneous movements of approaching and distancing, visualizing and defamiliarizing, transit and narration. We are interested in the point of view of those that guide us –how they define and experience precariousness, how they organize themselves on a daily basis and what are their vital strategies in the short and the long term, what they hope for- without dismissing, in this process, the dialog and complicity which is produced in our encounter. There is no going back; once you get home from a drift your head keeps buzzing until the next one.
./english/293.txt:335:Despite all the impediments relations are established, the workers end up meeting each other again in the course of their rotations, experience and resistance accumulate and socialization projects itself out of the work space, first to the Dunkin’Donuts to which they lead us since it’s the only affordable place in Salamanca (the neighborhood of Madrid where Qualytel is located in an almost totally clandestine manner[33]) and then, far from the opulent streets of this area, into houses, bars, parks, public transportation, the city. Relationships, confined by the intense rhythms of work and by the acceleration of urban life, seek interior and exterior spaces for release. Bea and Teresa keep in touch with many of their former colleagues. Carmen, in our trip through her former job in a health center for heroin addicts, goes out for one thing or another with many of her former comrades in this nocturnal job.
./english/298.txt:23:Far removed from the clichéd image of the ‘ivory tower’, today’s universities have been opened to the harsh realities of neoliberal economics: huge volumes of students, extreme levels of performance-geared management, casualisation of employment, and the conversion of students into ‘consumers’. In the name of democratisation and equality, the university has become a cross between a supermarket and a factory whose consumers are also its hyper-exploited labour force. Here, in an email exchange, Marc Bousquet and Tiziana Terranova, themselves employed in US and British universities respectively, describe the way the system works from the inside and look at the possibilities for getting out of it. Far from being a simple question of domination, they contend, the conditions of ‘mass intellectuality’ – also shared by many knowledge workers elsewhere in the ‘social factory’ – create enormous scope for new alliances and forms of resistance.
./english/299.txt:275:The situation of social services and their progressive privatization, as is explained in an interview included in this book, not only does not auger well but predicts serious losses. The distribution of housework is very limited and faces many difficulties due to the resistance of men, the lack of resources and the flexibilization of employment. Women who work in the domestic and care sector have not witnessed any reform in an almost feudal labor legislation.[41] Instead, they have seen how their living conditions have gotten worse amid the flourishing of service companies and immigration policies as well as the traditional difficulty of forcing negotiation in these sectors.
./english/300.txt:16:The history will follow more or less chronologically. First the emergence of radical geography in the late 60’s early 70’s will be presented, focusing on the tradition of the Geographical Expedition of William Bunge and concerns with radical methodology. The next part, called the ‘Long March’, will discuss the development of radical geography which disengaged from the tradition of the Geographical Expedition and the re-hardening of the ‘cognitive wall’ between the academy and activism. This part will also include the challenges that the women’s’ movement presented through feminist geography to the dominant methodologies of research. Finally the essay will conclude looking at more recent developments including new calls to break down the academy/activist divide, recent projects by geographers, as well as engagement with geographical thinking on the part of activists themselves. These recent developments will be situated in the context of a developing and expanding round of mobilization at the global level, specifically through the movements of global resistance.
./english/300.txt:67:What is interesting to note about this discussion is that it’s emerging and multiplying itself at a time when we are seeing increased social mobilization and conflictuality. Issues such as globalizing capitalism, trade agreements, failed development, neoliberalism, and the war on terrorism are met by opposed dynamics whether they be Chiapas and the multiplication of indigenous movements, global resistance counter-summits and social forums or the independent organizing of the unemployed in numerous countries. Different struggles in distant places are articulating themselves through a similar discourse and already the term ‘movement of movements’ is one in common usage amongst activists. While in no way trying to say that this is a repeat of the sixties dynamic, it is interesting to see how similar discussions in geography begin to re-emerge with the increase of social conflictuality.
./english/300.txt:70:So taking into account these developments (i.e. people’s geography project and critical development work) and the discussions about how to increase collaborative projects between activism and the academy we may be seeing the beginnings of a move by a portion of critical geography into developing new ‘contact zones’. Yet as some other geographers have noted, engagement for the large part, particularly between movements of global resistance and geographers has yet to happen. “Geographers have, as yet, made only a fragmentary engagement with these movements and there has been little detailed empirical engagement with either their organizing or spatial practices,” (Featherstone 2003; p. 405).
./english/300.txt:76:Conversely geographers will need to recognize and engage with the elaborate amount of geographic thinking and analysis occurring within the movements of global resistance. A veritable potpourri of spatial practices and metaphors occupies many movement collectives’ imaginaries: the analysis of the links between the global and the local (as well as the regional and national) and the different sorts of political strategy necessary at each scale are often debated within movement groupings; the idea of ‘reclaiming’ is one that permeates much thinking within the movement-whether the reclaiming of concrete places (squatters’ movements) or reclaiming landscapes (such as Reclaim The Streets actions); the existence of groups with explicit names such as the Department of Land and Space Reclamation which is utilizing Lefebvrian thought on the creation of space and is now toying with uses of GIS to map corporate power in Chicago [2] ; the creation of ‘maps’ of networked power structures at a global scale to complement cognitive mapping practices and begin to visualize that global scale (Holmes 2003).
./english/302.txt:19:Precarias a la Deriva has been, until now, a research project on precariousness which aspired to take ourselves, our own precarious realities, as a point of departure, and to interpolate others in search of new forms of resistance and new spaces of encounter and cooperation built out of multiplicity. In our wanderings we have arrived at three certainties. We have determined that particular precarious positions - understood in the classic sense such as instability of employment are inscribed in a general tendency towards the Œprecarization¹ of life as a whole. This tendency which threads through all social strata as a threat (³If you don¹t hew to the norm you¹ll fall into permanent instability²) and effects all spheres of life (employment, unpaid activities, urban spaces, domestic environmentsŠ) as a force of uncertainty and social atomization. We have also realized that, though the processes of precarization effect all of us, they do not effect us in the same way: society is stratified along lines of class, sex, sexual orientation or identity, age, national origin, ethnicity, level of educationŠ which place us in positions which are asymmetrical and sometimes in conflict. Any project which aspires to produce something shared must deal with these forms of stratification: genuine Œborders¹ which impede social bonds and sow fear of the Œother¹. Lastly, we have intuited that the territory in which precarious women might come together is not necessarily the ³workplace²: how could it be when this so frequently coincides with one¹s own house, or someone else¹s? When the workplace changes every few months or when the odds of coinciding with a group of fellow workers for long enough to get to know them is one in a thousand? Often the strongest alliances, the networks of cooperation which diminish fear, lend courage and generate the capacity for transformation are constructed outside the workplace, in other spaces far from the boss¹s gaze, the isolation of the household or the bureaucratic discipline of the residency, the hospital, the school. For this reason our efforts are now dedicated to creating a space of encounter and empowerment in the center of Madrid in which we and other precarious women (of other national and social origins, with more or less lines in their CVs, more or less money in their pockets, more or less persons dependent upon them) might find counsel and tools for self-defense against the thousand and one daily injustices we face. But also where we might find spaces for expression and analysis of our precarious realities which permit us to mutually enrich ourselves and to imagine practices of cooperation and resistance against the precarization of our lives and against the borders which each of us face.
./english/302.txt:23:Thus we propose a space open to the exchange of information, support and strategies against precariousness, in which the specific counseling provided by people with experience in confronting difficult situations (related to work, health, housing, migration lawŠ) is not conceived as assistential or unidirectional work sustained only by Œexperts¹, but rather the collective production of practical knowledge, a ³precarious instinct² of resistance for the empowered transformation of the different precariousnesses which touch our lives. Given that these precarious situations are intertwined and are not necessarily ordered according to established categories, falling within the domain of specific professional figures, we lean towards a transversal ³precarious instinct² which might be capable of developing forms of resistance even in the cracks of a Welfare State sometimes oriented more towards control than towards the guaranteeing of rights. We depart from the articulation between different knowledges and experiences in order to construct, beyond the exchange of information and support, a space for collective self-organization. This effort has a name: Todasacien. Agency of Precarious Affairs.
./english/302.txt:48: 4. Devices and resources for self-organizing, which would arise from the counseling, the workshops and the more specifically communicative activities, such as the mailing list and the web-forum, a bulletin board for exchanges between needs and Œexcesses¹ (often we need things but other times we have things to offer) or all kinds (exchanges of services, of work, of information) in order to think through and consolidate proposals of cooperativism and the generation of material resources (self-employment, grants) which permit us to carry out certain initiatives or survive moments of economic impasse (resistance fund).
./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:47:When it comes to researching resistance, there has traditionally been what de Certeau (1984: 24-25) refers to as a gap between the time of solidarity and the time of writing. The former is marked by docility and gratitude toward one’s hosts, while the latter reveals the institutional affiliations, and the intellectual, professional, and financial profit for which this hospitality is objectively the means (402).
./english/303.txt:67:Finally, the question remains as to the most appropriate context for practicing militant ethnography and how to distribute the results. One obvious place is the academy, which despite increasing corporate influence and institutional constraints, continues to offer a critical space for collective discussion, learning, and debate. Indeed, as Scheper-Hughes (1995) suggests, those of us within the academy can use academic writing and publishing as a form of resistance, working within the system to generate alternative politically engaged accounts. Moreover, as Routledge (1996: 400) points out, there are no “pure” or “authentic” sites, as academia and activism both “constitute fluid fields of social action that are interwoven with other activity spaces.” Routledge thus posits an alternative “third space,” “where neither site, role, or representation holds sway, where one continually subverts the other.” The more utopian alternative is suggested by the rise of multiple networks of autonomous research collectives and free university projects, including the “activist research” conference cited above. In my own case, by examining the cultural logics, networking activities, and utopian imaginaries within contemporary anti-corporate globalization movements, I hope to contribute to both academic and activist spheres through exploring, as the Argentine Colectivo Situaciones puts it, “the emerging clues of a new sociability within concrete practices (2001: 39).”
./english/303.txt:95:Routledge, Paul. 1996. Critical Geopolitics and Terrains of Resistance. Political Geography 15(6/7): 509-531.
./english/306.txt:53:The Karakola has housed projects investigating the working conditions and urban experience of migrant women, debates about the transformations of the LGBT movement, lesbian marriage and the ‘pink market’, discussions about the feminist grounding for antimilitarist interventions. We have introduced the workshop ‘Tools against Racism’ into local social movements, encouraging ourselves to constantly investigate our own discourses. We have initiated an ongoing campaign against violence against women which insists upon looking at the many and complex ways in which ‘violence’ and ‘security’ are constructed. We participate in a neighborhood network proposing socially inclusive urbanistic alternatives to the ‘rehabilitation’ currently under way. We have participated actively and critically in the lock-ins of ‘sin papeles’ in Madrid. These and hundreds of other investigations, mobilizations, discussions and publications have arisen from the crucible that is the Karakola. We insist that all these apparently diverse concerns are intimately related, and we attempt to trace the lines of their relationship, articulating them within the feminist and the global resistance movements, refusing to separate the academic from the activist, the local struggle from the global context.
./english/306.txt: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: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:217:capacity to reappropriate and reestablish its normalizing discourse in the daily practices of life by drawing new and more complex boundaries of exclusion. To us, breaking with the normalizing discourse, with the claims of ‘equality’, with the creation of stereotypes and the growing gay market, to make the sexualities that are ‘out’ visible, are prime questions in making a political criticism of the hetero-patriarchal order. Proposals such as “bollo no es una marca, es un desorden global” (“dyke is not a brand name; it’s a global disorder”) went in that direction. On the one hand, we insist on the denaturalisation of sex (including both heterosexual and homosexual identities), and on the other insist that our sexuality is irreducible to capitalism. It is always excessive, an excess that opens and makes possible the constant subversions and resistances against capitalism.
./english/307.txt:4:What is and isn’t PUSM? PUSM is not a school for training cadres or leaders of NGOs and social movements. Although PUSM is clearly oriented towards action for social transformation, its aim is not to offer the kinds of skills and training that are usually provided by such schools. Nor is PUSM a think tank of NGOs and Social Movements. Although it highly values strategic research and reflection, PUSM rejects the distance that one and the other usually keep vis-à-vis collective action. The major objective of PUSM is to help make knowledge of alternative globalization as global as globalization itself, and, at the same time, to render actions for social transformation better known and more efficient, and its protagonists more competent and reflective. To meet its goals PUSM will have to be more international and intercultural than similar existent initiatives. Rationale The movement for an alternative globalization is a new political fact focused on the idea that the current phase of global capitalism, known as neoliberal globalization, requires new forms of resistance and new directions for social emancipation. From within this movement, made up of a large number of social movements and NGOs, new social agents and practices are emerging. They operate in an equally new framework, networking local, national, and global struggles. Present theories of social change cannot adequately deal with this political and cultural novelty. This gap between theory and practice has negative consequences both for genuinely progressive social movements and NGOs, and the universities, where theories have traditionally been produced. Both leaders and activists of social movements and NGOs feel the lack of
./english/313.txt:46:Around the Zapatista suggestion and way “walk asking” and its rich Consulta process, there are some initiatives using the mechanism of survey, interview and discussion groups as a excuse to talk to the others and talk with themselves, to break the distance in the hiperfrangmentated social space, searching common notions that describe the own reality and searching forms of resistance and cooperation. Some inquire and co-research experience could be found around the Italian magazine Deriva Approdi and Posse, or Initiatives of the German collective Kolindo on Telemarketing. At the Spanish State on precarity, Precarias a la Deriva, Colective Estrella and Entransito (Malo, 2004).
./english/313.txt:101:A creative line is the collective construction of cartography maps “a caballo” of process of social mobilisation. Some examples are the maps of Bureua d’Etudes and the University Tangente about multinational networks, the bonairence Grup of street art about resistance, the map against/about the Forum of the cultures (but not against the War) of Barcelona or the map of conflicts in metropolitan territory of Rome done by Transform! Italia (publish us: “La riva sinistra del Tevere” by Carta).
./english/313.txt:124:Although the movements generate some resistance to individual adscription of knowledge, we can not forget the important contribution of some individuals to the movements [1]. There are also the people that had been studying for many years an issue (GMO, EU lobbying) and contribute as “experts” on the area.
./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/316.txt:86:‘1968’ was certainly inspired by the Cuban Revolution (1959), the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1965), the Vietnamese resistance to the US (1960s), by the dramatic rise of the US Civil Rights Movement (1960s), by the creation of the Cuban-sponsored Tricontinental solidarity movement and the Organisation of Latin American Solidarity (1966-7). It was certainly also informed, in the literal sense, by mass media reports. But 1968 was neither organised nor coordinated by these. And the commercial media proved to be a predictably problematic means of movement communication (Ali and Watkins 1998, Gitlin 1980, Koning 1988:192).
./english/320.txt:36:An investigation of the collective agency of dominant social groups can help activists in avoiding the reification of exploitative and oppressive social structures. Hegemony is not a given or the result of “conformity”; it is the (temporary) outcome of political projects to establish and maintain a certain way of socially organizing human practice through leading, organising and articulating other people’s practice. Similarly, activists are not as alone in their struggles against hegemony as they may feel. Hegemonic projects from above invariably meet with resistance from below (albeit often fragmented and isolated), from subaltern social groups struggling against exploitation and oppression:
./english/320.txt:37:– a resistance which is in turn countered with a mixture of attempts at consent and coercion. Thus hegemony must be viewed as a process, as opposed to an achieved state of affairs:
./english/320.txt:45:A repressive project typically counters insurgent political projects through violent coercion and the curbing of civil rights so as to silence or erase resistance. A typical example here would be the state terrorism unleashed by Latin American dictatorships upon campaigns for democracy in the 1970s and the 1980s. More recently, state practices have come to centre increasingly around control and discipline through legislation that curbs civil liberties and the containment of dissent through various forms of policing and surveillance. I want to emphasize here that I am not suggesting that accommodative projects
./english/320.txt:56:If movements from above attempt to create structures, which in turn generate routines, the activist experience in movements from below tends to reverse this order. Thus the point of departure for my approach to the understanding of the collective agency of subaltern social groups – social movements from below – is that of the existential situation of activists and the learning processes that are inherent to movement activity. I start from people's situated experiences of a social world that is problematic relative to their changing needs and capacities, and their attempts to combine with other people with similar experiences to do something about this. This can be referred to as the movement process and I propose the terms local rationality and militant particularism, campaign, and social movement project as conceptual prisms that might allow us to formulate a developmental theory of the direction of the collective agency of subaltern social groups. If we are to start with and from people’s situated experience of a given lifeworld, we start from the context of everyday lives with all their manifold practical routines and received wisdoms. Gramsci’s (1998: 333) concept of ‘common sense’ serves as an apt prism through which to view the experiential rationality that guides everyday activities and mentalities in the sense that it constitutes an amalgamation of two elements: Firstly, the established ways of doing things – that is, the routines that constitute the molecular workings of a hegemonic social organization of human practice, and its "received wisdoms" (the general outlook that this a natural way of doing things, "the way things have always been done", or "the only way of doing things"). Secondly, the practical but often tacit experience of the existent as somehow problematic in the form of "ticklish" knowledges or "grudges" that there is something wrong about the present state of affairs, that this is not due to individual maladjustment, and the subaltern skills and responses that are developed so as to act on such grudges. These knowledges and their grudges can perhaps be likened to what Scott (1985) calls everyday forms of resistance
./english/320.txt:67:skills, idioms, and imaginaries of which they are made up can be generalized; these can then transcend the particular locale in which they have emerged and thus be applied across a spectrum of specific situations and singular struggles. This is one reason for speaking of local rationalities, as something which can firstly be derived from experience and hidden transcripts and articulated in public ways. This process of practices, skills, idioms, and imaginaries specific to a given site of conflict and struggle transcending the boundaries of this site is fundamental to the process of abstraction and translation through which activists go beyond the immediate parameters of the local of resistance in which they are situated.
./english/320.txt:127:slogan such as “Our World is Not for Sale” testifies to a refusal to submit to the intensive expansion of capitalism, while “Another World is Possible” constitutes an insistence that alternative ways of socially organizing human practice are within reach. Klein has labelled the former refusal as resistance to ‘the privatization of every aspect of life, and the transformation of every activity and value into a commodity’ which amounts to ‘a radical reclaiming of the commons’ (2001: 82). Sousa Santos (2003) conceives of the latter insistence as a 'critical utopia'. The utopian dimension consists, basically, in rejecting the ‘conservative utopia’ of neoliberalism and ‘its radical denial of alternatives to present-day reality’ and 'in claiming the existence of alternatives to neoliberal globalization' (ibid.: 6, 7).
./english/320.txt:129:In order to understand why resistance to global neoliberal capitalism can rightly be referred to as a ‘movement of movements’, we need to understand how ‘the spontaneity of Seattle was a long time coming’ (Wilkin 2000: 42; see also Broad and Heckscher 2003).
./english/323.txt:230:9 See the important reflection by Cristina Vega (2002) , Firenze, feminism, global resistance. Some (personal and
./english/323.txt:236:practices and theories of the globalized resistances, and in the affirmation of new alliances
./english/325.txt:56:3) A close connection to the anarchist squatters’ movement. Van Husen was surprised to see how the two scenes, at least in Amsterdam, do overlap, although not all queers are part of the squatters’ subculture and not all squatters identify themselves as queer. Some queers told her they ended up in the squat scene through their taste of music, or by frequenting squat parties (for these parties see also the end of part 1 of this paper). Others explained this link through political affiliation; for them, being queer automatically means having a radical left political orientation because political right denies them their existence. And other queers stated that the personal freedom within the anarchist movement made it into the one scene where queers could express themselves. As I told in part I of this paper, in the end of the eighties the squatters’ movement expanded their ideals and became ‘the’ movement, criticizing all kinds of abuses in society (see also Poldervaart, 2004: 127). According to Van Husen both queer and the anarchist movement are cultures of resistance; they share the same rejection of sexism, racism and other inequalities in mainstream culture. The DiY (Do it Yourself) aspect in Queeruption comes directly from anarchistic ideals and some queers told her that anyone unwilling to participate in DiY wasn’t welcome in Queeruption.
./english/325.txt:57:This shows also a weak point of the whole multiculturalism discussion: how open the different (resistance) cultures have to be to people who belong more to the dominant culture?
./english/325.txt:76:Besides these more formal social movement organizations, all kinds of more informal groups became active. They started actions against the commercialising of practically every aspect of life in 1984, when in Canada and the United States adbusters (culture jamming) protested against the billboards in public spaces, and in 1995, when in England the ‘Reclaim the Street’-activists were demanding the streets back as public places. The rise of the Zapatistas has been an inspiration to the whole movement. This Mexican group sent their manifest against the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) into the world (via the internet) on 1 January 1994 and in the summer of that year (and again in 1996) invited ‘leftist activists, youngsters, women, gays and lesbians, people of colour, immigrants, workers, farmers around the world’ to discuss new ways of thinking about power, resistance and globalisation with them (Klein 2002: 177-188). The meeting of 1996 resulted in the foundation of the People Global Action (PGA) and many visitors of this meeting played a key role in Seattle in 1999.
./english/325.txt:93:-The aim of the DiY-activists is to deepen the quality of relations between people by creating diversity. One of the means to do this is the narrative, story-telling structure of their actions to give the activists the possibility to tell their personal stories (McDonald 2002). The movement has learnt that a web of testimonies and experiences is more important to stimulate the imagination of people than to command them (Jordan 2002). In their story telling culture and in their rejection of the conquest of power, the movement gives much attention to language. Above all the Zapatistas have proven that it is possible to develop a new language of resistance, a language that is full of imagination, story-telling and speaking in riddles and paradoxes and not in securities (Holloway 2002). Another means to strive for better relations between people is the continually emphasis by the activists that people often show altruistic behaviour, that people will do things for each other from which they themselves don’t benefit (de Marcellus 2003). In this way they fight against the idea that people only are calculating citizens, a supposition brought forward by neo-liberalism.
./english/325.txt:107:In my opinion you can state that the queer movement and the alterglobalization movement have much in common, especially when the globalists started discussing sexuality and the queer movement started to criticize the social structures and material social practices and to express their feeling of solidarity with other oppressed groups. The question remains, however, whether the ‘free places’ of both movements are open enough to people unknown with anarchist ideas of ‘Do-it-Yourself’. If both movements really want ‘to queer the culture’ they have to accept all kinds of ‘otherness’ of people, to accept the many diversities of non-dominant cultures.v It seems the Zapatistas try to be as open as possible to these diversities. Therefore I want to end this paper with a repetition of their invitation of 1994 and 1996, directed to: leftist activists, youngsters, women, gays and lesbians, people of colour, immigrants, workers, farmers around the world. These invitation was not meant to unite them all, but to discuss new ways of thinking about power, resistance and globalization, to learn from each other and to respect their differences and autonomy.
./english/331.txt:87:Every week high profile left-wing writers (George Monbiot, Noam Chomsky, Mark Thomas, John Pilger to name a few) comment on the activities of corporate bullies and their partners in crime, corrupt politicians. Landmark publications have fuelled the anti-capitalist fire: Naomi Klein's No Logo was the book that united frustrated protestors into a global movement. Websites such as CorpWatch, Globalise Resistance and IndyMedia disseminate information and propaganda, and mobilise support - not just from rich kids in rich countries, but increasingly diverse groups from developing countries too. Each and every recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, WTO, IMF, World Bank, G8, in Davos, Seattle, Prague, Genoa, New York; environmental summits in Rio and Johannesburg, has had a contingent of protestors challenging the neo-liberal status quo. The left is still there, and it rejects both the conservative and the Third Way’s claim to the moral high ground. To the secular left, morality is compassion and justice on a global, humanitarian scale that transcends religious, ethnic or geo-political boundaries:
./english/332.txt:3:The EPA takes place in the midst of an important period of sharpening class struggle. The forces of resistance to the coalition waging the “war on terror” have inflicted significant defeats on it. The effectiveness of resistance in Lebanon forced withdrawal of the Israeli invaders, the occupation in Iraq has entered its final stage – where withdrawal is being openly debated and the Afghan occupation has become a major war.
./english/332.txt:28:But this means that those organisations who want to win the thousands who have been attending the ESFs, the working class militants and youth of the trade unions and the reformist parties too, must demand that the ESF changes its structure and its objectives NOW and at the same time that they start their own anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist initiatives to co-ordinate resistance.
./english/332.txt:33:Against imperialist war, occupation, boycotts and blockades against the countries of the so-called “Third World”. Immediate withdrawal of all imperialist troops and their allies. For coordinated action by the working class and youth – strikes, blockades, general strikes – and active support for the resistance.
./english/339.txt:3:The fact that approximately 300 meetings were held in Athens from 4th-7th May 2006 and were organised by hundreds collectives from all over Europe shows that the European Social Forum is the biggest and most pluralist European laboratory of radical ideas. The variety of the topics that were discussed in the European Social Forum proves not only the vigour, but also the depth of its reflections. Therefore, it is confirmed that the European Social Forum is neither a meeting point of various resistance groups nor a body for the international co-ordination of movements. Having contributed to the collective process of the configuration of its program and having a clear view of the way it was materialised we have to make the following observations:
./english/339.txt:7:4.In Athens, we made small, albeit important, steps towards building truly European resistance networks. Furthermore, there were seminars that were attended by the majority of the people who dealt with a specific matter (e.g. precarious employment) and for the first time there were concrete results (e.g. public services).
./english/342.txt:8:2.Meetings in the countries of Eastern Europe, Turkey and Middle East. The organizations of ESF meetings and events with the collaboration of the local forums or other movements in the above-mentioned countries, apart from the political and personal benefits that provided to those who participated, are major and decisive steps towards the relative success of the following: a. The connection of the local resistances with the European mobilizations against neo-liberal globalization. b. The essential political dialogue and the effort to lay out common political initiatives among countries that have followed different paces and courses of integration in E.U. and among movements with different political traditions. Of course, such an effort of compatibility and accord in a political level seems extremely difficult even to the movements of “Western Europe”.
./english/343.txt:12:Mobilising social movements against this state of permanent war means defining new corss-border ways of ensuring solidarity with those peoples that are mounting resistance. The nature of some of these movements poses questions, especially with regard to the values that we share. We should embrace such a debate.
./english/343.txt:14:However, the violence the system uses does not just manifest itself in open warfare against 'peoples who resist neoliberal thinking'. Other weapons used to break down resistance are the repression of social movements and the restriction of basic rights. Military occupation and the establishment of foreign bases are an open attack on peoples' sovereignty and their desire to cast off the shackles of imperial domination.
./english/343.txt:32:We should also note the difficulties the system faces in its attempts to reach its objectives. It has faced significant setbacks at the hands of popular resistance. The war in the Lebanon, the impasse in WTO negotiations and the resistance shown by young French workers in the face of job insecurity all show that it is possible to counterattack,
./english/343.txt:42:3. Bringing together actors is a process designed to end the isolation many struggles face, to build forces and to better coordinate. This allows us to identify a common enemy and enumerate the different mechanisms it uses to exploit and subject. In real terms the Assembly is also a space for debate and exchanging views on the international situation, on relations with political parties and left-wing governments, on the nature of and dialogue with the various resistance movements. By doing so we can define joint working approaches, agreements, agendas, calendars and joint campaigns, while at the same time respecting movements' independence. This type of process has to respect the rhythm of the various collective actors, for fear of paralysis and the alienation of grassroots militants. It is also necessary to draw up our own agenda separate from the agenda of capitalist institutions.
./english/343.txt:388:Globalize Resistance
./english/344.txt:23:With the advent of labour diplomacy, a distinctive model of international trade union bureaucratisation became the line of least resistance. We may note, in this context, that the double-edged certification of labour as a 'social partner' within the institutions of the European Union has had analogous effects: providing recognition and material resources, but incorporating the ETUC within an elite policy community largely detached from those it claims to represent. (Hyman 2002)
./english/347.txt:24:Whilst there has been a real increase in struggles over the past year or so, the ESF and the EPA have failed to either fully reflect this or have an impact back upon these struggles. It is not a question whether or not political parties are welcome as such, but what they stand for – for resistance to the attacks on workers and the oppressed or for carrying out neoliberal austerity measures and imperialist interventions. How can we ignore the fact that parties like RC in Italy are now actively pursuing the latter course? Nor can we ignore the fact that parties like PCF in France or the PDS –Left Party in Germany are heading in this direction. To be silent on these issues is the biggest “lack of transparency imaginable. The problem of the ESF therefore is not that it is “too radical” as Attac had claimed, but because it was and is not “radical, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist” enough.
./english/347.txt:45:The ESF (and the World Social Forum -WSF) too came into being as a result of capitalist globalisation and as a result of the emergence of a movement fighting against it. But this movement not only combined resistance from different classes and strata – workers, peasants, youth, petit bourgeois and middle classes.
./english/347.txt:54:The problem is that as the crisis for European imperialist project, in part caused by the anti-globalist and anticapitalist movement, deepens the call has gone out from sections of the European ruling class to co-opt some of the “left” reformist parties that have played a big role in the ESF. The capitalists support new versions of the popular front – like L’Unione in Italy - and use them to derail, contain or split the resistance and radicalisation of the masses. Obviously, one cannot have a “united” movement, with one part in government attacking the other part on the street resisting.
./english/348.txt:13:From May until now a lot of serious events take place. The most important of them was the war in Lebanon and the temporary defeat of the imperialists and their collaborators after the heroic resistance of the Lebanese people. We condemn the decisions of the so called international community to send a so-called “peace” force in to Lebanon, legitimize in that way the USA and Israeli imperialist aggression. We call for active solidarity to the Lebanese people and to participation to the Beirut Conference at 16 to 19 of November.
./english/362.txt:27:The antecedents of the World Social Forum (WSF) can be traced to January 2000 when a small group of about 50 activists, representing trade unions, intellectuals, peasant organisations and other social groups, gathered in Davos. Samir Amin, an intellectual who is regarded as one of the foremost thinkers on the changing dynamics of capitalism, was among those assembled at the "Anti-Davos in Davos". Since then he has been actively associated with not only the WSF but also the regional forums that have evolved as a challenge to imperialist globalisation. He is director, Third World Forum (TWF), located in Dakar (Senegal) and Cairo and in Belgium, a network of social scientists and intellectuals from developing countries. Amin has also played a key role in the formation of the World Forum for Alternatives, which was launched in 1997. The WFA aims to service the needs of social movements that are engaged in challenging the dominant discourse on globalisation. It is also involved in the search for alternatives by developing the tools for "the globalisation of resistance and struggles".
./english/362.txt:115:I am a Marxist and have always been a part of the communist movement. That is not a secret. As a child, during the Second World War, I was enthused by the Soviet resistance against Nazi Germany. In those days, Egyptian society was highly politicised; even 13-14 year-old youth were quite politicised. While in elementary school, only about 20 per cent of those in my age group were non-political. The rest were distributed equally in two camps, communists and nationalists. The nationalists used to say that the main enemy of the Egyptian people was Britain; but the communists said that capitalism, operating through Britain, was the enemy. Egyptian society is not as politicised now. Many of my contemporaries were or are communists. I came from a relatively privileged family. I came from a family of the intellectual bourgeoisie, a family of doctors. My father belonged to the Waqf party, very much like the Congress party here. My mother owed allegiance to the radical socialists, the Jacobins, in France. Incidentally, my great great-grandfather was among the first republicans in Egypt, in the 1860s.
./english/363.txt:11:It looks like there could be something big happening "out there" - not in the sense of "somewhere far away, in other countries", but close to hand, within processes of globalisation and resistance which are just as real here in Ireland as anywhere else: "out there" where working-class communities are struggling to take back control of their everyday contexts, where Irish activists are working in solidarity with the Zapatistas, where trade unionists are pushing partnership to the limits, where women are demanding childcare provision, where Netslaves are realising that ?35,000 a year really means three and a half hours travel a day and a house in nowhere, New Suburbia.
./english/363.txt:32:This "political economy of the working class" is not simply a history of resistance to an overpowering, and increasingly out of control (Giddens 1990), juggernaut. We are not in the world of Terminator II. For that juggernaut to continue rolling, we have to continue doing things. It is, after all, made up of our actions: capitalism, patriarchy, racism are things people do as they reproduce their everyday lives. When we think this as activists, it presents simply one more challenge: not just large-scale structures, but also everyday routines need to be resisted (Lichterman 1996). But when we think this from an understanding of ourselves as being the ordinary people who do this stuff, it gives us a remarkable potential.
./english/363.txt:41:These "world-revolutionary moments" would include the "Atlantic Revolutions" that gave birth to the USA and republican France in the late 18th century; the independence movements of Latin America in the early 19th century; that "proto-1968" which happened in 1848 and underlies much of contemporary European nationalism; the revolutionary flowering at the end of World War II in which the Soviet Union and independent Ireland were born, and far more was attempted (Mitchell 1970); the "high tide" of the European Resistance in 1944 (Thompson 1982); 1968 itself, and perhaps, too, the present moment, or one not too far off.
./english/366.txt:6:The Battle in Seattle brought to the world's attention a new global resistance movement that was not only made possible by the Internet but, as Naomi Klein has deftly pointed out, was shaped in its image. Sharing the Internet's architecture of interconnected hubs and spokes, the new movement was a coalition of coalitions, a decentralized network of campaigns "intricately and tightly linked to one another."
./english/366.txt:48:Returning to the MoveOn website a couple of days after the global vigil, I was able to browse through photographs and personal commentaries from vigils all over the world--Kazakhstan, Korea and Kenya, as well as the one I attended in Park Slope. All in all, some 10,000 photographs were uploaded that week. Through the Internet we had found our way into the streets, and the streets had then found their way right back onto the Internet. Our local protest was immediately reflected back to us as part of a larger story of national and global resistance.
./english/367.txt:37:Another major Maoist pole that developed was the threesome — CPI(ML) People’s War Group, or PWG; CPI(ML) Party Unity, or PU; and the Maoist Communist Center (MCC). These are the three main forces still insisting on the original armed struggle line, annihilation of the class enemy, and so on. Despite internecine turf wars among themselves, two of them, the PWG and the PU, united to form the CPI(ML) PW. These forces are extremely opportunistic. Since, according to their analysis, all other parties are bourgeois parties in the service of one or another fraction of a comprador bourgeoisie, they feel free to make any short-term alliance with any party against any other. So they make short-term alliances with various bourgeois parties in order to get footholds in different areas. In West Bengal, for example, where the CPI(M) is in power, at one stage they allied with the CPI(M), and at another stage with the right-wing regional party, the Trinamool Congress, which is a part of the BJP-led central government regime. They also use murderous violence in order to establish their control over different areas. The fact that there are extensive areas in India where even the twentieth century has hardly penetrated till now, however, gives their line of armed resistance and “protection” a seeming attraction to oppressed poor peasants and ethnic groups.
./english/367.txt:89:The NGO sector is of course well represented, even overrepresented at the WSF. And many of the NGOs do not even realize that their agenda turns them into safety nets for capitalism, not instruments of struggle. But at the same time, there are plenty of NGOs that take a different, and more radical, stand. But the mainstream left and the bulk of the radical left are dead set against all NGOs. Two recent attacks on the WSF display this. During the Asian Social Forum, the CPI(ML) PW called for a boycott and a counter-program. This time too, they have been trying to set up an alternative called Mumbai Resistance.
./english/368.txt:62:The most directly relevant struggle in which the power of such international linkages began to become apparent in the period before January 1994 was in the organization of resistance to the North American Free Trade Agreement.(18) Coalitions of dozens of groups of workers, farmers, women, students, environmentalists, and the indigenous concerned with the threats posed by the neo-liberal strategy of "free trade" were able to establish working relationships --periodically through meetings and regularly through The Net.(19) The need to form a common front provided a great incentive to confront and wrestle not only with the interrelationships among a diverse array of issues (e.g., runaway shops, international environmental standards, ethnic autonomy and so on) but also with the different perspectives of the North and the South (e.g., those of workers laid off by runaway shops and those of workers offered jobs by those shops' arrival in their communities). Given the urgency of the collectively perceived threat, discussion of such interrelationships and differences developed faster and more productively than ever before in the history of North America. The cyberspacial connections that were forged and strengthened during that struggle were still in place and functioning when the Zapatistas declared NAFTA a "death sentence" for the indigenous and campesinos.
./english/368.txt:122:Unhampered by legal restrictions in its overseas operations, the CIA is reported to have supported the U.S. invasion of Haiti through psy-ops (Psychological Operations) warfare via the Internet. As part of a broader set of actions, it sought to undermine resistance to U.S. policy by sending "ominous e-mail messages to some members of Haiti's oligarchy who had personal computers."(55)
./english/369.txt:37:But for the first time in twenty years, the ruling classes' political offensive is running up against a significant new social movement, borne by a new generation of youth, which is global, offensive, internationalist and against the system from the start. Defensive social battles, which have never ceased, are losing their "rearguard" aspect, because the movement against capitalist globalisation has provided them with a new political framework, an offensive spirit, a perspective and an alternative. The centre of gravity for political initiatives and mass mobilisation is located at the moment outside the traditional labour movement. Although weakened, the European trade union movement still brings together, according to national statistics, millions of workers and thousands of activists. As long as the wage-earning class, which is a majority social force, does not become active, as long as it does not struggle massively for its own immediate demands and broad aspirations, as long as it does not organise itself on an ever widening scale, neither the ongoing globalisation of the market nor neo-liberal and pro-war policies will be stopped. The general strikes and gigantic citizens' mobilisations in Italy, the Spanish general strike, the recurrent social struggles in Greece and the renewal of sectoral strikes in Germany (particularly among metal and construction workers) clearly herald a stronger resistance to the bosses and governments' ongoing offensive.
./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/374.txt:36:During the months following the agreement, optimism reigned supreme in the camp of the popular forces. The last pockets of the anti-French resistance were dismantled in the South of the country and they awaited the fulfillment of the Geneva agreements. But the patriots soon realized there would be no elections -unless the United States felt itself capable of imposing its will in the polls, which was practically impossible even resorting to all its fraudulent methods. Once again the fighting broke out in the South and gradually acquired full intensity. At present the U.S. army has increased to over half a million invaders while the puppet forces decrease in number and, above all, have totally lost their combativeness.
./english/374.txt:104:In Latin America the armed struggle is going on in Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia; the first uprisings are cropping up in Brazil [sic]. There are also some resistance focuses which appear and then are extinguished. But almost all the countries of this continent are ripe for a type of struggle that, in order to achieve victory, can not be content with anything less than establishing a government of socialist tendencies.
./english/375.txt:2:This debate was organised by Globalise Resistance on 25 January 2003 at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre Brazil in front of about 300 people. The two main speakers spoke for 21 minutes each, and there were then some 22 contributions from the floor – one of the highest degrees of participation at any meeting at the forum.
./english/375.txt:135:I am from Mexico, and Zapatismo ensures that this no longer a theoretical question but a practical one. We are not in Seattle any more but we are in Porto Alegre and on the threshold of a war which may have terrible consequence for humanity as a whole. If we are going to turn this global movement into a movement against the war and if we are asking that it should be led by the working class, we cannot organise it. We need to build the widest movement so that the vast majority of humanity can express its resistance to war. As the Zapatistas have shown we can win a new world.
./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: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:100:One of the more instructive examples of the use of the internet to foster global struggles against the excesses of corporate capitalism occurred in the protests in Seattle and throughout the world against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in December 1999, and the subsequent emergence of a worldwide anti-globalization movement in 2000-2001. Behind these actions was a global protest movement using the internet to organize resistance to the institutions of capitalist globalization, while championing democratization. In the build-up to the 1999 Seattle demonstrations, many websites generated anti-WTO material and numerous mailing lists used the internet to distribute critical material and to organize the protest. The result was the mobilization of caravans from throughout the United States to take protestors to Seattle, as well as contingents of activists throughout the world. Many of the protestors had never met and were recruited through the internet. For the first time ever, labour, environmentalist, feminist, anticapitalist, animal rights, anarchist and other groups organized to protest aspects of globalization and to form new alliances and solidarities for future struggles. In addition, demonstrations took place throughout the world, and a proliferation of anti-WTO material against the extremely secret group spread throughout the internet.[9]
./english/380.txt:61: In addition to technologically determinist and reductive postindustrial accounts of globalization, there are economic determinist discourses that view it primarily as the continuation of capitalism rather than its restructuring through technological revolution. A large number of theorists conceive globalization simply as a process of the imposition of the logic of capital and neo-liberalism on various parts of the world rather than seeing the restructuring process and the enormous changes and transformations that scientific and technological revolution are producing in the networked economy and society. Capital logic theorists, for instance, portray globalization primarily as the imposition of the logic of capital on the world economy, polity, and culture, often engaging in economic determinism, rather than seeing the complex new configurations of economy, technology, polity, and culture, and attendant forces of domination and resistance. In the same vein, some critical theorists depict globalization as the triumph of a globalized hegemony of market capitalism, where capital creates a homogeneous world culture of commercialization, commodification, administration, surveillance, and domination (Robins and Webster 1999).
./english/380.txt:125: Friedman, by contrast, is too uncritical of globalization , caught up in his own Lexus high-consumption life-style, failing to perceive the depth of the oppressive features of globalization and breadth and extent of resistance and opposition to it. In particular, he fails to articulate contradictions between capitalism and democracy, and the ways that globalization and its economic logic undermines democracy as well as circulates it. Likewise, he does not grasp the virulence of the premodern and Jihadist tendencies that he blithely identifies with the Olive tree, and the reasons why globalization and the West are so strongly resisted in many parts of the world.
./english/380.txt:133: My intention is to present globalization as conflictual, contradictory and open to resistance and democratic intervention and transformation and not just as a monolithic juggernaut of progress or domination as in many discourses. This goal is advanced by distinguishing between "globalization from below" and the "globalization from above" of corporate capitalism and the capitalist state, a distinction that should help us to get a better sense of how globalization does or does not promote democratization. "Globalization from below" refers to the ways in which marginalized individuals and social movements resist globalization and/or use its institutions and instruments to further democratization and social justice. While on one level, globalization significantly increases the supremacy of big corporations and big government, it can also give power to groups and individuals that were previously left out of the democratic dialogue and terrain of political struggle. Such potentially positive effects of globalization include increased access to education for individuals excluded from entry to culture and knowledge and the possibility of oppositional individuals and groups to participate in global culture and politics through gaining access to global communication and media networks and to circulate local struggles and oppositional ideas through these media. The role of new technologies in social movements, political struggle, and everyday life forces social movements to reconsider their political strategies and goals and democratic theory to appraise how new technologies do and do not promote democratization (Kellner 1997 and 1999b).
./english/380.txt:137: In their magisterial book Empire, Hardt and Negri (2000) present contradictions within globalization in terms of an imperializing logic of “Empire” and an assortment of struggles by the multitude, creating a contradictory and tension-full situation. As in my conception, Hardt and Negri present globalization as a complex process that involves a multidimensional mixture of expansions of the global economy and capitalist market system, new technologies and media, expanded judicial and legal modes of governance, and emergent modes of power, sovereignty, and resistance.[6] Combining poststructuralism with “autonomous Marxism,” Hardt and Negri stress political openings and possibilities of struggle within Empire in an optimistic and buoyant text that envisages progressive democratization and self-valorization in the turbulent process of the restructuring of capital.
./english/380.txt:149: Against capitalist globalization from above, there have been a significant eruption of forces and subcultures of resistance that have attempted to preserve specific forms of culture and society against globalization and homogenization, and to create alternative forces of society and culture, thus exhibiting resistance and globalization from below. Most dramatically, peasant and guerrilla movements in Latin America, labor unions, students, and environmentalists throughout the world, and a variety of other groups and movements have resisted capitalist globalization and attacks on previous rights and benefits.[8] Several dozen people's organizations from around the world have protested World Trade Organization policies and a backlash against globalization is visible everywhere. Politicians who once championed trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA are now often quiet about these arrangements and at the 1996 annual Davos World Economic Forum its founder and managing director published a warning entitled: "Start Taking the Backlash Against Globalization Seriously." Reports surfaced that major representatives of the capitalist system expressed fear that capitalism was getting too mean and predatory, that it needs a kinder and gentler state to ensure order and harmony, and that the welfare state may make a come-back (see the article in New York Times, February 7, 1996: A15).[9] One should take such reports with the proverbial grain of salt, but they express fissures and openings in the system for critical discourse and intervention.
./english/380.txt: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:173: For instance, the Internet can be used to promote capitalist globalization or struggles against it. One of the more instructive examples of the use of the Internet to foster movements against the excesses of corporate capitalism occurred in the protests in Seattle and throughout the world against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in December 1999. Behind these actions was a global protest movement using the Internet to organize resistance to the WTO and capitalist globalization, while championing democratization. Many web sites contained anti-WTO material and numerous mailing lists used the Internet to distribute critical material and to organize the protest. The result was the mobilization of caravans from throughout the United States to take protestors to Seattle, many of whom had never met and were recruited through the Internet. There were also significant numbers of international participants in Seattle which exhibited labor, environmentalist, feminist, anti-capitalist, animal rights, anarchist, and other groups organized to protest aspects of globalization and form new alliances and solidarities for future struggles. In addition, protests occurred throughout the world, and a proliferation of anti-WTO material against the extremely secret group spread throughout the Internet.[11]
./english/380.txt:236: And so, to paraphrase Foucault, wherever there is globalization-from-above, globalization as the imposition of capitalist logic, there can be resistance and struggle. The possibilities of globalization-from-below result from transnational alliances between groups fighting for better wages and working conditions, social and political justice, environmental protection, and more democracy and freedom worldwide. In addition, a renewed emphasis on local and grassroots movements have put dominant economic forces on the defensive in their own backyard and often the broadcasting media or the Internet have called attention to oppressive and destructive corporate policies on the local level, putting national and even transnational pressure upon major corporations for reform. Moreover, proliferating media and the Internet make possible a greater circulation of struggles and the possibilities of new alliances and solidarities that can connect resistant forces who oppose capitalist and corporate-state elite forms of globalization-from-above (Dyer-Witheford 1999).
./english/380.txt:244: On a global terrain, Hardt and Negri (2000) have stressed the openings and possibilities for democratic transformative struggle within globalization, or what they call Empire. I am arguing that similar arguments can be made in which globalization is not conceived merely as the triumph of capitalism and democracy working together as it was in the classical theories of Milton Friedman or more recently in Francis Fukuyama. Nor should globalization be depicted solely as the triumph of capital as in many despairing anti-globalization theories. Rather, one should see that globalization unleashes conflicts between capitalism and democracy and in its restructuring processes creates new openings for struggle, resistance, and democratic transformation.
./english/380.txt:264: As I have argued in this study, the term "globalization" is often used as a code word that stands for a tremendous diversity of issues and problems and that serves as a front for a variety of theoretical and political positions. While it can function as a legitimating ideology to cover over and sanitize ugly realities, a critical globalization theory can inflect the discourse to point precisely to these deplorable phenomena and can elucidate a series of contemporary problems and conflicts. In view of the different concepts and functions of globalization discourse, it is important to note that the concept of globalization is a theoretical construct that varies according to the assumptions and commitments of the theory in question. Seeing the term globalization as a construct helps rob it of its force of nature, as a sign of an inexorable triumph of market forces and the hegemony of capital, or, as the extreme right fears, of a rapidly encroaching world government. While the term can both describe and legitimate capitalist transnationalism and supranational government institutions, a critical theory of globalization does not buy into ideological valorizations and affirms difference, resistance, and democratic self-determination against forms of global domination and subordination.
./english/380.txt: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: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:137:erode the 'social and natural substratum' and here there emerge a range of conflicts. Resistance
./english/386.txt:116:People's Movement and Resistance to Globalisation
./english/386.txt:117:The frightening fact is that the political parties in India were unable to offer any credible resistance to Globalisation and there now seems to be a consensus amongst these parties on the issues of Globalisation though the perception on the issue differ among themselves. The differences are on specific programmes, measures to be taken, sectors of investment, etc. However organised trade unions related to different political parties offered resistance to the onslaught ofd Global capitalism by differing from their respective party positions.
./english/386.txt:121:Various mass organisations in the country in recent past have risen against globalisation in whatever manner they could. These movements have made certain impact by offering resistance to invasion of Global Capitalism by highlighting and struggling on issues affect the everyday life of the people.
./english/386.txt:125:The farmers movement according to A.K.Ramakrishnan was able to raise major issues related to globalisation on a national scale and achieved limited success in resisting TNC operations in seeds and related fields and in obtaining assurance from the Indian government that farmers' rights to grow, exchange and reuse seeds will not be affected by signing the GATT treaty. Resistance also resulted in blocking, at least for the time being, the amendment of the Indian Patent Act of 1970 in the tune with GATT/WTO specifications."
./english/386.txt:137:Globalisation has been very rapid in Indian infrastructure sectors like power. Transnational corporations have been able to make great inroads into the power sector as exemplified by the Enron project in Maharashtra and the Cogentrix project in Karnataka. These mega power projects are also centres of people's resistance; the struggle against Enron being able to catch wide national attention. Apart from these there have been other struggles against TNCs like the one against DuPont in Goa.
./english/386.txt:149:Alliance building and people's solidarity is a focal point for promoting movement for justice concerns and build-up people's resistance against the forces of globalisation across nations. This alliance should be based on people-to-people contacts rooted in a culture of friendship and partnership that transcends borders and sectoral and organisational concerns. This calls for an attitude to learn from each others struggles and strengthen the relationships and alliances already underway in our own societies. We are challenged to be open to other cultures and experiences in our efforts to link not just ideas but persons; to support and contribute rather than merely expect support; to give meaning to language and communication between peoples; and to be open to initiatives and alternatives coming from all levels.
./english/387.txt:32:The younger delegates fortunately had not passed through the sectarian leftist wars of the 1960s or 1970s. Their support for the Cuban Revolution was based on its resistance to U.S. intervention and its progressive agrarian reform. Few, if any, took their “doctrinal cues” from Fidel Castro. They “incorporated” Che Guevara or Fidel Castro to particular national and social struggle. Hence the coca farmer delegate spoke of Che’s anti-imperialism in the struggle against U.S.-DEA eradication policies. Fidel Castro was cited as a forerunner of the Brazilian peasants struggle to occupy land and resist eviction. Thus there is neither repudiation or iconization of past revolutionaries.
./english/387.txt:49:The new militancy of peasant women was manifested in other instances. A delegate of the Cochabamba peasant movement described the struggle of the coca farmers against the U.S.-directed eradication campaign. “This year they have already assassinated several of our members and one of our leaders. We have resisted and will continue to resist. I am supporting my elderly mother and my only son on my four acres. We negotiated with the government a pact in exchange for the eradication of 7,000 acres of coca production the government promised to finance alternative economic activity, including a factory to employ the displaced farmers. We have reduced coca production by 3,000 acres but they have not even started to build the factory. They have tricked us again. Now they are threatening to send the military to massacre us and eradicate all our sacred lands and leave us in misery. I want to learn how to use a gun. Because I want to be able to be part of the armed resistance when the Army invades.”
./english/393.txt:253:– in both public and private life – will increase the capacity for social resistance to the
./english/393.txt:258:and private life - will increase the capacity for non-violent social resistance to the process of
./english/394.txt:194:the so-called ‘Mumbai Resistance’.17
./english/394.txt:315:17 International League for People’s Struggles (ILPS), World People’s Resistance Movement (WPRM), South
./english/394.txt:317:(ATIK), and others, September 2003 – ‘Introducing MR-2004 : Mumbai Resistance-2004 - Against
./english/395.txt:164:hold good, and that there is world wide resistance to neoliberal globalisation and its attendant
./english/395.txt:370:much more grey, such as in the context of national liberation, resistance against oppression, or even
./english/395.txt:480:recognises the evil of casteism, it is always possible that there is going to be resistance to the
./english/400.txt:183:Varney, W. & Martin, B. (2000) Net Resistance, Net Benefits: Opposing MAI, Social Alternatives 19 (1) pp 47-51
./english/401.txt:134:at least in principle, there would be no incompatibility between the pro-social movement position coming from the North and the union practices of the CUT. On the contrary, cross-contamination between the two cultures could instill radicalism among other changes greatly desired by the most dynamic nucleus of Brazilian syndicalism [unionsm – PW]. The fact that there has been more than a little resistance to the influence of unions in Mercosur forums demonstrates that the manner in which those actors have tried to address problems related to regional integration has been conflictual and creative at the same time. Finally, to acknowledge that the possibility of a working-class internationalism has its problems does not mean that it is doomed to failure. The challenge of trying could bring new meaning to an old and celebrated call.
./english/402.txt:50:I am concerned about the future of the Forum process but not worried. Pandora has opened her box, the genie has is out of the lamp, the secret of fire is now an open one. Already in Florence, young libertarians were mumbling, ‘Another Forum is Possible’. This possibility is not only a matter of information and communication technology (which has yet to produce an English/Spanish translation programme with an appropriate vocabulary). It may be the combination, precisely, of this with youth, given that urban kids have grown up with cellular phones, playing arcade computer games, and therefore with an affinity for any computer technology, and a healthy disregard for attempts to coral such. (I was moved to produce my first-ever Power Point production, on WSF2, by my 12-year-old granddaughter, Joelle, who is also puzzled about my resistance to the cell phone, text-messaging and computer chat).
./english/403.txt:125:Cox, L. (2001) ‘Barbarian Resistance and Rebel Alliances: Social Movements and Empire’, Rethinking Marxism 13 (3/4), Fall/Winter.
./english/403.txt:161:Lacey, A. (2001) Networks of Protest, Communities of Resistance: Autonomous Activism in Contemporary Britain. Ph.D thesis, Centre for European Studies, Monash University, currently submitted for examination.
./english/405.txt:48:capitalist globalization: during the colonial expansion that took place from the 16th to the 18th century and during the world colonisation that started in 1980. We are happy to see that, in one of these continents, institutional resistances are starting to also appear, maybe as important as the liberation revolutions that resulted in the birth of the Latin-American national states in the 19th century or, to use a more recent example, the national development plans that were put into action in the period between 1940-1970.
./english/408.txt:14:A related issue concerned the participation of NGOs in the WSF. Relatively uncontroversial in Brazil, this was hotly contested in India where much of the left have developed a fierce critique of the NGOs for creaming off activists into well-paid bureaucratic jobs and confining the movements they back to relatively narrow issues. This critique - plus the WSFs exclusion of armed struggle groups (some M-L organizations are still involved in guerrilla campaigns in some regions of rural India) - was used to justify the organization of two rival forums, one of which (Mumbai Resistance 2004) took place at the same time as the WSF. It was a flop, attracting a few thousand compared to the 100,000 who thronged the WSF - yet more evidence that cultivating revolutionary purity for its own sake merely isolates you from those whose interests you claim to represent.
./english/409.txt:12:If Seattle was, for many people, the coming-out party of a resistance movement, then, according to Soren Ambrose, policy analyst with 50 Years Is Enough, "Porto Alegre is the coming-out party for the existence of serious thinking about alternatives." The emphasis was on alternatives coming from the countries experiencing most acutely the negative effects of globalization: mass migration of people, widening wealth disparities, weakening political power.
./english/409.txt:67:With a sweeping new round of WTO negotiations set for the fall, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) being negotiated in April, these questions about process are suddenly urgent. How do we determine whether the goal is to push for "social clauses" on labor and environmental issues in international agreements or to try to shoot down the agreements altogether? This debate--academic at previous points because there was so much resistance to social clauses from business--is now very real. US industry leaders, including Caterpillar and Boeing, are actively lobbying for the linking of trade with labor and environmental clauses, not because they want to raise standards but because these links are viewed as the key to breaking the Congressional stalemate over fast-track trade negotiating authority. By pushing for social clauses, are unions and environmentalists unwittingly helping the advancement of these negotiations, a process that will also open the door to privatization !
./english/417.txt:405: Beiruth conference - Contact: Beirutresistance2006@no-log.org
./english/418.txt:8:The EUCOCO Conference greets the resistance of the Saharawi People in the occupied territories and pays tribute to the victims of the Moroccan repression. The conference also denounces the massive violations of the human rights by the Moroccan authorities in the occupied territories, as well as the systematic and bloody reprisals that Saharawi people suffer. The conference informs us on the violence against women; 35% of missing people are women. The conference welcomes the associations and the Moroccan political parties that defend the right of the Saharawi people to self determination.
./english/418.txt:20:The conference declares 2007 as the international year of solidarity with the SADR and support of the popular resistance in the Saharawi occupied territories. It has decided to include some activities in their general programme.
./english/471.txt:16:Some of the WSF’s critics have variously charged the forum with being a foreign-funded talk-shop or nothing more than a carnival. The cacophony of views expressed at the WSF, activists in the Mumbai Resistance event claim, disables the unity of the opposition that is needed to United States attempts to secure its global hegemony.
./english/476.txt:18:When the Forum moved from Brazil to India, the Indian organizing committee dropped the provision about parties. Still, the proscription against violence led to a split among the Indians. A small Maoist movement organized a counter-Forum, called Mumbai Resistance-2004, on grounds across the road from the WSF. And they denounced the WSF as a combination of Trotskyites, Social-Democrats, reformist mass organizations, NGO's financed by transnationals - in short, a stalking-horse for quietism and counter-revolution. They specifically attacked the concept of the open forum (merely a talk show, they said), the slogan (not "another world," but socialism as the objective, they said), and the financing of the WSF (the fact that some money came from the Ford Foundation).
./english/476.txt:20:But Mumbai Resistance proved to be a minor sideshow, stimulating some good discussion in the WSF but attracting maybe 2% of the numbers. As for action by the WSF, many pointed out that the world demonstrations of Feb. 15, 2003 against the war in Iraq, were inspired and organized by WSF participants. So, in the end, everyone seemed to agree that WSF should retain the concept of the open forum but perhaps find some way to accept and institutionalize groups that wished to take common actions.
./english/477.txt:14:When the Forum moved from Brazil to India, from a country in which most movements had more or less supported the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and therefore didn't need the actual formal presence of the PT to a country in which the movements were divided among many parties and where the parties were key mass organizations, the Indian organizing committee dropped the provision about parties. Still, the proscription against violence led to a split among the Indians. A small Maoist movement organized a counter-Forum, called Mumbai Resistance-2004, on grounds across the road from the WSF. And they denounced the WSF as a combination of Trotskyites, Social-Democrats, reformist mass organizations, NGOs financed by transnationals - in short, a stalking-horse for quietism and counter-revolution. They specifically attacked the concept of the open forum (merely a talk show, they said), the slogan (not "another world," but socialism as the objective, they said), and the financing of the WSF (the fact that some money had come in the past from the Ford Foundation).
./english/477.txt:16:But Mumbai Resistance proved to be a minor sideshow, stimulating some good discussion in the WSF but attracting maybe 2% of the numbers attending the WSF. As for action by the WSF, many pointed out that the world demonstrations of Feb. 15, 2003 against the war in Iraq were inspired and organized by WSF participants. So, in the end, everyone seemed to agree that WSF should retain the concept of the open forum but perhaps find some way to accept and institutionalize groups that wished to take common actions. There already is an assembly of movements, who meet together at the time of the WSF, and do pass resolutions and propose concrete actions. They are planning a worldwide demonstration on March 20, 2004, the anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
./english/480.txt:15:resistance for this particular moment of crisis (in the meaning of neo-liberal globalization – of
./english/500.txt:20:But there is much resistance to structuring the WSF. ''Too much is made of the freedom to do your own thing, and that is understandable as there is some fear that the event could be manipulated by certain groups,'' says the veteran activist, declining to be named.
./english/502.txt:48:capitalist globalization: during the colonial expansion that took place from the 16th to the 18th century and during the world colonisation that started in 1980. We are happy to see that, in one of these continents, institutional resistances are starting to also appear, maybe as important as the liberation revolutions that resulted in the birth of the Latin-American national states in the 19th century or, to use a more recent example, the national development plans that were put into action in the period between 1940-1970.
./english/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/513.txt:35:The Forum can be what it already is and be much more besides, all of which is important and transcendental; but, we insist, its central challenge must be to follow through on the main purpose of its original convocation: resistance to neo-liberal globalisation. This can hardly be achieved by staging “a fair of alternatives” or an agenda of debates, nor by calling for mobilisations on unconnected issues; neither can it be achieved through methodological experiments for improving the Forum event, whose concretion is not unrelated to intra-Forum economic and power relations. While this goes on, the existing Neo-liberal model will quietly continue to consolidate.
./english/513.txt:39:Can the Forum collectively define common world gatherings or rallying points in order to enable the struggles taking place everywhere to express themselves in one or more key moments, and so achieve greater impact? Can it provide a focus for a common agenda and calls that inter-relate the multiple, inter-related resistances/struggles to the different sources of oppression within the system? Can the Forum’s agenda prioritise vital issues such as dignity, sovereignty, justice and peace? Common sense says so; the political significance of the agenda of struggle against the model also says so, and in fact it is already happening, but these issues still don’t form part of its explicit aims.
./english/513.txt:65:The Forum is undoubtedly the largest planetary initiative, bringing together citizens, in history. Its accumulated experience is benefited by the wealth of an important trajectory of struggles and resistance to old and new forms of domination; its heritage of critical thought, alternatives and visions of change are an inexhaustible source of proposals and actions; its participatory, pluralistic and diverse character is the terrain for building new democratic practices. In sum, in its short life the Forum has begun a wide-ranging process of opening up possibilities for struggle against the development model. Its growth now implies the need to invent strategies to politically organise resistance to the model and to do so, from a pluralist and diverse prospect of hope, that the Forum awakened on a planetary scale when it affirmed that “Another World is Possible”.
./english/519.txt:20:It is in Latin America where the most consistent winds of resistance to neo liberalism and aspiration for changes blow. If Lula’s election has enormously frustrated the Brazilian and the international leftist movement and his settlement with the current order strengthens a series of “left without changes” (or social liberals) governments in the region (Uruguay, Chile, and to a certain extent, Ar-gentina), Brazilian government needs to keep dialogue with the reality established by Chavez, in Venezuela (supported by Cuba). The recent election of Evo Morales may be considered, at this moment, a strengthening fact to the transforming pole of Latin America’s left wing. Since 2005 (4th Hemispheric Meeting Against ALCA, in Havana), Chavez has been keeping a strong political ini-tiative within the region, supported by the Cubans; Chavez has launched the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) proposal, which imposes itself on the discussion as a concrete alternative to FTTA. Another important fact may be the recent zapatists’ change of political course, which came with the Marcos’national tour, introducing, therefore, new elements on the board. All socie-ties in the continent are clearly in movement.
./english/519.txt:69:In the article “WSF: from resistance to the struggle for a post-neoliberal world or retrogression”, written by Emir Sader a little before the Caracas Forum, he says: “The WSF leaves the neo liberal-ism resistance stage and starts to participate actively in the fight for ‘another possible world’ or it will be doomed to retrogression. Taking place in Venezuela, it is an excellent opportunity for the WSF to take this step further. If it gets out of this event undamaged, recovering the same previous speech, without having learned from the extraordinary conquers and warnings that Caribbean and Latin America offered, it will condemn itself to be in the margin of the big battles that are in pro-gress now against the imperial hegemony and neo liberalism in the world”.
./english/519.txt:73:If the leftist governments ought to be defended from the imperialist ag-gressions, we should also learn with the “real socialism” collapse and emphasize the fragility of so-cial change processes whose focus is unilaterally the state machine — and this fragility became clear to many Caracas Forum participants. This should not be seen as an antagonistic critic to the Bolivarian Revolution, but as a part of a dialogue that tries to contribute to the improvement of this process. This is the same kind of criticism that many components of the WSF process have made to castrism, from the leftist point of view, what we, the Latin American people do emphasize stressing the difficult conditions imposed by the imperialistic enclosure to the Havana regime and the Cuba people heroic resistance — approach that usually leftist sectors from outside the continent take as condescendence. On the other hand, the concrete problems of revolutionary processes in progress stimulate the debate within the WSF on the political power and the State as a changing element to-wards another world.
./english/522.txt:15:In its original homeland (a part of Latin America and of southern Europe) the launch of the WSF benefited from a new context (the emergence of resistance to capitalist globalisation), but also from the renewal of unitary traditions during the 1990s, already involving a notable diversity of social actors. The forums have enlarged and strengthened these unitary traditions, but they have profited from a dynamic of convergence which was already underway.
./english/522.txt:59:Of course, each forum has its own characteristics and functions. But the form “forum/process”, “meeting space/place of impulsion of actions” clearly responds to needs linked to the period and not only to a specific political geography. We already knew it, but this is a confirmation of it. The forums allow the rallying of resistance (in its diversity) in a time of globalisation, when the crisis of the socialist reference has not been overcome and the modes of centralisation of the past period (around the workers’ movement or armed struggles) do not work as before.
./english/522.txt:73:4. Globalisation of resistance. The process of internationalisation of forums began from 2002 with the European Social Forum in Florence. It experienced a qualitative leap with Hyderabad (India) and Mumbai in 2003-2004. It is today again the case with Bamako and Karachi (Caracas occupies a specific place in the deepening of political themes). That will again be true in 2007 with Nairobi.
./english/527.txt:38:No one will disagree on the need for more participatory democracy. However, the question on how and if movements can ally with politicians and/or political parties is much more difficult to answer. The WSF in Caracas was a case in point, since many observers and participants feared that Chavez would try to appropriate the forum. There was quite some resistance against a possible funding of the WSF by the Venezuelan government. Civil society, it was said, has to be autonomous and cannot work with governments. This debate was sharpened by a letter from Chico Whitacker, one of the Brazilian founders of the Forum. Because of the corruption within Brazilian politics, he dismissed from the PT (Worker’s Party) and fiercely defends a politisation of society, without political parties.
./english/527.txt:64:In order to understand this reasoning, one should not forget that the Mexican Zapatista movement is seen as one of the founders of the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement. Their theoretical background has been excellently worded by John Holloway in his book on how to change the world without taking power. Holloway refers to the numerous local initiatives and the resistance of normal people. These practices change people and make them understand that another world is indeed possible. However, how the other world finally comes about is not explained in the book.
./english/527.txt:68:Of course, movements or groups of movements are free to propose their programmes and alternatives. A group of ‘social movements’ has been doing just that since a couple of years, after each WSF. It is also what 18 men and one woman have done last year in Porto Alegre. They published a ‘Consensus of Porto Alegre’, a short text of two pages and 12 proposals that was supposed to meet the agreement of most participants. Nevertheless, resistance was huge, because it was interpreted as an attempt to force the WSF into a direction it has always refused.
./english/527.txt:84:At an international conference in Ghent in 2005 on the anti-globalisation movement, Anne Morelli told the astounded audience that not one single movement in history had ever enforced change without violence. That is a difficult lesson for all advocates of peaceful resistance. The WSF rightfully excludes the use of violence and that is the reason why the Zapatistas are never – directly - present at the WSF. Maybe the media attention for all Islamic movements is due precisely to the fact that one fears them, that they are seen as a threat. The WSF does not threaten any one, why should one listen to it?
./english/532.txt:29:The chief purpose of this article is not to answer these questions by examining the ‘self-evident’ truths of open source production. Such studies are already being carried out in forums like Oekunux [http://www.oekonux.de]; indeed, in this issue of Mute, Gilberto Camara, Director for Earth Observation at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, publishes research that challenges some key tenets of the FLOSS model. His research exposes the possibility that, in many cases, FLOSS does not innovate significantly original software, or sustain projects outside of corporate or large scale academic involvement. Instead this article seeks to address the intense political expectation around open organisation among diverse elements of the diffuse activist organisations which, post-Seattle, have been loosely referred to as ‘the social movement’ or ‘social movements’. In referring to the social movement, this article concerns itself primarily with groups such as People’s Global Action, Indymedia, Euraction Hub and other such non-hierarchised collectives; it does not have in mind more traditionally structured organisations like the Social Forums, Globalise Resistance or so-called ‘civil society’ NGOs.
./english/532.txt:65:4. A call to direct action and civil disobedience, support for social movements’ struggles, advocating forms of resistance which maximise respect for life and oppressed peoples’ rights, as well as the construction of local alternatives to global capitalism.
./english/548.txt:9:With the slogan “another world is possible,” the forum is filled with speakers, workshops, panels, debates, marches, and cultural events. The forum provides an open platform for activists to discuss strategies of resistance to globalization and to present constructive alternatives. Although hardly known or recognized in the United States, the World Social Forum has quickly grown into the most dynamic and important political event in the world.
./english/553.txt:163:The second area of resistance has been on the home front – and this is where the second major element of Mandelson’s vision also kicks in. Mandelson’s attempts to gain more market access for EU companies through the WTO negotiations have been thwarted by domestic resistance to the neoliberal model in Europe itself. Put simply, the EU has not been able to offer its trading partners the open markets which Mandelson would love to create internally, and therefore has not been able to extract from those trading partners the new business opportunities demanded by EU companies externally.
./english/565.txt:12:.:. FREE SOFTWARE: THE BIRTH OF A COMPUTED RESISTANCE .:.
./english/565.txt:73:software movement, as a political act of resistance against proprietary
./english/571.txt:43:The World Social Forum has been defined as a civil society event, but there exists a considereable debate on how the limits of this civil society should be defined. Who gets in, and who stays out? If the World Social Forum is a counter-event to the World Economic Forum, in 2004 Mumbai Resistance was the counter-event’s counter-event. Mumbai Resistance was conceived as a “truly anti-imperialist” parallel event that took place next to the World Social Forum venue in Mumbai. One of the concerns of the originators of Mumbai Resistance was that the WSF is not open to “all forms of struggle”, referring to the rule, expressed in Article 9 of the Charter of Principles, that military organizations cannot participate in the WSF (9).
./english/571.txt:134:(9) The debate on excluding, for example, the FARC guerrillas of Colombia had taken place many times before Mumbai Resistance existed. See e.g. Valenzuela 2002.
./english/574.txt:15:In the first three Forums there was a contradiction, inevitable perhaps but ultimately debilitating if it had continued. Its founders claimed that it would be a self-managed space for the plurality of activities that made up the resistance to neo-liberalism and war. But the reality was a programme dominated by plenaries organised by an increasingly unrepresentative though well-intentioned organising committee.
./english/577.txt:4:As we walked through the venue for the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre at the banks of the Guaiba river, on January 23, it all seemed so familiar. The WSF was back in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where it had begun in 2001 and had gained strength in 2002 and 2003, after the interlude in Mumbai in 2004. But Porto Alegre 2005 could well have been Mumbai 2004. The same surging crowds – over 100,000 in number, the same cacophony of myriad voices, the same beating of drums, the same confusion, and the same determination on the faces of people who had come to celebrate protest and resistance. And the same determination with which people debated in over 2000 events, spread over four days, and organised in the sprawling venue of makeshift tents over about 4 kms of a green verge skirting the river.
./english/577.txt:6:The first message from the WSF this year was: resistance and protests that confront imperialist globalisation today have assumed truly global proportions. Two years ago in the WSF in 2003, the mention of India or Mumbai was likely to be greeted with questioning looks. No more so – after the Mumbai WSF, both are firmly on the map of the WSF. As will be Africa which shall hold the Forum in 2007, as will be numerous other places in the globe as the WSF takes wings and flies to different corners.
./english/577.txt:10:The abiding memory that everybody who was in Porto Alegre brought back was a sense of solidarity, the feeling that “we are not alone”. A feeling that the gross injustice that we face across the globe is being confronted by pockets of resistance all over the world. Pockets of resistance that are also starting to link up, to strategise together, to form a united surge of resistance. We saw all this happening in Mumbai, and those who were at Porto Alegre came back with the confidence that the movement to “globalise resistance” is alive and growing, and that “Another World” is indeed possible.
./english/579.txt:8:There was a legitimate worry that shifting the WSF from South America, the continent of greatest resistance to neoliberalism, to the Indian subcontinent where the government’s neoliberal trajectory is still only weakly challenged, could be a mistake. It is in South America that, indisputably, mass politicization is deepest and widest. At Mumbai the flip side of the WSF’s wonderful diversity, of the delightful displays of music, dance and street theatre, of the strong presence of Dalits, tribals, women’s groups and trade unions, was the fact that political awareness was more limited and sectoral in character. Neither leaders nor ordinary members of so many of the large movements and groups gathered there showed much interest or involvement in the conferences, seminars and workshops lying outside their specific areas of concern. Low literacy levels and breakdowns in the technical facilities provided for translations did not fully explain this weakness whose basic roots are political.(2)
./english/579.txt:12:All these contradictions were clearly present in Mumbai. Where else would you find, for the first time, an alternative world social forum called Mumbai Resistance (MR) being organized across the road from the official one, by a variety of Maoist groups and fronts whose principal ballasts were the Peoples War Group of India and the Communist Party of the Philippines. Much smaller, with an overall attendance in the few thousands, MR’s main purpose was to call attention to itself. Its inaugural function spent nearly as much time criticising the WSF as it did attacking neoliberalism or US imperialism.(3) But even outside the entrances of the main WSF, inconsistent certainly with the prevailing spirit of the Social Forum project, the CPI and the CPM had strategically placed (hitting visitor eyes well before the WSF signs themselves) huge billboards declaring that their idea of another world at least was the ‘Communist future’. A strongly instrumentalist attitude towards the Social Forum project still prevails amongst these left parties.
./english/579.txt:26:The Central government is clearly determined to push through privatization of valuable public properties. Since few would wish to buy up loss-making or sick industries unless they have high-value assets worth stripping, or can easily be made highly profitable, New Delhi has tried to follow a dual strategy. This is to sell off some of the big profit makers (oil companies like Hindustan Petroleum and Chemicals Limited and Bharat Petroleum and Chemicals Limited) and to starve potential profit-makers of necessary modernisation-investment funds. The latter tactic is being applied to Air India and Indian Airlines whose most profitable air routes are being opened up to competitors. Failing balance sheets and profit and loss accounts can then be used to justify equity divestment and privatization. HPCL and BPCL were nationalized by Acts of Parliament, and a Court ruling that this status can only be changed by a similar political process has stalled matters; while resistance to efforts at privatization of the Indian banking system is still strong.(5) In the beginning of the nineties, public sector assets were around 15 percent of GDP. Today, they are around 12 percent of GDP.
./english/579.txt:52:Overall, it would be fair to say that the mass fronts of the left parties, substantial sections within the parties including many major leaders, have moved closer to the social movements and progressive NGOs, and vice versa. This movement towards closer collaboration is still hesitant, wary and uneasy. There remains a lack of that kind of general perspective that could help systematize forms of collaboration going beyond occasional common actions. But the movement forward is real. Internationally, the Indian left has nowhere to turn except towards a global radical milieu that is naturally anti-Stalinist and much more developed in its attitudes on matters concerning sexual choice, female oppression and ecological sustainability. Domestically, greater coordination amongst radical forces is required to confront the neoliberal project as well. In this respect, public opposition in India is likely to grow. In South America what tipped the balance towards successful mass resistance was the antagonism of whole swathes of the middle class whose savings were destroyed by the combination of unstable currencies, recession and unemployment. This has not yet happened in India. The neoliberal reforms have a shorter history and a more cautious approach to capital convertibility has provided a measure of protection. But the problem of educated unemployment is rising to serious proportions. Youth belonging to the lower echelons of the ‘middle class’ are finding neither secure nor well-paid jobs. A growing crisis of expectations is emerging. In retrospect Mumbai 2004 might well be identified as the first major collective warning of the shape of things to come.
./english/579.txt:69:5. In 2000 the government introduced the Banking Companies and Financial Institution Laws (Amendment) Bill in Parliament which seeks to reduce the minimum share holding by government to 33 percent. Resistance from bank unions forced the government to refer the Bill to the Standing Committee on Finance where it currently remains.
./english/580.txt:100:The reason for the partial failure (or success!) in this regard are many. First, it is important to note that many organisations prefer to hold their own events even if similar events are also being organised by others. When they register events they may have a very specific objective in mind as well as, in some cases, a specific set of speakers. Many do not wish to make the adjustment or the extra effort to accommodate their framework with that of others, no matter however close the other framework might be. In this context it would be interesting to note that of the many suggestions that the Content Commission and the programme group of the IOC made regarding merging of large events after its joint meeting in Mumbai, only a small minority were actually accepted by the event organisers. The culture of working together is still evolving in the WSF, and resistance to working together for specific activities is still a formidable force among many of us.
./english/580.txt:106:To bring in coherence, we had also announced that no organisation could register more than 4 events. There was resistance to this too from many organisations. Some tried to circumvent this by registering in the name of allied organisations, though the active organisers remained the same! This again points to the need felt by many in the WSF to give more weightage to individual or organisational concerns than to shared concerns – to be heard than to hear!
./english/587.txt:14:The new languages and the need for translation to link between equality in diversity are the greatest political and cultural challenges that emerge from Mumbai. The strength of new languages, expressing identities unrecognised and rights denied – where the dalit movements were prominent – adding in to the gathering wave of clamour for another world, set the tone of the many marches at the WSF. From 8 in the morning to 10 at night, the dusty main street was transformed into an avenue of planetary citizenship. This was the epicentre of the World Social Forum in Mumbai. We did not need to understand literally what the marches said, it was enough to surrender to their symbolism heavy with denunciation and demands. The major events (conferences, panels and round tables) on militarism, unilateralism and war, on oppressive global power and the trenches of resistance, on movements for peace, joined them and were re-qualified by them. Meanwhile, the living laboratory of over a thousand seminars and workshops, going their own ways in their own way, but all asserting the possibility of starting here and now on building another world.
./english/589.txt:130:Faced with such intensive resistance, the government wished to close the factory, but the American embassy intervened to prevent this, arguing that it would be a bad signal to foreign investment and threatening legal action. Therefore, for the time being, neither party is giving in. Governments from left and right all have one priority, bringing in foreign investment: they demand no conditions or precautions, not even compliance with national legislation. For some demonstrators, the situation is worse than under English occupation, as the politicians are on the enemys side.
./english/589.txt:165:(*) Denise Comanne and Eric Toussaint are leading members of CADTM (Committee for the abolition of the third world debt). Eric Toussaint is coauthor of The Debt Scam: IMF, World Bank and the Third World Debt, VAK publications, Mumbai, 2003; author of Globalisation: Reality, Resistance and Alternatives, VAK publications, Mumbai, 2004 and of Your Money or Your Life. The Tyranny of Global Finance, Pluto Press, London, 1999 and VAK publications, Mumbai, 1999 (a new edition will be available end of 2004 edited by Haymarket Books and PlutoPress, Chicago-London).
./english/590.txt:8:The choice made by Bernard Cassen to write his book in the first person, without much fuss, is doubtlessly somewhat enervating and risky: it is possible that the reader experiences some resistance reading his reflections, even though correct, about the meaning of the World Social Forum (WSF). But apart from that, one can draw quite some benefit from this irreplaceable testimony of the necessary discussions and the tensions experienced.
./english/594.txt:20:Finally, what filled me with hope was the unity meeting of 45 left-wing organisations, Maoists and Trotskyists, which decided that we all need to work together in a concrete manner to contribute to a new socialist and non-sectarian world within the WSF process. One very important issue which the left must come to terms with is the attitude towards NGOs, especially in Asia. We must get away from narrow sectarianism and find ways to work with NGO activists in opposing neo-liberalism and imperialism, while at the same time never shying away from political debates. The failure of narrow sectarianism was clearly shown in the case of the isolated Mumbai Resistance 2004 which attracted a few thousand people compared to the 100,000 who attended the WSF.
./english/595.txt:4:Attempts to make the WSF genuinely global and develop it beyond its Brazilian roots have proved successful, since the quest to create truly global resistance and formulate alternative paths to capitalist globalisation aims at strengthening the combat of every actor, whether from the North, South, East or West. After Mumbai, Porto Alegre is even stronger. Thanks to the tenacity of the Indian organisers and above all to the strong presence and art of living of the Indians that gave life to this event, we are now stronger than before.
./english/598.txt:44:So, this is what the social forum movement aspires to: it seeks to provide a purposeful space in which activists can create new alliances and extend their networks of resistance, and help them turn their organisations into the sources of alternative policies, stronger strategies and more convincing visions. And this is our task in hosting the next European Social Forum in London: we must develop the forum so that it is not only a celebration of diversity and international solidarity, but also an innovative collective intellect nourished by peoples daily resistance to the pressures of the global market. First, as the Indians managed to do in Mumbai, we have to break from the old closed ways that so irritated Gautam Mody. But, again like the Indians, and the Italians, the Brazilians and the French, we also have to find a way of developing new ways of organising that build on whats left of the foundations of democratic organisation and collective strength that the trade unions historically laid.
./english/605.txt:61:Despite the effort of the organization in anticipating the deadline of activities inscriptions and promoting their fusion (what reduced the number of activities from 2,000 to about 1,200), still occurred several duplicated activities by organizations that had not shared workshops and seminars or even burled the limit number of four events registered per entity. Amit Sen Gupta, from Indian group of program and methodology, evaluates that “the working-together culture is still growing up in the WSF and the resistances to working together in specific activities still is a formidable strength among us.”
./english/614.txt:39:The WSF periodicity and the location or, what is the same, where and when it will occur is another of the key points towards its future. Until now, it has been taking place every year, and despite the fact that in the beginning the conclusion was that the Forum would “circulate” throughout the planet, the reality is that the Forum seems to be “attached” to Porto Alegre. Nevertheless, the Mumbai experience has contributed to the future of the WSF: contact with other realities, inclusion of social movements, new dynamics; also, new problems (Mumbai Resistance, The II People’s Movements Encounter…), etc. and to this end it points out the path to follow. The best is when the new culture that presumes the accomplishment of the Social Forums (horizontality, consensus, open and plural space…) allows to generate unified and working dynamics and to feedback the mobilizations among the social movements, as has occurred in India this year.
./english/626.txt:12:WSF 04 was not an isolated event. It was challenged. By Mumbai Resistance - a separate event held by those who felt the WSF was exclusionary and compromised. Across the highway, several organizations and people often referred to as the "extreme left" rallied to discuss many of the same issues but under a different banner. Other parallel but not challenging events were the Land First Mela - an event devoted to the creation of a stronger land rights movement, and the conference of Via Campesina - an international network of peasant organizations, agricultural workers, and indigenous communities. Events attended by many who also participated in the WSF. Events that chose separate spaces for logistic and other conveniences. Events that were all spokes in the wheel of the alternative vehicle were engaged in building.
./english/626.txt:18:If democracy lives in India, you can feel it in the vibrant culture of resistance. It was the pulse of the WSF. Some march or the other was constantly going on. These were not just protests for the sake of protesting. These were rallies of people with ideas, with histories, with stories, with sufferings, with victories, and with visions. Victims, winners, survivors, fighters. All dreamers. All praxis-builders.
./english/626.txt:22:And an Indian newspaper called it an "anti-global event." With more than 120 countries participating, could an event be more global in nature? "Anti-globalisation" is another term often and erroneously used to describe the WSF. This is just another form of globalisation. A counter-globalisation. A globalisation that challenges the prevalent neo-imperial corporate globalisation agenda. A globalisation from below. A globalisation of struggles. A globalisation of resistance. A globalisation of movements, of activism, of defiance. A globalisation of hope.
./english/626.txt:24:I like to believe the Forum is an open space. Some would disagree. Like those who formed Mumbai Resistance. Yes, the WSF keeps some people out, officially. Like those involved in armed struggle. Because one of its charters is about non-violence. Yet, it allows everyone to come there. To share a platform. To raise a voice. To launch an idea. To build a movement. To generate solidarity. To challenge hegemony. To defy imperialism. And even to question 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:27:use: referendums, constituents assemblies, networks of empowered local councils and assemblies. Choosing an alternative economic path would still spark fierce resistance, but his opponents would not have the luxury of being against Lula, as they are against Chavez, and would instead be forced to oppose the repeated and stated will of the majority - to be against democracy itse
./english/645.txt:25:We need a victory in our international campaign to show that this momentum of globalisation can be broken, said Nicola Bullard from Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South. The war being planned is the most grotesque symbol of their globalisation. Our resistance is the most important symbol of our globalisation.
./english/646.txt:34:Events conceived in transnational contexts often have relatively weak roots in their own locality. This was never the case in the WSF of Porto Alegre. Porto Alegre, the capital of the Rio Grande do Sul state in southern Brazil, is one of the most important strongholds of the Workers Party. Already during Brazil’s military rule, the city was a centre of resistance, with energetic neighbourhood associations. Founded in 1980, the PT has deep roots in these associations, trade unions, Catholic organisations, women’s movements and other parts of a vibrant Brazilian civil society.