./english/31.txt:39:l The recognition that coordinating our campaigns and activities is not just a nice idea, but vital. We need continent-wide campaigns, strikes and demonstrations against cuts, privatisations, war and all attacks on our class and the democratic rights it has won.
./english/35.txt:23:Rights in Central and Eastern Europe.
./english/35.txt:29:the National Minorities Rights in Central and Eastern Europe, in a
./english/35.txt:31:human and social rights.
./english/35.txt:55:rights.
./english/37.txt:12:regarding a new society in which human and social rights could be
./english/40.txt:6:In the build up to the European Social Forum (ESF) in Athens, the fourth since Florence in 2002, the Greek organisers were modest in their expectations of its political significance. ‘It will be a well organised event; but that’ll be it,’ said Panayotis Yulis from the Greek Social and Political Rights Network on the eve of the gathering that took place in the abandoned airport from 4-7 May.
./english/40.txt:15:A generally good-humoured `social movements assembly’ at the end of the forum heard of focal points for action over the next year. These include a Europe-wide week of action to campaign for complete withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, against the threat of a new war in Iran, against the occupation of Palestine, for nuclear disarmament, and to eliminate military bases in Europe; and a day of mobilisation across Europe and Africa in favour of an unconditional legalisation and equal rights for all migrants, and the closure of all detention centres in Europe.
./english/41.txt:22:Friday evening: For the workshop “Governmental participation”, there then materialised, strangely enough, a Babels interpreter, even though the Greek hosts had explicitly granted that while the seminars had to be translated by BABELS/ALIS, the workshop organisers were allowed to bring their own collaborators. I feel demeaned by that, because it is a way to be able to say later on that I (or others in that situation) have not earned their fare. However, I then after all listened to part of the workshop: the speaker from the PCF stressed how the PCF was trying to create a broad alliance in view of the next elections and to also woo left-wingers from the PS, the Norwegian speaker emphasised the role of the trade unions in bringing about the left-wing government that they now have there, Jolanda Putz (from Italy and Germany) highlighted the victory over Berlusconi fascism as the basics for the new (somewhat more) left-wing government in Italy, my colleague Connie and the discussant from our partner party, the WASG (Electoral Initiative for Work and Social Justice), lost themselves in a futile dispute over petty details. I again went to the mike and asked the question whether it would not be possible to replace what Connie herself had called the “easily undermined” essentials of governmental participation by minimal standards to be enforced and not to be violated under any circumstances (for instance, no privatisations, defence of workers’ rights, no study fees etc.), as has been proposed in our German Left Party by Sahra Wagenknecht, Nele Hirsch and Tobias Pflüger et al., but the climate in the workshop was heavy, if you know what I want to say, and I switched to the seminar “Entry of Turkey into the EU”, where also my boss Michael Brie (rlf) had spoken. Here and in the seminar on war, I had the great revelation of the forum, namely the fact that the long-time bitter conflict between Turkey and Greece (and also Greece and Italy, due to the inheritance of fascism) really is a factor, which is why one felt tension again and again at the ESF.
./english/41.txt:32:There was an advance version of the declaration to which the social movements then added. The main themes were: against the threat of war, against the occupation of Iraq, for a just peace between Israel and Palestine, women’s rights in Turkey, Against Precariousness (founding of a new network), against the G-8 in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) and in Heiligendamm etc. Somewhat irksome was the demand by Babels, which itself had not really earned the medal of honour, especially not for its translations from the Greek and the Turkic, that the speakers should speak their mother tongues and not “shit English or Français merdique”. In my opinion, they had not achieved the performance that would have justified such mean remarks. Therefore, the Russians as well undauntedly first addressed their compatriots in Russian and then switched to English and nobody prevented them. Sophie Zafari first read the draft of the final declaration in English and commented in French and also got through. When, however, an Arabic interpretress wanted to interpret consecutively for a Palestinian speaker, because the majority of the audience (as had been the case during the whole ESF) had not been able to get a radio, she was refused that, and she had to return to her cabin.
./english/42.txt:37:2. The seminars were well visited, at least three of them. The seminar "„The War on Terror“, new Planetary Enemies and the Human Rights" on Thu, May 4, 6 to 9 p.m., with Tariq Ali, Wolfgang Kaleck, Akin Birdal and Jim McVeigh was attended by about 300 people. The seminar "“Antiterrorist” Laws, Black Lists and the Policies of Security in Europe" on Thu, May 4, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., with Wolfgang Kaleck, Ben Hayes, Iratxe Urizar and Babis Kouroundis had about 100 attendants (80 at the same time). The seminar "Political Prisoners, Special Trials and Security-Jails" on Fri, May 5, 2.30 to 5.30 p.m., with Andreas-Thomas Vogel, Ander Larunbe, a Turk comrade, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, and Joachim Rollhaeuser was visited by about 70 people. And the seminar "Criminalization of Communities and “Dangerous Populations”" on Sat., May 6, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., with Daniel Bensaïd, Les Levidow, Joachim Rollhaeuser und Martin Glasenapp found 30 interested people.
./english/42.txt:42:3. We went to the Saturday demonstration. The Network members took part in the rally with their organisations. Members of Libertad, Germany marched in the block of the Network for Political and Social Rights, Greece.
./english/42.txt:72:During the seminar on Black lists and political trials we heard about the use of special, so-called antiterrorist laws and measures to criminalize political organizations and individuals and ban them from legal activity. The EU is at the forefront of this attack on our hard-earned civil and political rights; which affects all of us, whether in the Basque Country, in Germany, Greece, Turkey, or further afield. It is important to put a stop to this antidemocratic dynamics.
./english/42.txt:97:It is necessary to raise the issue of the connection between the “war on terror”, racist exclusion and the attack on civil and human rights and against the banning of social and political organizations. We reject special courts and proceedings.
./english/42.txt:103:We call on everybody inside and outside the ESF to include the struggle for the freedom of political prisoners, against torture, against the “antiterrorist” laws and the migrants’ detention camps in all our political and social struggles. The right to have rights is on the agenda of the day.
./english/44.txt:14:Wars all over the world are destroying the basic human rights of millions of men and women. Wars have always been for the economic interest of a few and now this reality is stronger than ever.
./english/44.txt:66:We invite all European peoples and organizations to participate in and support the world campaign for the right to health including the defence of rights in Europe and international solidarity for the right to health of African People.
./english/44.txt:89:CALL FOR THE EQUALITY OF RIGHTS, LEGALISATION OF ALL THE MIGRANTS AND FOR THE CLOSURE OF DETENTION CENTRES
./english/44.txt:92:The day of action will be directed against the denial of rights and criminalisation of migrants, claiming clear demands with respect to freedom of movement and the right to stay; for a European unconditional legalization and equal rights for all migrants; for the closure of all detention centres in Europe, an end to externalisation and deportations; against the precariousness of the migrants situation and for the uncoupling of the link between resident permit and the labour contract; for a residence citizenship.
./english/44.txt:95:FOR NEW RIGHTS FOR THE ”HAVE NOT” AND PRECARIOUS PERSONS
./english/44.txt:97:The No Vox network calls for a demonstration against the G8 in 2007 to denounce the increase in social inequalities, poverty, discrimination, repression, to share the wealth and build new rights such as a decent wage, freedom of movement and residence, housing and land for all.
./english/44.txt:106:During the seminar on black lists and political trials we heard about the use of special, so-called antiterrorist laws and measures to criminalize political organizations and individuals and ban them from legal activity. The EU is at the forefront of this attack on our hard-earned civil and political rights; which affects all of us, whether in the Basque Country, in Germany, Greece, Turkey, or elsewhere. It is important to put an end to these antidemocratic dynamics.
./english/44.txt:128:It is necessary to raise the issue of the connection between the “war on terror”, racist exclusion and the attack on civil and human rights and against the banning of social and political organizations. We reject special courts and proceedings.
./english/44.txt:134:We call on everybody inside and outside the ESF to include the struggle for the freedom of political prisoners, against torture, against the “antiterrorist” laws and the migrants’ detention camps in all our political and social struggles. The right to have rights is on the agenda of the day.
./english/44.txt:163:- Bolkestein and women’s rights: a day of action in October or November in Brussels.
./english/44.txt:211:The rights of the defence and the presumption of innocence must be fully respected during the appeal process. This process, along with the other remaining cases, must be carried out fairly in front of regular judiciary.
./english/44.txt:212:We call on you to employ all the political and legal resources at your disposal for the defence of the State of law and of democratic rights and freedoms in order that no one is condemned without evidence, that prison doors are not closed on the innocent and that the States, of which we are all citizens, forbid the imposition of detention conditions incompatible with the respect of human rights.
./english/44.txt:237:On that day at a meeting at the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa, Sheth haji Habib, an Indian and South African Muslim declared his commitment to refuse non-violently, at any cost, the new laws of repression passed by the British colonial empire against coloured people in South Africa. Mohatmas Gandhi attended the meeting which became a historic step forward for people’s non-violent power in its modern form. Since then, this same force has brought down imperial rule in India and elsewhere, achieved civil rights in the USA, contributed to the defeat of apartheid in South Africa and inspired people’s struggles for justice and dignity across the planet.
./english/44.txt:261:We are against the military and repressive policies, which are exercised in the name of “the war against drugs” at the international level, guided by the government of the United States of America against the national sovereignty of countries and the human rights of their people.
./english/45.txt:22:6.2 Promoting the social inclusion of mentally ill or disabled people and protecting their fundamental rights and dignity
./english/45.txt:93:• A lot of so-called treatments are in fact acts of torture and violating human rights.
./english/45.txt:95:The violation of fundamental human rights of patients by mental health care must stop rather today than tomorrow.
./english/45.txt:116:Psychiatry denies the person and its role of moral agent, and this is the most serious offence against human rights.
./english/45.txt:138:So this "new" approach is just a disguised revival of old Nazi-times medical eugenicist approach to "society". This is not something new, it's traceable back to Plato's Republic. The manoeuvre is that after WW-II, in American European society, psychiatry started to claim exclusive rights over it's patients, leaving out "of the business" other professionals; but now psychiatry is "opening" to interaction with other professionals (psychologists, social workers, etc). So this opening is in reality a way to expand personal power over society in general (with the support of drug companies).
./english/45.txt:149:• The attitude towards psychiatric patients in general, in all countries, should be bettered, so that patients are no longer ‘secondary humans’. Improvements can be gained by protecting the human rights and equality, by encouraging inclusion of patients into the society, by giving more respect, by less stigmatization, by stimulating (public) understanding of the difficulties the patients are coping with.
./english/45.txt:185:• Stop the violation of fundamental human rights, rather today than tomorrow.
./english/45.txt:186:• Respect the patients and their fundamental rights.
./english/45.txt:258:Psychiatry denies the person and its role of moral agent, and violating the core of human existence. This is the most serious offence against human rights. (* also see 4 developing responses: policy initiatives on mental health)
./english/45.txt:307:6.2 Promoting the social inclusion of mentally ill or disabled people and protecting their fundamental rights and dignity
./english/45.txt:314:3. Stop violation of human rights
./english/46.txt:6:While we are facing increasing political intervention by churches and religious fundamentalisms are on the rise in Europe, leading to a dramatic undermining of women's rights and, in spite of the warnings from feminist organizations, such as the World March of Women, towards the organizing committee of the European Social Forum, some of the workshops gave the floor to organizations or speakers who support values contrary to the Porto Alegre Charter and to women's rights. The Women's Assembly of the 4th ESF which met in Athens protests vividly against this situation.
./english/46.txt:10:Considering the present challenges facing the Social Forums, the Women's Assembly wishes to stress once again that women should not serve as an alibi for any kind of manipulations. We reject political alliances that are concluded to the detriment of women and which establish priorities for our struggles, putting feminist demands behind anti-racist and anti-war demands. Such processes divide the anti-liberal forces and undermine the strength of the Social Forums. Because women's rights are universal, feminists are equally involved in the fight against racism and against war/
./english/47.txt:19: Religious influence in political life, the attack on abortion rights
./english/47.txt:21: Welfare, Social state, Bolkenstein and Women’s Rights, Liberalisation and Deregulation of Markets
./english/47.txt:22: Equal rights for migrant women, racism
./english/47.txt:24: Sexual Discrimination including lesbian women’s rights
./english/47.txt:33: *Bolkestein and women’s rights: a day of action in October or November in Brussels.
./english/47.txt:63:• Clause of the most favoured European woman that would oblige the States to implement the most favourable law in order to harmonize women rights according to the most advanced and progressive criteria.
./english/47.txt:70:WOMEN’S RIGHTS and STATUS in CENTRAL and EASTERN EUROPE. CHALLENGES and FEMINIST STRATEGIES
./english/47.txt:73:• Promotion of their rights and their social and political gains, within a framework of mutual respect and total equality.
./english/47.txt:84:• No religion or religious structure should be supported by the state or considered as "state religion". Religious freedom should not serve as an alibi to legitimize the violation of women's rights.
./english/54.txt:81:human rights activists and revolutionary artists rather than the big NGOs.
./english/54.txt:265:and equal rights to all migrants across Europe; for the closure of all
./english/54.txt:271:services, and for social rights, co-ordinating our struggles throughout
./english/54.txt:344:rights within the EU
./english/147.txt:24:Perhaps the most interesting part of the social movements in Italy is represented by the movement “tutte bianche” (white overalls), who have since Genoa changed their name to Disobedienti. The movement is an interesting mixture of ideas and tactics of Zapatismo, Italian autonomous Marxism, and libertarian influences. The central groups of the movement comprise Zapatista support collectives, Ya Basta! The three-plank program of Ya Basta! calls for a universally guaranteed “basic income,” global citizenship that guarantees free movement of people across borders, and free access to new technologies, which in practice implies extreme limits on patent rights.
./english/147.txt:26:Disobedienti advocates social disobedience as a means for political action expressed by white attire, which symbolizes invisibility: invisible as immigrants, workers stripped of rights, prisoners, various people who oppose genocide all over the world.
./english/147.txt:82:The movement for the rights of immigrants began in Paris. During the 1990s, hundreds of immigrants without papers—the Sans Papiers—started one of the most exciting rebellions. This rebellion detonated a movement.
./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/150.txt:14:Those involved in Euromarch range from rank and file trade unionists, through political activists to social movement campaigners, but the most numerous and prominent participants have so far been unemployed activists. This reflects Euromarch«s central focus on unemployment and its main task which has been the mobilisation of marches and marchers against unemployment. However even within this issue there is a diversity of organisations which come under the umbrella of the Euromarch organisation. For example in France there are several unemployed organisations like Action Chomage!, APEIS, CGT (Unemployed Workers Committee) and MNCP which organise together despite their differences. The political perspectives of Euromarch activists also vary from left-wing Social Democrats, Socialists, Greens, Communists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, non-aligned etc., all of whom find Euromarch a worthwhile forum within which to pursue their particular politics. Similarly there are activists from a wide range of social movement campaigns. A list of the groups represented at the recent Cologne »Assizes« included campaigns for the rights of women, Black people, migrants, asylumseekers, pensioners, the homeless, students, school students as well as environmental and anti-fascist campaigns. Such a broad range of involvement is encouraged by Euromarch and in this vain Euromarch activist, Gitti Goetz, in her appeal for the Vienna demonstration hoped that »organizations and groups of unemployed, women, trade unionists, asylumseekers, and homeless will not only take part, but also become active themselves with their own ideas, forms of action and demands.« Such a diversity of participants is reflected by the breadth of demands which have been formulated.
./english/150.txt:16:With such a new movement and one so broad and diverse as Euromarch, encompassing people, campaigns and movements from across a continent, it is not surprising that the demands formulated to date, have been general ones. Euromarch has reasserted the right to work and has declared its opposition to the intoduction of »Workfare« style programmes. It argues for a drastic reduction in working hours without loss of pay and for the immediate introduction of a 35 hour working week. The idea of a guaranteed minimum income underpins the demand of a unified European social welfare system which would provide basic social rights to health, housing, education and welfare regardless of gender or nationality. Euromarch is campaigning for the imposition of a Tobin Tax on capital and speculation and for a uniform property tax. It declares itself in favour of equal rights for all and against any form of racism and social exclusion, including controls on immigration which restrict the right to the free movement of people. Such demands clearly have the potential to attract the support of the people of Europe but their translation into concrete policies is no easy matter as conditions in different countries vary so greatly and the debate around specifics may lead to divisions in the unity achieved around the general demands. There have also been claims that the outlook is too defensive and that minimalist demands have been shaped in order to maintain maximum unity but that the demands and resulting policies will not challenge the capitalist system which is at the root of neo-liberal restructuring.
./english/150.txt: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:31:For a hundred years, gold served as a coherent and relatively stable language of exchange for commercial transactions; and the profits were a powerful argument in favor of peace, or at least, against generalized warfare. It was the gradual abandonment of the international gold standard under the pressure of repeated financial breakdowns that led, in the 1930s, to the reconstitution of strictly national economies, closed in on themselves and subject to various forms of central planning (ranging from the relatively benign New Deal, to Nazism and Stalinism). But Polanyi, writing in 1944, did not suggest anything as simplistic as restoring the gold standard. His strongest argument was that the violence of free-market exchanges, when "disembedded" from their place within the larger social structure of reciprocities and solidarities, was finally what destroyed the laissez-faire system itself, provoking the fascist reaction. The fundamental problem therefore lay with the very notion of the self-regulating market. The last chapter of The Great Transformation predicts the opening of a new era in the history of humanity. It calls for the institution of a mixed economy, broadly regulated within a national framework and yet also highly respectful of individual rights, able to guarantee what the author describes as "freedom in a complex society" – that is, in a society which has recognized the limits of the free market.
./english/162.txt:52:The notion of the commons refers back to the same pre-capitalist history that Polanyi had invoked; and it does so in the context of what some are calling the "second enclosure movement," resulting in the extension of intellectual property rights, or the privatization of information. Benkler stresses that the word "commons" denotes "the absence of exclusion as the organizing feature of this new mode of production." To be sure, the examples he uses to prove the existence of voluntarily organized large-scale cultural production are strictly electronic projects like the Wikipedia encyclopedia, the Slashdot technews site, the Kuro5hin site, and so on. These are essentially situations where publicly available text plus creativity produces more publicly available text. They are also politically neutral examples, appropriate for an argumentation that aims, among other things, to influence the American legislature on the subject of copyright laws. Yet one could apply exactly the same ideas to the growing phenomenon of networked political protests. It is clear that mass access to email and the possibility to create personal web pages – both of which have been quite necessary to the world expansion of liberal capitalism – almost immediately made possible, not only a greater awareness of globalization and its effects, but also the self-organization of dissenting movements on a world scale. And the scope of the projects that have been realized in this sense has been tremendous.
./english/172.txt:13:Conservative forces in the north and the south are encouraging a “clash of civilization” aimed at dividing oppressed people, which is in turn producing unacceptable violence, barbarism and additional attacks on the rights and dignity of migrants and minorities.
./english/172.txt:15:Although the EU is one of the richest areas of the world, tens of millions of people are living in poverty, either because of mass unemployment or the casualization of labour. The policies of the EU based on the unending extension of competition within and outside Europe constitute an attack on employment, workers and welfare rights, public services, education, the health system and so on. The EU is planning the reduction of workers’ wages and employment benefits as well as the generalization of casualisation.
./english/172.txt:32:- We appeal for a international day of action and mobilization the 7th of October 2006 in Europe and Africa, for a European unconditional legalization and equal rights to all migrants; for the closure of all detention centers in Europe, for the stop to externalization, for the stop to deportations; against the precariousness and for the uncoupling of the link between resident permit and the labor contract, for a residence citizenship.
./english/172.txt:34:- We will mobilize against the casualization and the dismanting of public services and for the social rights coordinating our struggles in the whole Europe in the next months.
./english/176.txt:133:1 Emerging as a direct reaction against the process of neoliberal globalization, this movement was initially dubbed as the ‘anti-globalization movement’. However, this label seemed to spur too much confusion and misunderstanding, as the movement was identified with its most extreme anti-capitalist part. Thus, evolving from its initial outburst in Seattle in 1999 the movement came to define and call itself the ‘altermondialiste movement’ (in French), translated in English as the ‘alter-globalization movement’ or the ‘movement for alternative globalization’. The name ‘global social justice movement’ is also used, particularly by its trade justice/development part. This ‘alter-globalization’ label indicates more clearly that anti-globalization protesters are not opposed to globalization per se, but to the way it is shaped by neoliberal concerns, disregarding human rights and environmental issues (Walgrave and van Aelst 2004, 99). The change of name also points to the constant negotiations and re-negotiations of the movement’s identity, in its effort to accommodate and unite disparate groups and organizations.
./english/180.txt:124:as a direct attack from the European level against the social rights all
./english/187.txt:60:The initial idea would be to engage in a global analysis of the current economic, political and social system, but including Europe, its specific issues and the transformations we can promte from here, as a context of particular importance. In terms of levels and issues of debate, we start from the idea that the consultation process should integrate all those levels and themes of debate that might be of interest to those collectives and social movements that become involved in the process. It should marginalize neither analytical nor concrete debates and should attend to proposals for structural transformation (political, economic and social system), sectoral debate (ecology, social rights, militarism, immigration, gender, etc...) as well as concrete reforms (ending specific laws regarding immigration, abolishing the external debt, guaranteed income, tobin tax, etc...)
./english/192.txt:22:-> There was also a marked increased in participation by black, Asian, Muslim, and refugee networks: this is an important achievement given the Europe-wide offensive against civil liberties and the rights of migrants and asylum-seekers;
./english/193.txt:5:Between 14 and 17 October, more than 25,000 participants came together at the ESF in London, located at the wonderful Alexandra Palace, as well as at several other locations in Northern and Central London where several ‘autonomous spaces’, ranging from a ‘radical theory forum’ to ‘tactical media’ and ‘beyond the ESF’, were also held. It is impossible to grasp all the issues discussed at the ESF, reaching from ‘life after capitalism’ to ‘life despite capitalism’, from ‘against privatisation’ to the ‘experience of the commons’, from the ‘women’s assembly’ to the ‘no border network’, from ‘organising for workers rights’ to the ‘first assembly of the Precariat in Europe’ (a theme barely present on the official ESF) and so on and so forth. The supply of seminars and workshops was enormous, but the process of merging seminars in the run up to the ESF in many cases had led to the bringing together of things that do not fit.
./english/195.txt:9:I think that the contrast between these substantially different ways of doing, these modes of producing events, is highly “educational” for all of us, and we can evaluate the final outcome in these terms. By focussing on process and the totality of our movements, what can we say about the ESF held in London last November? Ambiguous result. On the one hand, it has represented a clear step forward for our movement. This not only because 25,000 people have attended and all large events like these encourage encounters between people across networks. Also and especially because a section of the movement has overcome its insularity at events like these and, working with organizing principles based on horizontality, inclusiveness and participation, has broadened substantially the programme of and participation in self-managed and autonomous zones. About 5000 people, many of whom where wearing the bracelet of the “official” event, have been estimated to have participated in the broad range of activities of the autonomous zones, and defined future action programmes on crucial themes such as precarity, migration and communication rights.
./english/197.txt:13:The same goes for restating the obvious and for finger-pointing in the general direction of the usual suspects. Our topics are becoming over-ritualisedwar and peace, democracy and fundamental rights, poverty and inequality and so on. It's pretty clear that as decent folk we favour some of these and deplore others. It's also safe to say, I think, that we already know pretty much what's wrong with the world and who or what is to blame. What, pray, is there left to say about the horrors of hunger, the devastation of debt, the iniquities of imperialism, the wickedness of war-and about all our other favourite subjects to which our responses are becoming not just predictable but positively Pavlovian.
./english/197.txt:17:I'm also surprised and distressed to note that the programmes of Social Forums tend not to focus on the truly key issue: power. If we're going to have all these plenary sessions, they should at least be geared to providing the audience with fresh insights into what the powerful have in store for us if we're not quick and smart enough to thwart and outwit them. We need to recognise the hard truth that they are much better organised than we are, at both the European and international levels. They've got the European Commission and UNICE (the European employers' union); the whole United States government, the Transatlantic Business Dialogue and the Paris and London Clubs (dealing with public and private Third World debt); the TNC's tax-dodges and mega-mergers; financial market freedom; the WTO and the GATS-you get my drift. What sorts of effective ripostes are we developing in our Social Forums to meet these challenges? Well, yes, we do regularly condemn war, poverty, human rights violations, obscene profits, etc, accompanied by soaring rhetoric. I'm sure that's got our adversaries positively trembling in their hand-made boots...
./english/197.txt:25:As for Europe, I believe that if we want to save what's left of our public services and of the European social model, we've got to go after Bolke/Frankenstein-like measures and the GATS. The welfare state, although never perfectly achieved anywhere, is one of the greatest conquests of human history. It could serve as a beacon for the entire world. Why shouldn't all citizens of all countries enjoy rights-not charity but rights-including the right to work and to decent compensation if unemployed, to leisure and family time, to free education at all levels, to culture and to health care; to efficient public services and to the rule of law? Merely to list these is to show why the capitalist project must strike them down.
./english/199.txt:23:That same evening I joined several hundred others from Beyond ESF for a Yo Mango Tube Party. We tried to maintain a low profile until arriving at the Circle Line, but the authorities caught on at Victoria Station. We were forced outside and reorganized into an impromptu Reclaim the Streets. Unfortunately, we were herded toward a nearby police station, where many were registered and eventually let free. I then went over to the Camden Center to check out the Indymedia Space. Unlike previous actions and gatherings where Indymedia was only a tool for reporting about other events, this year media activists organized their own schedule of activities, including a four day conference on Communication Rights. I was lucky enough to catch the end of a roundtable presentation in the main theater by activists from local struggles around the world, including Africa, Asia, and Latin America . There was also food, music, and dancing. In addition to the several hundred people gathered in the theater, hundreds more were drinking beer and sending e-mails in the bar, uploading news stories and videos upstairs, or chatting informally in the halls. Incredibly, there were just as many, or perhaps even more people than at Beyond ESF. The autonomous spaces were not only exciting and lively, they were simply overflowing, one into the other.
./english/202.txt:36:3) social war including ‘the war on terror’ as a systematic attack on human rights, civil liberties, refugees, migrant communities and their global links.
./english/203.txt:11:The forum also came after the ETUC's general secretary John Monks approved the EU Constitutional Treaty, strongly rejected by the majority of the associations and groups that gathered in London. Monks' official position is that “despite shortcomings, the Constitution is still an improvement on the acquis” and that “it will bring real benefits for working people and citizens across the EU even if it is not as good as the one the unions proposed”. Even Cgil, which was initially against the Treaty, in the end supported it: “We cannot hide the limitations of a draft that does not ban the use of war and does not guarantee the right of citizenship to migrants” said Titti Di Salvo, Cgil's International Secretary, “But at the same time the treaty defines some values that belong to the European social model. That's why we propose now to re-open the debate with a campaign to collect a million signatures' calling for a referendum to modify the text”. However, in the final document issued by the Forum's organisers the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty was clear, and so was the fight against the widespread attack in Europe to public services, to labour and social rights.
./english/203.txt:15:Some other initiatives in defence of public services were planned at the end of the forum, like the fight against the so-called “Bolkenstein” draft directive on the free circulation of services within the Union, currently under discussion at the EU council. Issued by the former European commissioner Frits Bolkenstein, a Dutch liberal, the directive would result in the marketisation of all services, including some essential sectors such as culture, education, health care and all of those relating to national social welfare systems that can be exposed to economic competition. The obvious consequence of this is an inevitable deterioration of pension systems, social welfare and health care cover in favour of private insurance. Core workers' rights, as established by the national laws of the countries in the Union, would also be affected. “We are at the end of the neoliberal myth of growth and development” said ETUC Confederal Secretary Joel Decaillon during an ESF seminar on privatisation. “We, European unions and movements, should now focus and work together on the real alternatives to the American social model.” Regarding the Bolkenstein directive, John Monks asked the European Council “to have a pragmatic and well-balanced approach that reconciles the achievement of the internal market of services and the respect for the rights of employees, consumers and European citizens,” although he also stated that he “fully supports the aim to establish an internal market for services,” a position that is quite far from the criticisms, requests and appeals raised at the ESF.
./english/209.txt:9:This new Europeanism is at two levels, which are in tension with each other. On the one hand, many trade union leaders now look towards Europe as if it was just about the social measures on labour rights. There is a blindness about the market-driven economics built into Giscard's constitution. On the other hand, in trade unions facing EU-led liberalisation , like the Communication Workers Union, or for public sector workers fighting privatisation at a local level, there is an eagerness to link up with workers across the continent to resist a common neo-liberal enemy. Here there is, as yet, little awareness about the constitution but there is a growing interest which will produce a real activist debate in the ESF about alternatives to the present proposals.
./english/209.txt:15:In the absence of a written constitution the rights of local government were never secure in the UK . Local government was decimated under Mrs Thatcher even to the point of abolishing the Greater London Council (GLC), the government of London , in 1986. Tony Blair restored a Greater London Authority (GLA) with only limited powers over planning, transport and waste. He also introduced the idea of a Mayor - not normally a feature of British cities. Blair's idea was a version of the American-style Chief Executive type Mayor with a lot of centralised power and a high profile but little democratic accountability. The Mayor has very little money under his local discretion - every big expenditure is negotiated with central government or has to comply with local government targets. The kind of person Blair wanted to be Mayor was Richard Branson, head of Virgin (records and airlines). The very last person he wanted was Ken Livingstone, who headed the GLC against Mrs Thatcher. When Livingstone led the GLC he was a rare political animal with an ability to be both very radical, for example in his egalitarian transport policy, his support for ethnic minorities and gays, and the need to talk to the IRA, and at the same time immensely popular. Livingstone was determined to stand as Mayor to demonstratively symbolise the unfinished business of the GLC, and in the long run establish a base and a record from which to launch an eventual challenge to Blair himself. Blair worked night and day to stop him, including depriving him of the Labour party nomination. Livingstone stood as an independent and won overwhelmingly. He has since been readmitted to the Labour Party and in June this year won his second term as Mayor as the Labour candidate - with a much reduced majority.
./english/219.txt:7:We come from all the campaigns and social movements, “no vox” organisations, trade unions, human rights organisations, international solidarity organisations, anti-war and peace and feminist movements. We come from every region in Europe to gather in London for the third European Social Forum. We are many, and our strength is our diversity.
./english/219.txt:13:We support the Palestinian and Israeli movements fighting for a just and lasting peace. Following the judgement of the UN International Court of Justice and the unanimous vote of the European countries in the UN General Assembly we call for an end to the Israeli occupation and the dismantling of the apartheid wall. We call for political and economic sanctions on the Israeli government as long as they continue to violate international law and the human rights of the Palestinian people. For these reasons we will mobilise for the international week of action against the apartheid wall from 9 to 16 November, and for European days of action on December 10 and 11, the anniversary of the UN Declaration on Human Rights.
./english/219.txt:21:The ESF is opposed to all forms of segregated provision for disabled people. In all work about disabled people the ESF supports the principal of ‘Nothing about us without us'. All ESF organisations should actively include disabled people. The ESF opposes all eugenics and fights for the rights to life and full civil rights for disabled people. All ESF events must be fully accessible for disabled people. We recognise that sign language is a basic necessity for the inclusion of Deaf people.
./english/219.txt:23:We stand against racism and Fortress Europe and for the rights of migrants and asylum seekers; for freedom of movement; for citizenship of residence and the closing of detention centres. We oppose deportation of migrants. We propose a day of action on 2 April 2005, against racism, for freedom of movement and for the right to stay as an alternative to a Europe based on exclusion and exploitation.
./english/219.txt:29:At a time when the draft for the European Constitutional treaty is about to be ratified, we must state that the peoples of Europe need to be consulted directly. The draft does not meet our aspirations. This constitution treaty consecrates neo-liberalism as the official doctrine of the EU; it makes competition the basis for European community law, and indeed for all human activity; it completely ignores the objectives of ecologically sustainable society. This constitutional treaty does not grant equal rights, the free movement of people and citizenship for everyone in the country they live in, whatever their nationality; it gives NATO a role in European foreign policy and defence, and pushes for the militarisation of the EU. Finally it puts the market first by marginalising the social sphere, and hence accelerating the destruction of public services.
./english/219.txt:31:We are fighting for another Europe . Our mobilisations bring hope of a Europe where job insecurity and unemployment are not part of the agenda. We are fighting for a viable agriculture controlled by the farmers themselves, an agriculture that preserves jobs, and defends the quality of environment and food products as public assets. We want to open Europe to the world, with the right to asylum, free movement of people and citizenship for everyone in the country they live in. We demand real social equality between men and women, and equal pay. Our Europe will respect and promote cultural and linguistic diversity and respect the right of peoples to self-determination and allow all the different peoples of Europe to decide upon their futures democratically. We are struggling for another Europe, which is respectful of workers' rights and guarantees a decent salary and a high level of social protection. We are struggling against any laws that establish insecurity through new ways of subcontracting work.
./english/219.txt:33:We are fighting for a Europe that refuses war, a continent of international solidarity and ecologically sustainable society. We fight for disarmament, against nuclear weapons, and against US and NATO military bases. We support all those who refuse to serve in the military.We reject the privatisation of public services and common goods like water. We are fighting for human, social, economic, political and environmental rights to defeat and overcome the rule of the market, the logic of profit and the domination of the third world by debt. We refuse the use of “war on terrorism” to attack civil and democratic rights, and to criminalise dissent and social conflict.
./english/219.txt:37:At a time when the new European Commission shamelessly boasts a high profile of laissez-faire politics, we must start a process of mobilisation in all European countries in order to impose the recognition of both collective and individual social, political, economic, cultural and ecological rights for men and women alike. To enable all the peoples of Europe to join this process, we must build a movement that overrides our differences and groups all the forces of the peoples of Europe ready to be involved in the struggle against European neo-liberalism.
./english/219.txt:39:20th March 2005 marks the second anniversary of the start of the war against Iraq . On 22 and 23 March the European Council meets in Brussels. We call for national mobilisations in all European countries. We call for a central demonstration in Brussels on 19 March against war, racism, and against a neo-liberal Europe, against privatisation, against the Bolkestein project and against the attacks on working time; for a Europe of rights and solidarity between the peoples. We call all the social movements and the European trade union movements to take to the streets on this day.
./english/221.txt:13:We will act to assert the rights of first-generation Europeans and freedom of migration into the EU.
./english/221.txt:17:We agree to shape a transeuropean network of movements and collectives determined to agitate against freemarketeers for social rights valid for all human beings living in Europe .
./english/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/232.txt:11:3. The Assembly of movements: although the final document was built more openly than before the calls for actions have to come from the work of the networks and the assembly is the space for all to express the work which has be done. The way the London Assembly was organized didn't give the local social forum network the chance to communicate their work. We also want to point out that Stop the War Coalition in Britain has called a rally for the 19th of March, the same day when the ‘central demonstration in Brussels on 19 March against war, racism, and against a neo-liberal Europe, against privatisation, against the Bolkestein project and against the attacks on working time, for a Europe of rights and solidarity between the peoples’ will take place. We support the action in Brussels and we will work for that.
./english/237.txt:17:However, worrying trends emerged in the formative stages of the UK ESF process which raised questions about the motivations of the groups holding the reins of the event, namely Socialist Action, the Socialist Workers Party and the Greater London Authority (GLA). We quickly witness a lack of spaces for open dialogue, the delegitimisation of local working groups (including the London Social Forum), vertical company structures for the event and, most disturbingly, the silencing of dissent in the process and non-consensus based decisions. The UK ESF was sold as a gathering for those opposed to war, racism and corporate power, global justice, workers' rights and a sustainable society” but essentially it became a giant market place of commodified politics, with blatant backroom dealing in seminars and the privatisation of the event management.
./english/237.txt:45:As we began socialising our physical spaces volunteers from Indymedia London, as one of the groups fully engaged in the autonomous spaces, also tried to petition the ESF organisers to utilise the movement’s media and networked resources in the same way. We urged them to decentralise the ESF working lists, to socialise the communication tools and to utilise alternative and community media groups. Most of these points were ignored by the official process, however, including the suggestion of setting up Internet cafes and delegate resource centres at Alexandra Palace. So after multiple attempts, Indymedia turned its attention to working autonomously not only with ASs but also with NGOs engaged in advocating communication rights. This coalition highlighted the need for an activist gathering of thousands to address the issue of the freedom to communicate. Working with NGOs was often difficult for a group with very open networks, and potentially confusing information channels, non-9-5 working hours and exploitable energy. However, the result was that we managed to create a looser form of collaboration, which resulted in a wider understanding of communication as it moved from the margins to become a more central theme. The Camden Centre played host to four days of discussion on tactical media and communication rights as well as free internet and a media centre. Meanwhile, the wider collaboration and relationships built with Communication Rights advocates turned into a very real node of critical support when, as a result of an unrelated incident, Indymedia’s servers were seized during the ESF preparations by the FBI.
./english/244.txt:31:One of my questions is related to the ambivalence of our production and creation of information. It is quite certain that those two dynamics (receptor and emitter) always exist side by side inside the same person. Sometimes we only consume, sometimes we are actively producing and spreading our own info and points of view, but what is usually escaping from us is the possibility to evaluate the exact degree of reception of our production/input inside the info flow. When do we communicate the activities of our group or organization, who are we seeking to read, see, and listen to it? Where is the feedback perception outside the use of NTIC digital tools on line; our newspapers, gazettes, pamphlets, flyers, are the X unknown composite that just travels from one house to another one, from one to the rubbish can, but it is also this piece of paper (recycle paper please!) that is at least a factor that can encourage any citizen to change her/his perception around issues like: immigration, women rights, work flexibility, etc. We are not yet able to answer all those questions, we just hope that they have a place where they can be contemplated and stimulate some debates.
./english/245.txt:38:Indeed several meetings took place in the Autonomous Spaces during the ESF that discussed communication tools and memory projects in relation to the Social Forums. Two of these were held at the European Forum of Communications Rights and Indymedia Centre which was a collaboration between various progressive electronic media networks, community media
./english/266.txt:108:Third World Network: Covers globalization , trade, environment, human and women's rights among other issues. An international network based in Malaysia.
./english/269.txt:35:In addition to these basic hypotheses and a mountain of doubts, we have a few clues as to where to look next. First of all, and thanks to the workshops we conducted on ‘Globalized Care’ we have managed to work out a few points of attack. The crisis of care, or better, the political articulation of this fact, which from one or the other side of the sea effects all of us, is one of those points. We don’t think there is a simple way of posing the question, a single formula like a social salary, salaries for housewives, distribution of tasks, or anything like that. Any solutions will have to be combined. This is a submerged and many-legged conflict, involving immigration policy, the conception of social services, work conditions, family structure, affect… which we will have to take on as a whole but with attention to its specificities. And then there is our fascination with the world of sexwork which we have been encountering bit by bit, and which once again situates us in a complex map in which we also have to look at migration policy and labor rights, but also rights in the realm of the imaginary. There is a continuum here, which for the moment we are calling Care-Sex-Attention, and which encompasses much of the activity in all of the sectors we have investigated. Affect, its quantities and qualities, is at the center of a chain which connects places, circuits, families, populations, etc. These chains are producing phenomena and strategies as diverse as virtually arranged marriages, sex tourism, marriage as a means of passing along rights, the ethnification of sex and of care, the formation of multiple and transnational households.
./english/275.txt:114:The theory of ‘militant particularism’ argues that all broad-based political movements have their origins in particular struggles in particular places and times … Many struggles are defensive … But some forms of militant particularism are pro-active. Under capitalism this typically means struggles for specific group rights that are universally declared but only partially conferred …
./english/275.txt:119:The movement from particularity to universality entails a ‘translation’ from the concrete to the abstract. Since a violence attaches to abstraction, a tension always exists between particularity and universality in politics. This can be viewed either as a creative tension or, more often, as a destructive and immobilizing force in which inflexible mediating institutions … claim rights over individuals and communities in the name of some universal principle52
./english/276.txt:37:The movement from particularity to universality entails a “translation” from the concrete to the abstract. Since a violence attaches to abstraction, a tension always exists between particularity and universality in politics. This can be viewed either as a creative tension or, more often, as a destructive and immobilizing force in which inflexible mediating institutions …. claim rights over individuals and communities in the name of some universal principle (Harvey 2000: 242)
./english/282.txt:53:In essence, Lukacs's opponents argued that the Hungarian Revolution was lost due to factors beyond human control; Lukacs's riposte is, 'No, comrades, we blew it!' Had the Hungarian CP leadership been better equipped theoretically, they would not have made the mistakes they did, and the outcome would have been - for good or ill - different (4). Now, to return to McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, they never seem to provide a basis for saying, 'They blew it....' (or, of course, 'They got it right, for the following reasons'). They do get close, sometimes, but seem to stop inquiring just as the issue comes near to a head. They note, for example, following McAdam (1999), that the Civil Rights Movement 'socially appropriated' the Black church network, but talk about social appropriation as a 'mechanism' rather than a more or less deliberate activity. They record that the Communist Party in the Philippines effectively abstained from taking any active position during the 1980s revolution against Marcos, and even note that the Party had the capacity, had it intervened, to make a decided difference to what happened, but they do not further explore this interesting abstention. (5) In short, they largely avoid concrete political judgment. They do not offer grounds for saying, 'That was a practical mistake,' or '(Ideally), had we been there, we would have spoken or acted thus....'
./english/282.txt:93:Paths to becoming a movement intellectual are rather different. They vary according to the movement in question and the circumstances of its development. In the Civil Rights Movement in the US, for example, some of the most prominent 'public intellectuals' were church ministers (most famously Martin Luther King Jr.); the predominant sexism of the time excluded women from prominent public leadership roles, although (as Robnett 1997 has documented) both Black and White women from varieties of backgrounds played critical intellectual roles (as 'bridge leaders') in the movement's development. King held a Harvard PhD in Divinity, but Fannie Lou Hamer came from a sharecropping background. In some circumstances, a lack of formal educational qualifications may be a positive advantage: Lech Walesa's idiosyncratic speaking style added to his popularity among Polish workers in 1980, for he 'sounded like one of us.' (11)
./english/282.txt:203:When they come to describe the Civil Rights Movement in the US, the phrase becomes even more metaphorical:
./english/282.txt:206:The technical dimension of the civil rights movement's cognitive praxis consists of the specific objects of opposition and, even more importantly, the tactics, the techniques of protest, by which those objects were opposed. (123)
./english/290.txt:75:In the same way, the organization of care experiences strong changes that, together with other compaÒeras, we understand in terms of crisis[11] but also of occasion (for a social transformation that would ally care with desire in a more just manner for each and all). On the other hand, we have spoken extensively about the characteristics of this crisis of care[12]; here we will limit ourselves, for reasons of space, to the enumeration of four crucial elements of its physiognomy. In first place, the passage from the Welfare State (which for good and for bad guaranteed the access of all who were considered citizens to a series of rights) to "risk management" (or, to say it better, to the containment of the subjects of risk) in the hands of an expanding "third sector" where the concrete labor done by women (and sometimes men) "volunteers" and/or with limited and precarious contracts, is subjected to high levels of tension and responsibility.
./english/290.txt:93:The present context is marked by the conjunction of macropolitics of security and their everyday correlate, the micropolitics of fear. At the grand scale we observe how the western governments justify the application of these securitary policies as a response to the present geopolitical configuration, strongly marked by the "terrorist threat". These macropolitics articulate themselves day to day with the micropolitics of fear, directly related to the deregularization of the labor market and the instability that this generates. Simultaneously, consumption tries to impose itself as the sole remnant of public activity and public spaces organized around other axes disappear. The securitary triumphs as a way of taking charge of bodies and filtering them into the distinct strata of our societies. In this context of uncertainty and deterritorialization, precarity is not only a characteristic of the poorest workers. Today we can speak of a precarization of existence in order to refer to a tendency that traverses all of society, which feeds and feeds upon the climate of instability and fear. Precarity functions as a blackmail, because we are susceptible to losing our jobs tomorrow even though we have indefinite contracts, because hiring, mortgages, and prices in general go up but our wages don't, because social networks are very deteriorated and the construction of community today is a complicated task, because we don't know who will care for us tomorrow... The logic of security founds itself in fear, concretizes itself in practices of containment, and generates isolation that persists in present social problems as individual ones. Practices of containment the subjects that need care and rights either into poor victims or into subjects dangerous for the rest of
./english/290.txt:94:"normalized" society, which has been subjected and controlled in well established niches. In the present situation of cutting back rights, social measures diminish, the focus is fundamentally assistance-ist and controling, and its object is trying to maintain an order that perpetuates the confusion between being in a situation of risk or vulnerability and being dangerous. To carry out this task of containment, new social agents proliferate, like private security companies and NGOs, which live alongside the old dispositifs - the State security bodies and the disciplinary institutions continue playing their role.
./english/291.txt:55:Precarization affects all of us, and however, axes of stratification traverse it. Axes that have to do with gender, ethnicity, age, and with other things. In the first place, with the resources monetary (patrimony) and cognitive (education) that we count on. In second place, with the networks of contacts and of support in which we participate, in order confront unforeseen events, in order to ease uncertainty. In third place, with the capacity for mobility: just as with businesses, the more mobile we are the more possibilities we will have to take advantage of comparative advantages in changing from one position to another, but it's trouble for us, if - due to physical or mental condition, dependents that we care for, lack of material or cognitive resources or roots - we don't know to move at the exact moment, like a lightning bolt! Finally, the degree of precarization has to do with our place of origin and our legal situation: those who have come to Europe from the East and the South of the world in search of a better life, fleeing from situations of exploitation and/or oppression, not only have to cross ever more militarized borders, but also traverse a veritable legal obstacle course (from their status of being "without papers", that is to say, without rights, to achieving full citizenship) imposed by the European policies of immigration control.
./english/291.txt:97:The Mayday Parade constitutes a means of visibilization of the new forms of rebellion, a moment of encounter for the movements, and practices of forms of self-organized politicization (social centers, rank-and-file unions, immigrant collectives, feminists, ecologists, hackers), a space of expression of its forms of communication (the parade as an expression of pride inherited from the movements of sexual liberation, but also all the media-activist artillery developed around the global movement against the summits of the powerful of the world) and a collective cry for rights lost (housing, health, education) or new ones (free money, universal citizenship), which day to day and from each situated form we try to begin and to construct from below.
./english/291.txt:117:Rights of Citizenship and Care *1
./english/291.txt:125:Thus, from the experience of fragility and isolation that produces the process of generalized precarization, the rights that we want to instantiate are rights of cuidadania: right to resources, spaces, and times that permit the placing of care in the center and, with that, the possibility of constructing the common in a moment in which the common is shattered. But, look, if we speak of care it is not as the exclusive task of women to care for others, but rather as an ecological mode of taking charge of bodies that breaks with the securitarian logic and that substracts itself from the logic of accumulation. Care as passage to the other and to the many, as a point between the personal and the collective. Care as a fundamental weapon against the precarization of our lives.
./english/291.txt:153:From here arises the need to turn this situation around, in the sense of demanding securities and rights in the bosom of flexibility. It would be a matter of demanding and constructing flexicurity, as a contribution to a sort of new welfare state for intermitency. The dispositifs and demands are multiple: assure the access to knowledge generated by all, to housing, to real mobility (through free transportation and the abolition of migration regulations), to health and to care; generate a universal basic income that ends with the economic overturning of the bipolarity of temporary workers, a regularity in their incomes that would give them negotiating power when they accede to a remunerated job and when they refuse to accept determined laboral conditions and that permits the organization of strong networks of resistance in the times of non-work; to study the creation of new labor rights that respond to the new realities of temporary workers and would be aimed at avoiding the new forms of abuse due to this condition and to recognizes the wisdom and dexterity acquired across the length and width of these labor and vital trajectories enriched by mobility (changes of activity, of country, continuous education).
./english/291.txt:235:1. This section makes use of a play on words that is not directly translatable into English. The word "ciudadania" means citizenship, as well as having resonances with the word for city, "ciudad." The word for care, "cuidado," is spelled vary similarly. The authors of the text use these similarities to craft the neologism "cuidadania", referring to proposed rights to care analogous to the citizenship rights demanded by some sectors of the European precarity and immigrant/asylum seeker movements. Phrased in terms of a probably outmoded and problematic distinction, it can be said that "ciudadania" is a demand for public recognition and rights and "cuidadania" is a demand for private recognition and rights, though at the same time "cuidadania" is an attack on the separation between public and private. - Tr.
./english/292.txt:137:shortages of public space or the trimming of rights and liberties),
./english/293.txt:69:Second, the studies done on immaterial work, whose homogenization we resist, look at other modes of organizing work which feed upon the very characteristics of the activities which they lump together in the category of the ‘immaterial’; specifically the strategies of neoliberal restructuring, which consist basically in cutting costs in rights and salaries and increasing the strength of command over an ever more fragmented and mobile labor force which presently works under conditions all too well known to women: by commission, with flexible and unpredictable hours, with long days then periods of inactivity without income, by hour, without contract, without rights, freelance, at home, etc. Thus the development of this category has to do with key questions to which we will return later, such as the reordering of time, space, contracts, income and conditions. The consequences of these modalities are known to all (women): isolation and incapacity to organize life “as it should be”, stress, exhaustion, social control, impossibility of developing a self-determined social life, of protesting, of “coming out” and of expressing oneself freely in all sorts of questions.
./english/293.txt:137:In all these wanderings we attempt to extract common names from this dispersion of singularities -each one unknown, even alien, to the others- which comprise the new reality of precarized work. We dream of substituting, albeit just a little, the weakness of dispersion for the strength of alliances, the potential of networks. But the difficulty of both objectives comes out during the drifts. The realities of precarious work are very, very different: the resources we can count on, the emotional and material support, the wages, the rights, the social value of what we do, the diversity of availabilities and sensibilities.
./english/293.txt:160:5) cutbacks in salaries and the loss of the rights which have traditionally characterized ‘typical’ Fordist work and the Keynesian social pact (rights ranging from maternity leave to the regulation of pay, vacations or sick leave, not to mention benefits such as insurance and retirement).
./english/293.txt:369:The negotiating table has dissolved, the moment of contracting is interminable, the system of rights and obligations is established ‘as we go along’, such that the mere act of formulating this grammar is an arduous if not impossible task. The general wage agreement, for those who have it and for those who have it in their own sector, is more or less anecdotal, ill-fit to the rationality of the activity.
./english/293.txt:429:As much in the course of the drifts as afterwards in the two workshops of Globalized Care, we have only just begun to go over some of the memorable recent experiences of struggle: the janitor’s strike in Ramón y Cajal Hospital, the struggle of the Qualytel telephone operators, and other gestures, bursts, protests and budding processes of uprising. For some the encounter with the janitors in our brief visit to the hospital was strange, alien: alien to us because we saw them in a localized conflict, still influenced by unions like CCOO[37] (with which the workers of the Eurolimp-Ferrovial contract in Ramon y Cajal had had such confrontations in order to maintain their autonomy and their grassroots structure), in a conflict in which the question of precariousness resides basically in the increasing loss of rights, in the disappearance of the workers’ functions in order to intensify their activity, and in the absolute repression of any and all burst of protest.[38] But we immediately recognized the intimacy of the relationship they sought with the patients and their families and with other social groups outside of the realm of the unions, and we identified with their discourse about care as something related to citizenship and their criticism of the privatization of health care.
./english/299.txt:63:But first, might we ask again why sex work? We already knew, either from first or second hand experience, about the polemics that surround prostitution: those within the feminist movement[11] and those that habitually come up in public speech, for example in the media, so prone to prohibitionism. The debate between abolitionists and the defenders of the rights of sex workers that -- for those who do not know -- have cost us great battles, schisms and much bad blood, seem to be at a dead end, and we are not going to be the ones to reproduce them here. Some activists and scholars that are working in this field, prostitutes or otherwise, affirm that they are tired of warring against positions which are too narrow, deterministic and victimizing, and of feeling alone against the renewed wave of criminalization that is upon us and which strikes, first and foremost those sectors of society which are traditionally the most persecuted and marginalized. The touchstone continues to be the rights of the workers, or in other words the recognition of this activity as work and therefore as generator of a series of rights (although these are in the process of being dismantled in almost all sectors) comparable to those which are acquired through other kinds of work, and not as violence or sexual slavery, as something over which no woman might have full power of decision, or as the epitome of patriarchal and capitalist domination.[12]
./english/299.txt:75:On the other hand, the pragmatism that dominates regulationist discourse ≠ in which participate, in varying ways, prostitutes, businesspeople that run places of prostitution, and some feminist organizations ≠ limits them to consider the management of this activity, something that feminists allied to prostitutes years ago linked to a wider debate in which they included other questions which, over the years, have become less important. Among these were sexual senses and practices, their historical transformations and their strategic contribution to gender. This, which could be thought out very well from prostitution and the perspective of the prostitutes, not only concerned the women directly involved ≠ no small thing ≠ but all women. The rights of prostitutes ≠ the invention of new rights ≠ like the rights of domestic workers, have stayed in the margins of legality and, therefore, of state regulation,[15] and their visibility as subjects has had to situate itself in the center of the debate. Moreover, prostitution or sex work is a privileged location from which to speak about the value and the changing dimensions of sex in patriarchal society.
./english/299.txt:141:One of the elements of pleasure, says one colleague, is to feel oneself desired, and this disappears when we buy sex, although it can be substituted if we can imagine, somehow, that the prostitute chooses and chooses us, that she does it ≥because she wants to≤ and not because ≥she has no choice,≤ that there exists, in fact, some feeling.[25] When this whole hodgepodge is set loose we are again assaulted by the possibility of thinking about sex and the practices of sex in a historical dimension as do Foucault and the feminists that inspire us, that is, as production (and not as mere domination), as a place of regulation and of government. Thus we think about how sexuality has transformed in relation to femininity and masculinity, how sex services are specializing and becoming more sophisticated, and how all of this together with the invention of rights in a general context which is dominated by disarticulation and a particular one - that of sex work ≠ which is characterized by imbalance and stigma.[26]
./english/299.txt:213:The second aspect of this crisis, the absence of public service, has to do with the development of the so-called ≥Mediterranean≤ welfare State, called åMediterraneanπ because it sounds nicer than årudimentaryπ or åfamilyistπ. This means that reproduction is in the hands of women, frequently in the ådouble work-dayπ regime, and that only in the absence of a woman will the State intervene. Services are, especially in the field of care, a complement to the action of women. Homes with resources will contract another woman, probably immigrant, to externalize part of this work. And this is where other dimensions enter into play, like immigration regulations: the fact, for example, that migration law rests upon discriminatory phenomena that are unjustifiable from any Euro-orthodox point of view such as the pre-assignation by law of certain jobs (domestic service) to certain population groups (foreign women) in function of their sex and their condition as aliens. If all those European declarations really held any water these phenomena would be considered attacks against human rights.
./english/299.txt:315:In our first stutterings we made a survey of these points: of the working conditions in small new networked companies, in which it is not a question of major companies externalizing and contracting other companies but rather of major companies directly converting their former departments into subsidiaries, and thus liberating themselves from the obligation to respect labor agreements. We have also talked about the maximization of knowledge, affective resources and - in the case of the media, publicity and culture industry more than anywhere ≠ of connectivity, without this translating into income or stability. We have talked about other types of contracts which predominate at the lowest levels: internships, practica, contracts by job or no contract at all. And we have discussed the flexibility of schedules, the meager salaries and rights, the lack of delimitation of tasks, the polyvalence, the diffuse hierarchies oriented to promote self regulation, etc.[46]
./english/300.txt:20:The tradition, or movement as some would prefer to call it (see Blaut 1979), of radical geography in the Anglo-American countries appeared and coalesced in the late 1960’s. It emerged largely as the response and engagement on the part of geographers with the series of social struggles and processes of social transformation occurring throughout the time period. Movements against the war in Vietnam, anti-colonial struggles in countries of the Global South, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, what seemed to be the string of international revolts in ’68, provoked a reaction. As Peet states: “radical science in general and radical geography in particular are, at least in North America, of fairly recent origin. They are largely the product of the events of the 1960’s,” (Peet 1977; p. 7). Geographers were “forced by events to question the conceptual bases and practices of their discipline,” (Harvey and Smith 1984; p. 102).
./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/306.txt:29:Rights are a useful but insufficient charity, perverse in their disciplinary capacity. Now that capital has been embodied in us with hushed and persistent violence: (re)productive body, consumer body, clean and disinfected body which has repressed the ghost of stigma and death, versatile and accelerated body, it is time to ask: Is a different body possible?
./english/306.txt:35:While the vertiginous current of global capitalism impregnates every nook and cranny of our existance, submitting it to the virtual display window of the market-world, to the state of permanent global war, to the complete precarization of our lives, to the abysmal technocracy of the bureaucratic aparatus, to the privatization of services and of social and public goods, to isolation and solitude, to politics which can only be concieved in terms either of parties or else of super-hip politicking like that of the NGOs, to boredom and to being ‘entertained’, to the appropriation of our knowledge and to copyrights, to compulsory heterosexuality, euphoric and erroneous…
./english/306.txt:197:militarization of our life with mortifying discourses of control and legality, from the precarization of existence, the interruption of human rights, exploitation, marginality, misery.
./english/307.txt:3:Introduction The first version of this proposal was presented in January 2003 and published in Democracia Viva (IBASE), No. 14, January 2003, pp.78-83. In the months that followed it was discussed on several occasions with different people. In Madrid, on April 25, at the headquarters of ACSUR-Las Segovias, with Pedro Santana, Tomas Villasante, Juan Carlos Monedero and several other activists of Spanish and Latin-American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); in Cartagena de Indias, in June 16-20, during the Thematic World Social Forum on Democracy, Human Rights, Wars, and Narcotraffic, in a workdshop coordinated by Pedro Santana, Giampero Rasimelli, Moema Miranda and myself; and finally in Rio de Janeiro, on September 2, at the IBASE headquarters, with Candido Grzybowski, Moema Miranda, several other members of IBASE and Jorge Romano of Actionaid. The present version is the result of these discussions. The name and the thing There is no consensus on the name to be given to the proposed institution. Some consider the term “University” elitist. Others think that the term “Popular University” entails identification with initiatives of communist parties and other left organizations of the first decades of the twentieth century. School? Academy? Open University of the Social Movements? Global University of Social Movements? At some point the organizations that decide to take upon themselves the task of actually creating the popular university will have to come to an agreement as to its designation. Since none of the alternatives so far seems preferable, in this version I stick to the original designation. 3
./english/307.txt:10:movements, between any of them and the feminist and labor movements, between any of the previous movements and the peace and human rights movements, or finally between any of the above-mentioned and the movements and associations dedicated to popular education through the arts - dance, drama, literature, the plastic arts, and so on and so forth. This knowledge and the articulations that it can be translated into are the essential condition further to enhance the density and complexity of the movements’ network for an alternative globalization. Activities PUSM is constituted of three principal activities: pedagogical activities, activities of research-action for social transformation, and activities for spreading capabilities and tools for inter-thematic, international, and intercultural translation. Pedagogical Activities PUSM will be structured on the basis of workshops, attended by a limited number of activists/movement leaders, and social scientists/scholars/artists. Each workshop will last two weeks on a full-time basis, alternating periods for discussion, study and reflection, and leisure. Each workshop will have about 10 sessions for discussions. Activists/movement leaders and social scientists/scholars/artists will take turns in preparing and running these sessions. Study materials will be of various kinds: oral narratives and documents presented by movements and organizations, and theoretical and analytical texts proposed by social scientists/scholars, dramatic plays (for example, The Theater of the Oppressed, the methodology proposed by Augusto Boal and used today in 70 countries) and art objects and activities proposed by artists.
./english/307.txt:12:Each workshop will have 2 coordinators, one an activist/leader and the other a scientist/scholar /artist. Both activist/leaders and artists/scholars/artists will work as consecutive translators, whenever needed and feasible. Each workshop will consist of two phases: thematic and inter-thematic. The thematic phase will be concerned with deepening the theoretical and practical knowledge of movements and organizations working in a given area, be it labor, indigenous, feminism, environment, peace, human rights, fair trade, peasant agriculture, intellectual property rights, and so on. The inter-thematic phase will be concerned with having experiences and knowledges shared between at least two fields of collective action and their respective movements and organizations. To this effect, at least two workshops will be held at the same time at PUSM. The first week of each workshop will be dedicated to deepening the theme. In the second week, activists/leaders and social scientists/scholars/artists participating in two (or more) workshops will meet together. In its thematic phase, workshop discussions will deal with the following: 1. Accounts and trajectories of organization and action; 2. Reflection on successful and unsuccessful practices; 3. Discussion of the most complex issues, the most felt wants; 4. Discussion on objectives, strategies, and methodologies. 5. Discussion of topics proposed in the ambit of the two other activities of PUSM deemed by the coordinators as having particular relevance for the NGOs and movements that participate in the workshops. 8
./english/312.txt:38:- to defending and asserting the rights of temporary researchers, students and, generally, of knowledge workers at European level.
./english/316.txt:29:the feminisation of poverty, the commodification of women (the sex trade), the simultaneous formal endorsement and political denial of women’s and sexual rights;
./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:3:Social movements from above and below at the dawn of the new millennium: Whose rights? Whose justice?
./english/320.txt:13:This essay engages with the collective political agency of dominant and subaltern groups in the era of global neoliberal capitalism from three different angles. The first part of the essay outlines the basic framework of a Marxist theory of social movements, which proposes that the collective political agency of dominant and subaltern groups be conceptualized in terms of social movements from above and below. Moreover, the argument is made that the making and unmaking of historically specific social organizations of human practice are fundamentally animated by the dialectical relationship of conflictual process between the two. The second part of the essay applies this framework in a prolegomenon to an analysis of, on the one hand, the implementation, consolidation and globalization of neoliberal restructuring since the 1970s, and, on the other hand, the transition from defensive to offensive struggles against neoliberalism and the emergent crystallization of a new political subject in the form of the movement of movements. The third part discusses the role and relevance of normative ideals of rights and justice for the movement of movements, and argues for the development of an ethics of praxis through which new universalisms can be articulated. The essay concludes with some reflections on the role of activist research vis-à-vis these processes.
./english/320.txt: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:48:Accommodative projects seek to separate movements from each other and to incorporate them in selective ways (since to incorporate a movement from below more fully would be to abdicate, both in terms of power granted and in terms of interests). Activists facing such projects need above all to stress solidarity and find ways of building links with one another. In facing repressive projects, which seek to exclude movements from below, activists need to treat civil and political rights as the gains of past mvements (which they are), and understand that (whether legal or illegal) the exercise of such rights is the necessary precondition for movement action. This does not, of course, mean that movements from below should remain passive in this situation, which is after all one where movements from above are on the defensive. Rather, they need both to tackle these responses from above to their own movements and to find ways of taking the initiative further.
./english/325.txt:12:Two years ago in an article about the Dutch conference ‘Feminism and Multiculturalism’, I criticized the restricted meaning multiculturalism and feminism most of the time has in western countries (Poldervaart 2002). In dominant western debates multiculturalism is limited to the integration of non-white and Islamic people into the dominant male, white, heterosexual and middle class culture, as if multiculturalism isn’t more than differences in colour and religion. In this way the cultures of gay/queer and of protest groups criticizing dominant culture, disappear from the picture of multiculturalism. Feminism was defined by the conference-organisation as ‘striving for recognition of equality, of equal opportunities and equal rights’. This is, however, a very limited definition: most feminists want more! Moreover, such ‘equal-rights’-feminism stimulate in practice the idea that only non-white people have to struggle for feminism because ‘we, women in the west’ have equal rights already. Both restricted meanings (of feminism and multiculturalism) strengthen the difference between ‘we’ (white, supposed to be progressive) people against the ‘other’ (coloured or Islamic), make affiliation-politics between both groups very difficult, forget all other diversities between people and don’t criticize the dominance of neo-liberal politics.
./english/325.txt:37:Yet, nowadays a big international queer movement exists (just as the feminist movement hasn’t died when it criticized the fixed female identity). However, it took years before the gay and lesbian movement could accept transsexuals, transgenders and drag queens etc. in their movement; they were largely treated as embarrassments in their “legitimate” fight for tolerance, acceptance and equal rights. Aaron Devor and Nicholas Matte (2004) give a clear description of this struggle in the United States from the 1970s till the 2000s. In particular in the lesbian and feminist movement hotly contested battles have taken place over the question of whether or not male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals are women for the purposes of inclusion in women-only organizations. ‘Transgendered and transsexed people have posed the greatest challenges to gender definitions at a historical moment when women in general, and lesbians in particular, have begun only recently to feel that they exist as political players in their own right’ (Devor/Matte, 2004: 181). Many lesbian-feminist organizations insisted on a definition of womanhood that leaves no room for women who were born male. For example at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, a five-day women-only event run every year since 1976, from 1991 on till 2003 trans-women tried to be allowed into the festival and set up an informational and protest ‘Camp Trans’ outside the gates of the festival. Eventually the organizers of the festival bowed to the pressure and said that anyone self-defined as a ‘womyn-born-womyn’ would be allowed into the festival.
./english/325.txt:39:Also the combined gay and lesbian movement has proved resistant to aligning itself with transgendered and transsexual people. Not before 1997 more consistent progress toward unity had been made, with various gay and lesbian organizations expanding their mandate to include transgender perspectives. In September 1997 the national Gay and Lesbian Task Force amended its mission statement to include transgendered people. The same happened in 1998 with the ‘Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays’ and in April 2000 trangendered activists were allowed to speak at the Millennium March for Equality in Washington, DC. In March 2001 the Human Rights Campaign, which calls itself ‘America’s largest gay and lesbian organization’ amended its mission statement to include transgendered people. In their article Devor and Matte try to explain the important contributions of transgendered and transsexual people to the queer movement by showing the historical relationships between transgender and homosexual groups in the U.S. According to them much of the recent growth of gay and lesbian pride was built on an ethnic-like gay identity that necessarily defined inclusion by the exclusion of others. This pride has been created at least partly to counteract a society that taught gays and lesbians to be ashamed of who they are. But as they have found their pride, many have retreated in shame from the transgendered and transsexual people who had always been among them. Their idea of ‘You’re Strange and We’re Wonderful’ remains a dark corner in the struggle for gay and lesbian rights. Transgendered and transsexual people have understood the need for alliances and have made many important contributions to the fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered rights (Devor/Matte, 2004: 202).
./english/325.txt:41:However, although the struggle for rights remains important, I think the importance of queer theory and -movement is that it wants more. Like Foucault states: ‘Human rights regarding sexuality .. are not solved now, still I think we have to go a step further: the creation of new forms of life, relationships, friendships in society, art, culture and so on, through our sexual, ethical and political choices. Not only do we have to defend ourselves, not only affirm ourselves as an identity but as a creative force’ (Foucault 1989/1996: 383). You can see this ‘more’ already in the slogan on T-shirts of queers: ‘Queer, the privilege to imagine more’. Perhaps you can say, as Gwen van Husen does (2004:13) that the aim of queer theory is to queer (the whole) culture. She concludes after her small research of the people visiting the Queeruption festival in Amsterdam (June 1-7, 2004), however, that the queer scene limits itself to (their own) queer culture and is unwilling to queer mainstream society. I will elaborate on this.
./english/325.txt:103:In the United States the queer movement started in 1990 with Queer Nation, after a long battle with the gay and lesbian movement to accept transsexuals and transgenders. This battle shows how important it is not to fight for tolerance, acceptance and equal rights for your ‘own’ (deviate) identity only and how important affinity politics is. The queer movement added a new category, one that criticizes all existing, fixed categories. With the globalization of capitalism, queer culture was globalized and late years all kinds of international queer festivals are organized.
./english/331.txt:53:Economists don't often deal with morals, and academic criticism of the neo-liberal viewpoint tends more towards the slippage between theory and economic reality (eg. Rodrik, 2002). Here, Sally states explicitly, that which is usually left implicit: freedom in and of itself is a universal moral value. I hesitate to criticise an eminent scholar such as Sally. But how can this argument stand when access to choices can never be equal? Liberty in itself may be a fundamental human right, but if I exercise my freedom to choose and it conflicts with your human rights, then I must be constrained by recourse to a truly universal value: justice.
./english/331.txt:63:The AIDS pandemic sweeping sub-Saharan Africa illustrates just how wrong, in absolute terms, the liberal economic order can be. Forcing a western system of intellectual property rights in the pursuit of profit, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has been complicit in the deaths of millions (Oxfam 2003). Pharmaceutical companies are equally - perhaps more - culpable(Oxfam, 2003, The Guardian, 18/2/2003), although of course the counter view is that high prices for patented drugs are necessary to pay for the cost of research. Estimates of the cost of research and development can vary by up to 75% - depending on the analysis used. (The Guardian 18/2/2003)
./english/331.txt:68:Oh well that's all right then! No mention of the human right to life that is threatened by our continued pollution of the environment, or of our responsibilities as custodians of the planet - to its flora and fauna and our future generations. Arthur (2003) states that “…self-interest, once a vice, (is) now conceived as an economic virtue.” It strikes me that these points sum up the individualistic malaise of our western societies: we over-extend our conception of 'rights'; we are less enthusiastic about examining our responsibilities.
./english/331.txt:90:Of course it is only when the battle lines are drawn and the tear gas released that the anti-capitalist movement attracts the news crews, and their analysis is often crassly simplistic. Environmentalists, pacifists, Marxists, and anarchists are often viewed with equal distrust; human rights campaigners are equated with Stalinist revolutionaries. Clearly this is absurd, as is the 'anti-globalisation' label slapped on the movement.
./english/331.txt:103:So where are we going with all this? We’ve had the ultra-right American driven consensus that has fired international finance and the growth of TNC’s, but just ‘isn’t working’. The left has been driven underground by third way appeasers in governments across Europe; and subsequently exploded as a grassroots civil disobedience movement with myriad faces and kaleidoscopic shifts in focus: from environmental crisis to economic injustice to human rights and war. This refusal to be pinned down and defined is both the Achilles heel and the strength of the movement. In the absence of any governmental opposition to centrist and conservative ideology, it has become the popular voice of social justice and public morality, but has been dragged through the mud by extremism.
./english/331.txt:129:A relativistic approach (values clarification) is equally inappropriate – it leads to the entrenchment of individualism and a focus on rights rather than responsibilities. However, a consideration of psychological development of reasoning skills does not mean a relativistic attitude to morals. Kohlberg’s emphasis on the development of abstract reasoning skills was narrow and incomplete as a model of morality. However, it should not be confused as relativism, but taken exactly as it is: a useful way of conceptualising progression in the analytical thinking skills necessary to develop autonomous moral capability.
./english/331.txt:172:4.(Key Stage 4 and 5) Development of (universal) ethical principles based on an understanding of human rights and law.
./english/331.txt:224:Specifically, for example, pupils will learn about globalisation in a general sense at key stage 3 and already be familiar with key concepts by year 11. Abstract concepts such as human rights will have been revisited in different ways and through different topics at a more concrete level. This is bound to have an impact on attainment. Although this cohort will have had some opportunities to develop critical thinking skills in other subjects; their experience in dealing with abstract ethical principles, and their knowledge of the social and political world around them is extremely limited. This has implications for:
./english/332.txt:34:No to European Imperialism. No to fortress Europe. For the right of self-determination – including independent statehood- for all peoples in Europe. For full citizens rights for all who live in Europe. Down the European Military Union. Not a Euro, not a person for the EU-army. Down with the security laws of the EU. Scrap the “terrorist” list of the EU!
./english/332.txt:35:No to the European neoliberal offensive on the working class. For co-ordinated action against the implementation of the Lisbon agenda. For a European wide campaign and working class action to raise workers rights to the highest standard ensure a 35-hour week throughout the continent. For co-ordinated strike action against closures and neo-liberal attacks by the EU and the bosses.
./english/336.txt:19:profit is all sweeping away from his road: Human Rights, rights to Life,
./english/336.txt:38:defend the democratic rights of freedom against the extremist
./english/336.txt:50: -To defend and guarantee the Democratic Rights of Freedom,
./english/337.txt:49:As already mentioned in the last EPA in Frankfurt, we have not been able to extend the participation within the EPAs, beyond the individuals and organisations present from the beginning. In particular the representation of unions, environmental, development and human rights NGOs is too limited. Analysing some of the reasons behind this, we can identify the following problematic areas:
./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:20:Such violence affects all aspects of social life. People who reject the privatisation of natural resources, which only benefits multinationals, are likened to terrorists. By questioning the sovereignty of the people, the use and division of their natural resources and products, the very foundations of democracy are being undermined. Dictatorships and corruption thrive in this environment. Basic rights are denied to the victims, the producing classes, small holders, etc. The poorest people are in an even more precarious position both in the global North and the global South. Billions of people are deprived of basic public goods such as education, health and the right to housing. Farmer and fishermen organisations, as well as the population as a whole, demand food sovereignty in order to satisfy their needs independently of the world market.
./english/343.txt:22:People who fall victim to these policies and the conflicts linked to them are often forced to flee their country. In the era of free movement of capital a fundamental task of the social movements we belong to is defending migrants' rights, the rights of those fleeing neoliberalism and oppression, and the rights of women fleeing from forced marriages or sexual mutilation.
./english/343.txt:24:The patriarchal system is reinforced by the dominant economic set-up. Trafficking minors and prostitution are further proof of the commodification of all aspects of life. The situtation of women at work is exacerbated further, especially in free trade areas where they account for a large part of the labour force and enjoy few rights.
./english/343.txt:30:The challenge for social movements is to ensure joint globlal mobilisation against these enemies both in developing countries and in developed countries, where people also suffer the effects of these policies. Producers in both the formal and informal economies have their rights restricted in the name of competitivity and competition. One of financial capitalism's main aims is reducing labour costs. Workers themselves are submitted to competition through reforms to social polices, the expansion of free trade areas and relocation.
./english/343.txt:40:2. At the same time it wants to put forward concrete proposals for the idea 'A different world is possible' by proposing alternatives that reflect development and living models that are different and based on the needs and aspirations of the people and on the respect for natural resources. What sort of trade do we want? What sort of individual and collective relationship between men and women do we want? Between peoples even? We have to develop concrete ideas to answer these questions starting from the primacy of rights for all, public goods for all and the experience gained from the social struggles themselves... The Assembly is not the only initiative and the movements concerned do not represent the entirety of their geographic regions nor all areas of struggle, not even all of the interested parties, but the fact that it exists is an achievement in our desire to rally people and expand.
./english/343.txt:156:Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign-USA, COMPA
./english/343.txt:404:Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign-USA, COMPA
./english/343.txt:405:info@economichumanrights.org
./english/344.txt:8:[A revised and extended version of a contribution to International Union Rights, www.ictur.org, Autumn 2006]
./english/344.txt:49:Questioned about the coming merger, a North American international labour-rights specialist, based in Vienna itself, said he knew nothing about it though he was interested in attending the event.
./english/344.txt:57:[W]hat is the politics of the new International supposed to be? No one knows...but I fear it might be a divorce from any sort of explicit ideology, although I guess they won't be able to escape from the subliminal, immanent ideology of the trade union movement which is obliged to wage the class struggle whether it wants it or not, or even knows it or not. It will probably be couched in human rights terms.
./english/344.txt:59:I eventually found the proposed politics of the new international, along with its proposed name, in a document buried on the website of the World Confederation of Labour (2006). I would characterise this policy as somewhat broader, though hardly more radical, than a human rights policy. I characterise it as a ‘global neo-Keynesianism’. By this I mean the promotion at global level of the old West-European model of national welfare capitalism. Two immediate and obvious challenges to this are: 1) In so far as Keynesianism was successful within nation states, what argument or evidence (as contrasted with a hope or dream) is there for its possible success at global level? and 2) given that even powerful unions were unable to prevent the destruction of this model at national level, what evidence or argument is there that a dramatically weakened international movement could establish it at global level? The answer that its promoters might provide lie, perhaps, in an even greater dependency on the ILO (itself seriously marginalised by neo-liberal globalisation) than I had previously thought. Reference to the global justice movement, on the other hand, is both brief and obscure. This new international, in other words, appears to be appealing less to the world’s workers, major new social movements and global civil society than to hypothetical patrons above.
./english/348.txt:16:In the network meeting also it was reported from all the participants that during the last 6 months the movements and organizations of the Anti-imperialist Network participated to the actions which were decided at the Athens’s ESF (day of solidarity to the Nepalese people, day of action against the war, day of action for the rights of the refugees and the immigrants) and to all the activities against the imperialist intervention in Lebanon that tae place to the different countries.
./english/358.txt:8:1. social and workers rights;
./english/358.txt:9:2. the self-determination of peoples, the collective rights of minorities which should not prevail over the fundamental rights of the person;
./english/362.txt:35:I consider these events important. I do not mean that there are no problems with them. There are many, and growing, social movements around the world. They are very different in nature, struggling either on social fronts, for the defence of labour and of the rights of the popular classes, or on political fronts for basic political rights. There are the feminist movements, ecological movements and many more. What is characteristic of the present time is that these movements are fragmented, in the sense that they are mostly national-based, or, in many cases, local-based. Most of them deal with a single issue or with a single dimension of the problem, without articulating it into an overall alternative political project.
./english/364.txt:49:The most memorable moment of that confrontation came when Hebe de Bonafini, a representative of the Argentine human rights organization Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, shouted at financier George Soros across the Atlantic divide: "Mr. Soros, you are a hypocrite. How many children’s deaths are you responsible for."
./english/365.txt:34:Beyond identity processes, a second impetus for creating such broadly distributed communication networks is that the targets of global activism are both numerous, and they are slipping off the grid of conventional national politics. Many activists believe that labor, environment, rights and other policies of their governments have been weakened by pressures from global corporations and transnational economic regimes such as the World Trade Organization. The neo-liberal drift and re-branding of labor parties in Europe and the Democratic Party in the United States provide some evidence for these concerns. The resulting capacity of corporations to escape regulation and win concessions
./english/365.txt:56:In the American case, the model for activist issue campaigns can be traced to “corporate” campaigns pioneered by labor unions in the early 1980s (Manheim 2001). These corporate campaigns have now spread throughout activist and advocacy circles, being adopted by environmental, health, human rights, as well as by anti-globalization and sustainable development groups and coalitions. For example, a small global network of NGOs stopped Monsanto’s plans to develop genetically engineered seed with a successful media campaign labeling the sterile seed strain “The Terminator.” And the small human rights organization Global Witness successfully targeted the diamond giant De Beers, which ultimately agreed to limit the market for the bloody “conflict” diamonds that motivated mercenary armies to establish regimes of terror in crumbling African states (Cowell 2001).
./english/365.txt:58:Success in publicizing hard-to-communicate political messages may bring new players into campaigns even as others leave a network having declared their goals met. The influx of large and unwieldy networks of activists running through political territories once occupied in more orderly fashion by a small number of rights, environmental, consumer protection, labor and development NGOs presents an interesting strategic dilemma for movement organizing. One attraction of centrally run campaigns is the ability to stop them, which reinforces the credibility of activist organizations by rewarding the compliance of campaign targets. The attraction of decentralized campaigns is the ease of joining them and adding new charges against targets.
./english/365.txt:72:Ideological and identity thinning may also operate in single organizations that adopt open network designs to promote member equality or minimize bureaucracy. Le Grignou and Patou (forthcoming) note this potential for open networks to diminish organizational identity in their analysis of the French organization ATTAC (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens). ATTAC (www.attac.org) is an interesting case because it began with a very specific organizational goal of creating a tax on global financial transactions and using the funds for sustainable development. ATTAC even formed a Scientific Council to guide the production of high quality information. However, the organization also promoted the autonomy of local chapters through an open communication network that resulted in the posting of diverse concerns from the ATTAC activist membership. Le Grignou and Patou conclude that the easy communication of local interests quickly diversified the organizational agenda to include Commander Marcos, “Mad Cow disease”, human rights in Tunisia, and the labor struggles of Danone employees. Le Grignou and Patou explain that the “click here” logic of the open network at once makes connections between such disparate ideas possible, and at the same time creates an intellectual dilemma for the
./english/365.txt:89:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 25 networks helped to create successor organizations to mobilize future events. For example, the A16-2000 umbrella organization that coordinated the demonstrations at the Washington, D. C. International Monetary Fund meeting in April of 2000 opened its web site to announce a constantly changing roster of participants. The site enabled newcomers to post their own rallying messages at the top of the site (A16-2000Network\A16The Network List.htm). The user interface emphasized the political diversity of participating groups, along with an amazing number of different political reasons for opposing the IMF. The list of endorsing and participating groups (692 and still growing at the time I captured the site) was indexed by geographical location so that organizations in different locales could be viewed on the same page. Another page of the site revealed an equally diverse core group of demonstration sponsors: 50 Years is Enough, Alliance for Global Justice, Campaign for Labor Rights, Global Exchange, Mexico Solidarity Network, National Lawyers Guild, Nicaragua Network , and Witness for Peace, among others.
./english/366.txt:74:Last December in South Korea--the most densely wired country on the planet--a grassroots revolt streaming rich media across high-bandwidth connections helped elect an outsider human rights activist as president. Where will our own Internet-fueled movements take us?
./english/367.txt:29:Every time someone made a bid to argue that there should be more systematic mass work, that there should be trade union activities, or that in a country where elections are so deep-rooted the radical left cannot simply ignore elections, they were denounced as “neo-revisionists” and on occasion murdered. Eventually, by the mid-1990s, there were a few distinct currents. The biggest moderate Maoist group was the CPI(ML) Liberation. In the late 1970s, it had grown in Bihar through organizing armed struggle and by fighting for the rights of agricultural laborers, poor peasants, and dalits (those of the lowest castes, the “untouchables”).
./english/367.txt:42:Many Maoist cadres, for their part, found that in order to gain the confidence of the people, it was necessary to do something other than simply preach armed struggle — except in pockets where the level of oppression was such that armed struggle was the only road to even the faintest of reforms. Finally, from the 1970s, a series of new social movements were developing: feminism; the dalit movement (a renewed movement among the lowest castes against caste oppression); struggles of tribal peoples where tribal survival rights and environmental issues were inextricably mixed (for example, whether the tiger should be saved simply by driving out tribal populations from their long-standing areas and occupations, or whether in the name of development forests should be cut down with effects on both the ecology and the tribal way of life, as in the Chipco movement); a significant anti-nuclear movement; a growing health movement involving both radicals in medical jobs and ordinary people who felt they had a right to know what was being done to them as well as a right to a minimum of decent health care, and so on. What was common to these movements was a deep suspicion of the purely electoralist orientation of all parties, including the mainstream left parties.
./english/367.txt:83:In hospitals, free services have been drastically cut, and the quality of the remaining free services have become such that they can lead to the demise of the recipient. Though the population of Calcutta has grown massively, in 25 years of Left Front rule no new government hospital has been opened. The government has also been moving slowly but definitely toward curbing dissent. It has freely used the terrorist tag against its opponents. And it has displayed its commitment to globalization by turning against even reformist trade union struggles for concessions for the workers, even while at the all-India level the CPI(M) continues to mouth platitudes about the rights of workers. Government efforts on environmental protection show the same upper class orientation. Several thousand people were driven out of their “illegal” shantytown dwellings, and in one case the entire massive shantytown was “accidentally” set on fire. Activists of the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, as well as other organizations like those fighting for the ousted residents, were arrested. In rural West Bengal, in the name of combating Maoism and “separatism,” a horrifying level of violence has been unleashed, justified before the bourgeois media, and thereby substantially hushed up.
./english/367.txt:115:In fact, this shows their utter failure to understand social reality. Imperialism is not something standing outside society. We live in a capitalist world, and every mass movement will be tainted by capitalism and its ideology, especially in its early stages. Marx’s method was not to argue that Communists should enter into no movement unless it was led from the beginning by them. Rather, he stressed that Communists should enter real movements and gain influence within them. The rise of the NGOs was, in India as well as elsewhere, often due to the manipulative and bureaucratic politics of the Maoists. It is surprising that even some civil liberties activists in India, like the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, take the position that they will not collaborate with any NGO, because all NGOs are funded, ergo, agents of imperialism.
./english/367.txt:135:This internal democracy, and respect for the rights of differing tendencies, marks off the PT from both the CPI(M)-style left, which steamrolls internal opposition, and the Maoists, who go into the fission mode whenever differences occur.
./english/368.txt:70:For those in Mexico who read those messages and found them accurate and inspiring, this blockage was an intolerable situation which had to be overcome in order to build support for the Zapatistas and to stop the government's repression. What they did was very simple: they typed or scanned the communiques and letters into e-text form and sent them out over The Net to potentially receptive audiences around the world.(21) Those audiences included, first and foremost, UseNet newsgroups, PeaceNet conferences, and Internet lists whose members were already concerned with Mexico's social and political life,(22) secondly, humanitarian groupings concerned with human rights generally,(23) thirdly, networks of indigenous peoples and those sympathetic to them,(24) fourthly, those political regions of cyberspace which seemed likely to have members sympathetic to grassroots revolt in general(25) and fifthly, networks of feminists who would respond with solidarity to the rape of indigenous women by Mexican soldiers or to the EZLN "Women's Revolutionary Law" drafted by women, for women, within and against a traditionally patriarchal society.(26) Again and again, friendly and receptive readers spontaneously re-posted the messages in new places while sometimes translating the Spanish documents into English and other languages. In this way, the words of the Zapatistas and messages of their communities have been diffused from a few gateways throughout much of cyberspace.
./english/368.txt:80:On the contrary, given the obvious bias and incompleteness in such reporting, those circulating material on The Net informally adopted the practice of posting everything available. As a result, those who have tapped The Net for their organizing around the issues of the Zapatista struggle, and the movement for democracy in Mexico more generally, have been far better informed and far more able to shape critical assessments of any given event than the consumers of a limited sampling of mass media. Where casual readers may have access to one story in a local newspaper (often bought from the New York Times or the Washington Post), those subscribed to the relevant conferences or lists will receive anywhere from two or three to more than a dozen, both from the media and from unpublished sources. Good stories by independent reporters, e.g., those written by John Ross for the small circulation Anderson Valley Advertiser, have been made as assessable as those of New York Times reporters Tim Golden and Anthony DePalma. Otherwise totally obscure reports from Human Rights groups both local (e.g., the Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartelome de las Casas ) and international (e.g., Human Rights Watch) have been made as available as Mexican and U.S. government propaganda.
./english/368.txt:88:Over the months separating these dramatic events, the issues the Zapatistas were raising, e.g., NAFTA, poverty, land rights, justice, exploitation, environmental preservation, women's rights, democracy, and so on, tended to become more and more the subject of discussion. Issues such as the democratization of the Mexican political system, which was initially dismissed as a fantasy, became --through a multitude of political meetings, including such national events as the Convencion Nacional Democratica (CND)-- so central to public discourse as to dominate Mexican politics --to the utter dismay of the very undemocratic ruling party (the PRI). A pro-democracy movement developed the power to force a reformation, if not total revision, of the formal electoral system. Faced with the popular excitement stirred by the Zapatistas' vision of an open democratic system no longer monopolized by professional political parties and recognizing the autonomy of indigenous ethnic groups, the PRI (so internally divided as to assassinate its own leaders) began to cede ground.
./english/368.txt:92:The result for business, the state and the ruling class generally is a continuing crisis of "governability" wherein virtually every historical mechanism of domination is being challenged and ruptured from below. The old combinations of repression and co-optation have not been working and the traditional elite coalitions are splitting apart. The PRI has had to accept electoral reforms, cede state governments to the opposition Partido Accion Nacional (PAN), tolerate public denunciations from its own human rights commission, suffer repeated exposures of massive state corruption, while watching the center of gravity of public political debate and action shift toward radical groups like the EZLN or moderate groups like Alianza Civica. Desperate in the face of so many crises, the fragmenting ruling alliance has struck back with its usual violence --military repression in Chiapas, police state repression all over the place. At the same time, unfortunately, it has not collapsed and is hardly without resources --both financial and human-- even in extremis. As a result we have begun to see some new efforts to fight back on various fronts, including that of cyberspace.
./english/368.txt:102:One of the more provocative of these analyses to come to light, so far, has been that by national security analysts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt working at RAND Corp.(42) In a 1993 report entitled "CyberWar is Coming!", they formulate two related concepts: cyberwar and netwar --in both of which the role of information is central and critical. The former refers to military war making while the latter refers to "societal-level ideational conflicts waged in part through internetted modes of communication", "most often associated with low intensity conflict". Their examples of cyberwar range from the Mongols to the Gulf War. One of their primary examples of netwar is how "advocacy movements" are "increasingly organizing into cross-border networks and coalitions, identifying more with the development of civil society (even global civil society) than with nation-states and using advanced information and communications technologies to strengthen their activities". While Arquilla and Ronfeldt cite movements concerned with environmental, human-rights and religious issues, the pro-Zapatista movement is clearly another example of the kind of activity they are concerned with. In their discussion the "other side" of such "netwar" is the state and its traditional hierarchical institutions of governance. With their writing directed primarily at the U.S. government --with which they clearly identify-- they warn that new forms of warfare must be developed appropriate to this new arena of power.(43)
./english/368.txt:110:Such thinking about the emergence of cyberspace challenges to governability have also drawn on the currently popular concept of "civil society" to contemplate how such threats might be tamed and integrated. In these formulations, "civil society" is conceived as that part of society dominated by neither state nor market and often best represented by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), e.g., human rights, environmental, consumer, women's groups. In a recent RAND paper (which I do not yet have permission from the authors to quote or cite and therefore will not name) available through the RAND web site, Cathryn Thorup and David Ronfeldt have collaborated to provide a sketch of the problems of integrating the increasingly powerful networks of "civil society" into a workable balance with the state (hierarchy) and business (market). For those whose understanding of democracy sees the state and business as fundamental obstacles to its realization, such a conceptualization can only lead to formulae for co-optation, neutralization and defeat.(47)
./english/368.txt:114:On the side of the computer industry, rogue activity in cyberspace has provoked renewed efforts to enclose as much of that space as possible via commercialization and the enforcement through the State of "intellectual property rights", e.g., attacks on software piracy or copyright violations. With the growth of the commercial and governmental use of The Net a burgeoning "operational security" industry has also emerged to create and defend new kinds of electronic "barbed wire" around enclosed cyberspaces.(49) The infrastructure of The Net has been taken over by private capital (e.g., Sprintlink, MCI) and is no longer managed by public institutions such as ARPA or the National Science Foundation.(50) Today all access to The Net is via some commercial gateway. Institutions such as universities pay large fees, individuals pay smaller ones. Computer magazines are filled with advertisements of companies such as America On-line, Prodigy, Delphi and now Microsoft offering competing gateways to The Net and charging varying rates depending on the enclosed services to which access is desired.
./english/368.txt:118:On the side of the state, besides backing up the "legal rights" of corporate private property, governments struck first against hackers who dared to penetrate the state's own enclosures, e.g., military computer systems. The best known cases in the U.S. have been well publicized FBI arrests of hackers and seizures of equipment. The strategy has been terror: prosecute a few to intimidate others.(52)
./english/369.txt:19:The conference decided to coordinate its work better, particularly in the struggle against any new war waged by US imperialism and its allies, in solidarity with immigrants and in the struggle for "European-wide social rights". It will take this opportunity to adopt a common logo in order to underscore its political identity as a European anti-capitalist current.
./english/369.txt:52:immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops from the occupied territories in Palestine, suspension of the EU-Israeli treaty, respect for democratic and human rights, and the right of the Palestinian people to organise itself in a state with minimum guarantees for its survival;
./english/369.txt:55:2. Against Fortress Europe: for freedom of movement and equal rights for all men and women! For solidarity and unity in the world of labour on a continental scale!
./english/369.txt:59:The EU's "solution" consists in developing and coordinating its special border police, transit camps, collective expulsions, sped-up "justice" and financial sanctions against immigrants' countries of origin on a European scale. For our part, we reaffirm the right for all to freedom of movement, the right to asylum, the right to live in our countries with all the same rights as the native EU populations: in short, opening the borders and granting full citizenship to all.
./english/369.txt:65:First, the tracking of—legal as well as "illegal"—immigrants, against a background of xenophobia and racism, creates a fertile climate to impose the application of the EU's "anti-terrorist" legislation. This is a real threat to democratic freedoms. For example, the Spanish government has finally succeeded in brutalising immigrants in Andalusia and outlawing Herri Batasuna, a legal, parliamentary party that represents a substantial sector of the Basque people. The overwhelming majority of the Basque people reject this decision and want a democratic solution involving recognition of their democratic rights.
./english/369.txt:67:Second, the bosses and governments over-exploit this foreign work force, which is malleable and subjected to virtual forced labour and has neither rights nor unions. In addition, while the governments close the borders, they call for a new immigration policy that would enable them to grab hold "legally" of the most skilled workers from Third World countries, while agreeing "as a concession" to take charge as well of "the portion" of Third World sub-proletarians assigned to them. All this in the name of "supplementing the labour market" and "making up for the demographic deficit" (which is supposedly a threat to future generations' pensions!).
./english/369.txt:75:We fight against any form of xenophobia or racism, whether of state or popular origin. We extend our solidarity to all the victims of the bosses' and governments' discriminatory policies. We demand immediate equality, and full social and political rights for all men and women who live in our countries. But we are conscious that it is necessary to deal with the roots of the problem: we have to fight and organise for solidarity and unity within the world of labour. To do this the labour movement must take a radical turn and stop setting native-born workers against those who are newly arriving and male workers against female. This means making organising newly arriving workers a moral and social priority, so that they share the same struggles, the same demands, the same organisations, and the same program that puts "people before profits".
./english/369.txt:77:d) The market annexation of the eastern European countries, which is a genuine "periphery" dominated by the imperialist EU, will reinforce these developments even more. This absorption will not occur without a major crisis in the countryside and a considerable social regression in the cities, with a massive rise in inequality in each of these countries—all the more so because the EU will impose its neo-liberal prescriptions without ensuring the promised transfers that are indispensable to relaunching these economies (the EU's agricultural policy, structural funds and grants). It is up to the eastern countries' own peoples to decide whether they want to join the EU under these conditions. We will struggle inside the EU to ensure that they get the same social, environmental, political and democratic rights and norms that we have. We propose to the world of labour, women and youth to join in a single struggle for a different Europe. We will struggle for a trade unionism that unites male and female workers as well as all the emancipatory social movements throughout the European continent. The anti-capitalist left commits itself to developing the best possible contacts and collaboration with the east European left, which is active in social, political, trade unionist, feminist, environmentalist, anti-racist, pro-peace and anti-war and citizens' movements.
./english/369.txt:79:As for Turkey, its laws, rights and policies at the level of political democracy are incompatible with those of EU member states. We support all the progressive forces in this country, still dominated by the military caste, in their struggle for a radical change on these issues. In particular, we are in solidarity with the Kurdish people, which is struggling for its national-democratic, political and cultural rights.
./english/369.txt:105:Our alternative program is as simple, easy and clearly defined as the bosses' neo-liberal one: a full-time, stable job, a decent wage, and a liveable replacement income (in the event of unemployment, disease, disability or retirement) for everyone; radical reduction of working time without loss of pay or intensification of work, with compensatory hiring; the right to housing, education and professional training and health care, all good quality; and access to means of public transport. These political and social rights will be equal for all workers, native and immigrant, men and women. Implementing them requires: a radical extension of public services; a recasting of the state budget (including the tax system) that drastically increases social spending; and a radical redistribution of wealth and income from capital towards labour. For this purpose, all anti-capitalist measures must be taken that are needed to control and, if necessary, expropriate private property and transform it into social, public property.
./english/369.txt:131:The organisations that come together in the conferences of the European Anti-Capitalist Left are moving ahead. First, we are staking out our own political identity, made concrete through a "common logo". Second, we are setting to work on more detailed positions on immigrant issues and on the Charter of Social Rights, as a basis for joint activities. Finally, the next Conference of the EACL, the fifth one, will take place in Copenhagen, in December 2002. It will be organised by the RGA.
./english/371.txt:18:In Davos, a small minority of the world’s wealthy rulers were protected by the Swiss police. They could not move without police and military protection. However, they have now been exposed by the billions of people in the world. People became aware of their lies, which they try to conceal with beautiful words such as democracy, the free market, human rights, development, etc…
./english/376.txt:28:the interest of the giant corporations; oppose the tightening of the so-called intellectual property rights regime which strangles the knowledge commons; oppose the short-sighted adoption of proprietary software by many governments; oppose the normalisation of the discourse of 'public-private-partnership' that makes privatisation seem inevitable and avoids talk of communication systems focused on people before profits.
./english/376.txt:32:Promote communication as a human right and as a public good; promote and protect non-commercial, non-profit information, communication, and media systems (while taking care to avoid monopoly control by the state); promote regulation at international, national, and local levels to block the concentration of media ownership in the hands of the multinational conglomerates; promote alternatives to intellectual property rights including limiting such rights to individuals (not corporations); promote the knowledge commons, fair use, and copyright exemptions for poor countries; promote free and open source software; advance the discourse and practice of the global justice movement in taking the battle against neo-liberalism to the field of communication systems, and demand communication systems that serve people before profits.
./english/377.txt:10:Brinda Karat, general secretary of the AIDWA, speaking on a panel discussion on TV, referring to the gathering at the Asian Social Forum, said they are resisting the “Empire”. Indeed the gathering of 14,000 persons in Hyderabad, of whom unusually almost half if not more were dalits, and a good proportion of women, apart from those who work with the rights of the most oppressed and excluded, could be seen as a defining moment for the ‘Empire to strike back’ on many counts. As an expression of the vitality of the numerous identities, like dalits, displaced persons, unorganised workers and their ability to share a common space. As an expression of the widespread understanding of the international order, revealing the fact that information on the ‘big picture’ has reached the remote, thus justifying or affirming the value of forums and networks which have worked hard to carry the message of where and how the increasing pressures on dignity and survival are coming from. As a quest for alternatives to the current political and economic regimes and the theories that back them up. And, last but not the least, evidence that civil society has developed the mode and skills to hold international or world conferences outside of the UN’s initiative; an important step forward, as the UN world conferences are beginning to become counterproductive as the conservative forces and the unipolar world debases them.
./english/377.txt:18:Beginning as an offshoot of the World Social Forum, which also had a beginning as an alternative to the World Economic Forum, with ‘globalisation’, and the Bretton Woods Institutions as the whipping boys, the Asian Social Forum took a shape of its own, expanding the space, almost encroaching on the primacy of space usually occupied by not only government representatives but the ever-present UN agencies and bilateral donors; looking for potentials for funding and for their legitimacy as upholders of human rights, and supporters of poverty removal efforts. There was also the shift in the character of those present from NGO types usually engaged in ‘development’ to people’s movements. Also evident was the learning that had filtered in, from the earlier experience of participating in the NGO. Forums of the UN – for which naturally the UN system and the bilateral donors have to be given credit – from Durban for the dalit groups, from the people’s health assembly of the health for all movement, from the various women’s conferences for the women.
./english/377.txt:22:They were not deterred by the falling sky. The overpowering march of that great exterminator, the new political face of economic power, Bush and his allies. The impending war against Iraq, the overpowering of the UN as an international arbiter and protector of the sovereignty of nations, the hot pursuit into Pakistan, the incapacity of any other comity of nations to challenge the crushing march of this monolith; the many domestic laws, in the US as well as in all other countries, promulgated as anti-terrorist laws which violate human rights; the hate language built around religion which has given new pugnacity to domestic fundamentalist forces may have been in their consciousness, but there was also a resolve to get on with their work on the ground.
./english/378.txt:61:The anti-war movement in Russia and the West has little choice but to take up the banner of civil rights and liberties as well. It would be naive, however, to think that issues of this magnitude could be resolved by parading around the streets of a few European cities. The anti-war movement must prepare itself for a long, hard fight.
./english/379.txt:66:In January 1995, when the Mexican government attacked the Zapatistas, the latter used computer networks to inform and mobilize individuals and groups throughout the world to support them in their battle against repressive government action. There were many demonstrations in support of the rebels throughout the world. Prominent journalists, human rights observers and delegations traveled to Chiapas to demonstrate solidarity and to report on the uprising. The Mexican and US governments were bombarded with messages calling for negotiations rather than repression. The Mexican government was forced to back down and halt their repression of the insurgents. While carrying out various forms of subjugation, they continued to sporadically negotiate, and as of this writing in late 2001, the new Mexican President Vicente Fox has agreed to continue negotiations.[6]
./english/379.txt:100:One of the more instructive examples of the use of the internet to foster global struggles against the excesses of corporate capitalism occurred in the protests in Seattle and throughout the world against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in December 1999, and the subsequent emergence of a worldwide anti-globalization movement in 2000-2001. Behind these actions was a global protest movement using the internet to organize resistance to the institutions of capitalist globalization, while championing democratization. In the build-up to the 1999 Seattle demonstrations, many websites generated anti-WTO material and numerous mailing lists used the internet to distribute critical material and to organize the protest. The result was the mobilization of caravans from throughout the United States to take protestors to Seattle, as well as contingents of activists throughout the world. Many of the protestors had never met and were recruited through the internet. For the first time ever, labour, environmentalist, feminist, anticapitalist, animal rights, anarchist and other groups organized to protest aspects of globalization and to form new alliances and solidarities for future struggles. In addition, demonstrations took place throughout the world, and a proliferation of anti-WTO material against the extremely secret group spread throughout the internet.[9]
./english/379.txt:108:The Seattle protests had some immediate consequences. The day after the demonstrators made good on their promise to shut down the WTO negotiations, Bill Clinton gave a speech endorsing the concept of labour rights enforceable by trade sanctions, thus effectively making impossible any agreement during the Seattle meetings. In addition, at the World Economic Forum in Davos a month later there was much discussion of how concessions were necessary on labour and the environment if consensus over globalization and free trade were to be possible. Importantly, the issues of overcoming divisions between the information-rich and the information-poor, and improving the lot of the disenfranchised and oppressed, bringing these groups the benefits of globalization, were also seriously discussed at the meeting and in the media.
./english/379.txt:112:More important, many activists were energized by the new alliances, solidarities and militancy, and continued to cultivate an anti-globalization movement. The Seattle demonstrations were followed by April 2000 struggles in Washington, D.C., to protest the World Bank and IMF, and later in the year against capitalist globalization in Prague and Melbourne; in April 2001, an extremely large and militant protest erupted against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quebec City. It was apparent that a new worldwide movement was in the making capable of uniting diverse opponents of capitalist globalization throughout the world. The anticorporate globalization movement favoured globalization from below, which would protect the environment, labour rights, national cultures, democratization and other goods from the ravages of an uncontrolled capitalist globalization (see Falk 1999 and Brecher, Costello and Smith 2000).
./english/379.txt:190:disparate groups from the Direct Action Network to the AFL-CIO to various environmental and human rights groups have organized rallies and protests online, allowing for a global reach that would have been unthinkable just five years ago.
./english/380.txt:101: The experience of September 11 points to the objective ambiguity of globalization, that positive and negative sides are interconnected, that the institutions of the open society unlock the possibilities of destruction and violence, as well as democracy, free trade, and cultural and social exchange. Once again, the interconnection and interdependency of the networked world was dramatically demonstrated as terrorists from the Middle East brought local grievances from their region to attack key symbols of American power and the very infrastructure of New York. Some saw terrorism as an expression of “the dark side of globalization,” while I would conceive it as part of the objective ambiguity of globalization that simultaneously creates friends and enemies, wealth and poverty, and growing divisions between the “haves” and “have nots.” Yet, the downturning of the global economy, intensification of local and global political conflicts, repression of human rights and civil liberties, and general increase in fear and anxiety have certainly undermined the naïve optimism of globaphiles who perceived globalization as a purely positive instrument of progress and well-being.
./english/380.txt: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: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:181: The Seattle protests had some immediate consequences. The day after the demonstrators made good on their promise to shut down the WTO negotiations, Bill Clinton gave a speech endorsing the concept of labor rights enforceable by trade sanctions, thus effectively making impossible any agreement and consensus during the Seattle meetings. In addition, at the World Economic Forum in Davos a month later there was much discussion of how concessions were necessary on labor and the environment if consensus over globalization and free trade were to be possible. Importantly, the issue of overcoming divisions between the information rich and poor, and improving the lot of the disenfranchised and oppressed, bringing these groups the benefits of globalization, were also seriously discussed at the meeting and in the media.
./english/380.txt:189: In May 2002, a surprisingly large demonstration took place in Washington against capitalist globalization and for peace and justice, and it was apparent that a new worldwide movement was in the making that was uniting diverse opponents of capitalist globalization throughout the world. The anticorporate globalization movement favored globalization-from-below, which would protect the environment, labor rights, national cultures, democratization, and other goods from the ravages of an uncontrolled capitalist globalization (see Falk 1999; Brecher, Costello, and Smith 2000; and Steger 2002).
./english/380.txt:193: Initially, the incipient anti-globalization movement was precisely that - anti-globalization. The movement itself, however, was increasingly global, was linking together a diversity of movements into global solidarity networks, and was using the Internet and instruments of globalization to advance its struggles. Moreover, many opponents of capitalist globalization recognized the need for a global movement to have a positive vision and be for such things as social justice, equality, labor, civil liberties and human rights, and a sustainable environmentalism. Accordingly, the anti-capitalist globalization movement began advocating common values and visions.
./english/383.txt:83:England. Describes the nature of the historical commons, rights and duties, commons regimes,
./english/383.txt:97:moral field or the ‘ethical commons’. Considers utilitarian and rights based systems and
./english/386.txt:123:A major organisation at the forefront of the struggles against infiltration of Global capitalism was the Karnataka Rytha Rajya Sangha (KRRS). It became famous in the early nineties by its agitation against Kentucky Fried Chicken and against the attempt at gaining monopoly rights on seed and plant material by Transnational companies like Cargill. The farmers were outraged by the prospect of buying seeds every season from multinational seed companies. Methods of seed presevation integral to the farming experience and knowledge system of farmers since the time immemorial will be destroyed by this process.
./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:147:The immediate struggles will have to focus on the questions of survival and sustenance; on economic and social rights, on human rights including the right to self-determination. Alongwith protecting the sovereignity of the state against force of international capitalism and compel the state to fulfil its obligation to the people, to provide them social security and welfare, to meet their minimum needs. Also prevent the state to fritter away our natural resources and our environment in the name of development to transnational or indigenous capital. The content cannot be exhausted by these immediate needs. A goal of a new universal culture and a new internationalism will be necessary components of the vision.
./english/387.txt:22:In Colombia, the peasant-based guerrilla army, the Popular Army of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, has extended its influence to close to half the rural municipalities in the country. While not strictly speaking a peasant movement since almost one-third of its recruits come from the town and cities, many of its programmatic demands are rural-centered: land reform, human rights in the countryside, unionization of farm workers, etc. With close to 15,000 mostly peasant combatants it is probably the most potent guerrilla army in the Third World today and gaining strength. One indication is the fact that the U.S. Defense Department has dropped the fiction that its multi-million dollar military aid program is directed toward fighting narcotraffickers. It publicly endorsed the shipment of arms to fight peasant insurgency.
./english/387.txt:24:In Mexico, the Zapatista movement (EZLN) has re-opened the question of Indian rights, land reform, and more fundamentally the whole NAFTA/free market policies promoted by Clinton and Zedillo. Without the Zapatista uprising in 1994, the signing and implementation of NAFTA would have passed as an elite ceremonial event. Since implementation of NAFTA began, over one million peasants have been ruined and tens of millions of salaried employees have had their incomes cut by half. The demands and critique of the EZLN resonate throughout the country.
./english/387.txt:43:What became clear, however, in the course of the discussions was a profound difference between these militants and the public figures that the Western mass media present as “Indian spokes people.” For example, the Bolivians spoke disparagingly of the so-called “Quechua-speaking vice-president” who talks to the Indians and works for the rich foreigners. The Guatemalans were very critical of Rigoberta Menchu for her embrace of symbolic “Mayan” cultural changes divorced from the larger political-economic and human rights issues. And the Ecuadorean FONIC-I leaders spoke critically of two Indian leaders of the umbrella CONAI movement who were co-opted by the corrupt free market Bucaram regime. The leaders of the Indian movements at the CLOC congress were not falling victim to the “cultural identity” politics designed to divide and co-opt local leaders in order to undercut the movement’s demands for land rights.
./english/387.txt:62:But not all peasant movements are in a position to respond to death-squad repression. A peasant leader from Colombia at the Congress told of the systematic extermination of peasant activists and their families by paramilitary groups who suspect any proponents of land reform or advocates of human rights as disguised guerrilla sympathizers because the FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces) also support those demands.
./english/388.txt:27:Thirdly, human rights versus protectionism. Northern labour calls for human rights legislation as part of trade agreements, while southern labour interprets this as selective use of ‘human rights’ as a disguised form of protectionism.
./english/389.txt:9:The World Summit on the Information Society proposes to develop “a common vision and understanding of the information society and the adoption of a declaration and plan of action.” A vision of society must necessarily have people at its center and an understanding of the fundamental rights and needs of humankind. The goals of such a society should be based on principles of social, political and economic justice.
./english/390.txt:21:The two arms of the Indian Government have evolved the perfect pincer action. While one arm is busy selling India off in chunks, the other, to divert attention, is orchestrating a howling, baying chorus of Hindu nationalism and religious fascism. It is conducting nuclear tests, rewriting history books, burning churches, and demolishing mosques. Censorship, surveillance, the suspension of civil liberties and human rights, the definition of who is an Indian citizen and who is not, particularly with regard to religious minorities, is becoming common practice now.
./english/390.txt:39:Meanwhile, the countries of the North harden their borders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. After all they have to make sure that it’s only money, goods, patents and services that are globalized. Not the free movement of people. Not a respect for human rights. Not international treaties on racial discrimination or chemical and nuclear weapons or greenhouse gas emissions or climate change, or — god forbid — justice.
./english/391.txt:8:It is also important because it has achieved the unification of the two generations of civil society: the NGOs that emerged in the 1970s to fight for human rights, sustainable development, full participation for women, etc, and in defence of human rights, of a sustainable environment, of the full participation of women, of the indigenous movement, and the movement that arose in the 1990s as an opposition force to the neoliberal globalisation process.
./english/392.txt:130:NCHR (National Campaign for Housing Rights) − was perhaps the first and last one that
./english/392.txt:367:labouring poor and in relation to their struggles for dwelling (or ’housing’) rights and then later, from the
./english/392.txt:369:Convenor of the National Campaign for Housing Rights during 1986−1991 and Joint Convenor of the
./english/393.txt:106:world history. This will respect universal human rights, and those of all citizens – men
./english/393.txt:114:as a new stage in world history. This will respect universal human rights, and those of all
./english/393.txt:204:Human Rights, for peaceful relations, in equality and solidarity, among people, races,
./english/393.txt:209:social control by the State. It upholds respect for Human Rights, the practices of real
./english/395.txt:245:second European Social Forums, the World Social Thematic Forum on Democracy, Human Rights,
./english/395.txt:372:therefore doing is the classic ‘conflation’ in human rights discourse: in its opposition to “the use of
./english/396.txt:36:AC FIRE is an international communications venue working to contribute to bring a wide diversity of voices to the world’s media. Its mission is to: amplify the voices and ideas of women; promote the human rights of women; connect multiple voices, technologies and actions; strengthen women’s and Third World media efforts by participating in networks, and in local, regional and global initiatives; generate individual and collective commitment to movement building and action; and produce high quality, non-sexist, activist programs in Spanish and English for radio and the internet.
./english/396.txt:38:AC FIRE disseminates women's voices in all their diversity and allows their perspectives to be heard by men and women around the world, crossing barriers of nationality, culture, race, geography and language, and gender. FIRE’s feminist perspective is not about ‘women’s rights’ it is women’s voices and perspectives on all issues. FIRE is not ‘for’ women; it is by and about women talking about every issue, for all. While it is international in scope and reach, it is mainly done from the identity of Latin American and Caribbean feminists who are FIRE´s permanent producers and directors.
./english/396.txt:48:The right to information, the exercise of the freedom of expression and the human right to communicate through the media, access, the appropriation and use of the new technologies, all constitute, at the present, rights denied to the extensive majority of the women.
./english/396.txt:118:FIRE is about an international radio that broadcasts a critical content that combines sound with text and images with colors with an innovative treatment of the information. This interactive concept of radio is the creative process of a group of women that learn day to day to take advantage of the technological resources, in order to open channels that enable conversations within the networks and that allow women to create new forms of inclusion and disclosure of issues and perspectives for the sake of advancing their own human rights and those of all of humanity.
./english/396.txt:196:· Influence in the women’s media caucus in its document to governments so that the issues and strategies of women’s media in the region would be included. The main contribution of FIRE to the language of the document was that of defining the criteria of the voluntary codes of ethics of the media, based on the international framework of the human rights. This focus allowed women in media to solve a critical problem in the debate: by placing the discussion in the human rights framework we prevent arbitrary codes.
./english/396.txt:297:"What I found, as a woman and a human rights activist, is that there was no focus on the way in which racism and racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerances impacted on women," said Lesley. "As a black woman who grew up under apartheid, I thought it was necessary to look at the intersections of gender, racism, racial discrimination, etc., within the South Africa context."
./english/396.txt:301:Although the new South African Constitution and Bill of Rights includes equality clauses, Lesley noted that the results of these laws remain to be seen. "For that we need a change of mind, and for all a change of approach of everybody within the society." And WCAR offers this chance, particular for women: "For us this conference is very important because it is going to say that we as women are not going to stand by and observe what is happening around this conference...We are taking control over the situation, we are engaging in reflections, discussions, research and analyses, to come up with a plan of action and a set of strategies, which will contribute to what is the decade of mobilisation against racism and that will give as an equal place in the political discussion."
./english/396.txt:694:(From Ecuador): From Cuenca Ecuador, we are trying to make contact and listen to your program “Maratón a Todo Dar,” but it is not possible for us. We wish to see if it is possible to connect with you via our radio program, “Women in Radio,” which is at: www.ondasazuayas.com , and to see if you can get our signal and establish a connection on this special day when we are talking about the theme of women’s rights, with good public participation. If we aren’t able to connect, we sent greetings with much sisterhood for all the women and men who are participating with you in this marathon. Sandra López, Cuenca Ecuador.
./english/398.txt:14:Answering the question from the audience on what the WSF movement hoped to 'win' Emilio Tadei of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences said that one should not talk in terms one 'big victory' but about a series of smaller victories from the individual to the international level. These victories he said would be about winning various rights and social advancement for the people while at the same time 'carrying out a revolution in our daily lives'.
./english/400.txt:25:This development of networked organisation is also evident among multinational corporations. Many have sought to gain competitive advantage through strategic alliances including supplier and producer networks, technology development networks and standards coalitions (Castells, 1996). Similarly, 'new' social movements of recent decades, including environmental, women's, human rights and development movements, have achieved success at least in part through their adoption of networked organisational forms that allow very diverse groups to come together in collective action where values and concerns coincide (e.g. Sikkink, 1993; Castells, 1997; Schultz, 1998; Moghadam, 2000). Such non-hierarchical networks pose particular difficulties for hierarchically organised adversaries, by obscuring obvious leadership and frequently comprising redundant actors and communications channels.
./english/400.txt:29:Transnational networks comprised solely of labour activists may face fundamental problems. Apart from 'elite' actors who operate at transnational levels, most trade unionists remain located in diverse national contexts. Collective action among these nationally-situated actors requires the development of trust, reciprocity and a shared 'cultural learning'. The circumstances in which these can develop may prove to be very limited (Tarrow, 2000). Arquilla & Ronfeldt suggest (1998a) it is not necessarily the case that networked organisation is the only possible mode of organisation in information-intensive conflict, but that mastery of its techniques are essential. The combination of hierarchical and decentralised organisation ultimately may prove to be effective in transnational labour organising: campaigns in support of Guatemalan coffee workers benefitted on the one hand from the rapid transfer of information, decision making and grassroots involvement of workers and other social groups, and on the other hand with the ability to mobilise people and to provide financial and infrastructure resources possible from the more traditionally accountable IUF (Kidder & McGinn, 1995). Similar relationships between centralised hierarchies and decentralised networks can be seen in the apparently decentralised networks of 'new' social movements. For example human rights, issue-based networks may include decentralised organisations linked to local social movements typically concerned with struggling to establish or defend their own human rights, alongside organisations, such as international governmental organisations and private foundations concerned with the defence of others' rights (Sikkink, 1993; Sharpe, 2000). The environmental movement similarly includes organisations such as Greenpeace which has a highly centralised organisation in combination with a decentralised global network of local groups and activists (Castells, 1997).
./english/400.txt:36:Environmentalists have been particularly adept at exploiting the mainstream electronic and paper media to disseminate values and ideas. They have, for example, employed high profile, media-friendly, stunts and non-violent direct action to ensure extensive coverage of their activities (Castells, 1997; Waterman, 2000), (though Scott & Street (2000) have suggested that such actions may have become merely a form of 'managed spectatorship'). Environmentalists, human rights activists, consumer groups and others have used the Internet to mobilise public support in high profile international campaigns against national governments, intergovernmental bodies and transnational corporations. Among the many examples of this are support for the Mexican Zapatista rebels in Chiapas (Cleaver, 1998; Schultz, 1998), the campaign against the OECD's Multinational Agreement on Investment (MAI) (Varney & Brian, 2000), against the military regime in Burma (Bray, 1998; Danitz & Strobel, 1999) and campaigns against individual multinational such as Royal Dutch Shell and Monsanto (Bray, 1998). Consequently, there are now companies which specialise in monitoring Web sites, news groups or mailing lists for critical materials on client companies and in providing the opportunity for ‘rapid rebuttal’ coverage or legal restraints. Some companies have attempted to engage campaigners on this terrain by using their own Web sites to provide alternative commentaries on contentious issues in which they are involved (Bray, 1998)
./english/400.txt:52:Campaign C: Rio Tinto 1998- Stakeholder campaign against the company's industrial relations, human rights, environmental and health and safety practices.
./english/400.txt:61:In February 1998, ICEM launched a campaign to ensure that the mining multinational Rio Tinto, would "respect human and trade union rights and adhere to a set of basic standards in the field of the environment, occupational health and safety and working condition" (ICEM, 1998b). The company was targetted because of "the extreme actions of the company in seeking to de-unionise its operations and to restrict the bargaining rights of its workers" (ICEM, 1997: 0). Alongside the campaigning activities ICEM have also set about building an organisational network among those affiliates organising in Rio Tinto-owned companies. In early 2001, the Web pages were taken down following the reintroduction of collective bargaining in Australian coal mines previously on individual contracts and the beginning of discussions on a possible global agreement.
./english/400.txt:70:Campaign C: Rio Tinto Specific - Multinational enterprise Trade union rights; health & safety, environmental standards
./english/400.txt:77:All three of the industrially-focussed cybercampaigns (A, C & D) adopted corporate-campaign style approaches to identifying the adversary, broadening the campaign beyond the company directly involved to include variously shareholders, bankers, suppliers, distributors, regulatory bodies, politicians and diplomats. Campaign C in particular sought to draw attention to wider issues than simply the company's approach to industrial relations, including health and safety, indigenous peoples' rights and environmental issues (ICEM, 1997; 1998). The focus on shareholders extended to submitting two resolutions to the company's 2000 AGMs in Australia and the UK, including a motion to commit the company to complying with a range of ILO resolutions (Taylor, 2000).
./english/400.txt:90:In the three industrial campaigns, the companies' use of the Internet also appear to have developed. In Campaign A, the company made no online response. In Campaign C, the company, which has also been the target of environmental and other criticism, contains general statements on environment, community relations and human rights (e.g. Rio Tinto, 2000) but does not acknowledge or respond to specific claims. In Campaign D, the parent company established web pages to counter the ICEM/USWA case directly. These pages included a chronology of the dispute, a point by point response to the USWA allegations, press releases and links to press coverage. As well as hyperlinks to Continental sites in the USA and Germany, these pages included links directly to the ICEM campaign pages and to the North Carolina Department of Labor. The company informed ICEM of the link to the cybercampaign, and asked for a reciprocal link to the company's pages about the dispute. Continental AG, in effect, elected to respond in kind to the cybercampaign engaging the unions directly in the information netwar. As others have suggested (e.g. Bray, 1998) this may indicate an increasingly sophisticated response to such cybercampaigns by companies.
./english/400.txt:172:Sharp, W. (2000) Rebel Internet: Human Rights and the new technology, pp. 43-51 in Hick, S., Halpin, E. & Hoskins, E. (eds.) Human Rights and the Internet, Macmillan Press, London
./english/400.txt:174:Sikkink, K. (1993), Human rights, principled issue-networks, and sovereignty in Latin America, International Organization 47(3) pp411-441
./english/401.txt:39:[T]he dissolution of old identities does not always foreshadow movement. Far from it. The unraveling of working-class identity among…workers leaves them tripping in many directions…Unitary subjects splinter and then recombine in hybrid forms. They congeal into movements when cemented by an imagination of an alternative, better world […] Every step in the direction of flexible accumulation, global-local mutuality, and new identities, calls forth a reaction, the reassertion of Fordism, the state and old essentialist subjects. The dinosaurs of Fordism are still around…Welfare states have not disappeared…The economy still requires and receives ample regulation…Old identities have not dissolved in a welter of hybridity…Blue collar workers still organize themselves in unions and in some countries they even have parties […] Western global hegemonies cannot be overthrown through violence. Instead, we turn to wars of position in which different groups with multiple identities have to be woven together around universalistic interests such as human rights or environmental justice…It is not so much a matter of creating movements outside the hegemonic order but rather on its terrain, radicalizing the meaning of democracy, appropriating the market, democratizing sovereignty, and expanding human rights. (Michael Burawoy 2000:347-9)
./english/401.txt:76:· Biodiversity, Rival Knowledges and Intellectual Property Rights
./english/401.txt:78:While technologically advanced countries seek to extend intellectual property rights and patent law to biodiversity - there have already been attempts to patent human gene sequences - some peripheral countries, indigenous peoples groups and NGOs on their behalf are seeking to guarantee the conservation and reproduction of biodiversity by granting special protection status to the territories, ways of life, and traditional knowledges of indigenous and peasant communities. It is increasingly evident that the new cleavages between the North and the South will be centered around the question of access to biodiversity on a global scale.
./english/401.txt:80:We can reduce the four initial themes to this: the attempt to develop a post-capitalist and post-liberal (even post-socialist) understanding of Democracy, Production, Rights and Knowledge. I stress an understanding, rather than a condition or state (or State) – such as traditional understandings of Socialism, Communism or Utopia. Perhaps what is being proposed here is a change of direction, in which the destination is neither prescribed in advance, nor even known, but is to be discovered with our fellow-travelers whilst walking and talking. RSE articulates these four themes not with internationalism or solidarity in general but with a new kind of labor internationalism in particular. It must be said here that this articulation is unique. For in so far as there is a contemporary literature articulating emancipation with internationalism, it tends to be with some new cosmopolitanism, some new form of global governance or with some modest notion of 'transborder' or 'transnational' politics (Eschle 2001:Ch.5), rather than with a new labor internationalism in particular.
./english/401.txt:100:In so far, however, as a new labor internationalism is understood as one amongst many internationals and internationalisms (concerned with democracy, alternative production/consumption, with rights, with knowledge) then RSE represents no obstacle to re-articulating the original Marxist trinity, Emancipation-Internationalism-Emancipation, in a manner appropriate for, against and beyond a globalized networked capitalist (dis)order.
./english/401.txt:111:· Rob Lambert and Eddie Webster on the Southern Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights (L&W, Sigtur).
./english/401.txt:118:Costa/Portugal and European Works Councils. The focus of Costa's piece is divided between the EWCs and Portuguese union response to such. The EWCs come out of 1994 legislation at European level, the intention of which was to allow for worker/union consultation within larger multinationals (1,000+ employees) and with at least 150 employees in two or more member states. They thus come out of various European national traditions of consultation and bargaining, and the general European tradition of social partnership. Their establishment was, of course, provoked by the internationalization of capital (non-European companies are covered) on the one hand, and the development of the European Union on the other. The EWCs were argued for by the European Trade Union Confederation, with the aim of protecting and furthering labor and union rights across frontiers, and of establishing industrial relations and collective bargaining at a European level. Whilst almost 2,000 such companies (predominantly German, US and British, in that order) do have such EWCs, their establishment and powers are a matter of negotiation, thus differing by company and country, and sometimes within companies according to country concerned.
./english/401.txt:150: Véras/Brazilian Metalworkers. This is another paper focused on the industrial and national struggles of Brazilian auto/metalworkers, and concerned with their efforts to re-assert themselves nationally in the face of a neo-liberal globalization that has profoundly changed the socio-political weight of the industrialized and unionized working class in that country. Véras concentrates on the mobilization of workers for a national-level collective contract for the auto sector in Brazil (see Oliveira above). He refers to the attempts to develop a union presence within the Mercosur and union activity in relation to the Free Trade Areas of the Americas (FTAA, see Mello e Silva above). He also mentions the activities of the CUT to create new alliances at local, national and international levels. The CUT has been active in relation to the environment, children's rights, citizenship and education, and against the neo-liberalism of the Cardoso government:
./english/401.txt:152:New alliances—particularly with social movements, NGOs, and political parties opposed to neoliberal-inspired policies—have also been pursued at the international level, through participation in demonstrations such as the one in Seattle (at the WTO meeting, in 1999), in Washington (at the IMF meeting, in 2000), and in Quebec (at the FTAA meeting, in 2001); in the constitution of networks, such as the Continental Social Alliance…; and in events such as the World Social Forum…[in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2001 – PW]…CUT's discourse has been increasingly incorporating the expression “citizen union” to designate (not without internal tensions), in an adverse context, a union practice of a more ["propositional"] character, that takes as its central issues the defense of employment and of social rights, that seeks to expand its action to institutional spaces and have a more direct influence on the formulation and execution of public social policies, that seeks to construct closer links with other organizations and social movements, at local (by focusing on the question of “local government”), national (by discussing a “national project”), and international levels.
./english/401.txt:158:The last section of the paper considers 'Social Unionism and Labor Internationalism'. The social unionism has to do with the involvement of the union in both local party politics and in creating schools and other services for the local communities. The labor internationalism has to do with the involvement of Sintrainagro with international organizations of banana and other agro-industrial worker unions, in Central and South America, in Europe and – hopefully – in other Third World countries. The organizing activities have been in connection with the Geneva-based International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF). The motivation here has been to reduce or avoid competition between banana workers (and banana-producers or producing countries) in the face of the multinationals and an increasingly unstable and competitive world market (which has led to an IUF-Chiquita agreement on basic labor conditions and union rights in the region). The educational/social activities have been carried out with the support of Scandinavian and Spanish unions:
./english/401.txt:169:The union takes part in the collective-bargaining-oriented European Works Councils (Costa 2001) for unions in the shoe sector. It seems to have been in advance of the Communist-aligned national CGTP-IN in joining European solidarity demonstrations (union supported but not union controlled, precursors of what some are now calling the Global Justice Movement or GJM). And, internationally, it has links with a dozen or more organizations and networks, union or other, associated with the GJM. The latter include union and rural labor organizations in Brazil, human rights and peace organizations, solidarity networks for homeworkers and the unemployed (with contacts also involving such countries as the UK, Spain, Australia, Thailand, Chile):
./english/401.txt:185:The most crucial question seems to be how to valorize the contribution of the working class in the informal sector worldwide and to give it a unified voice. This voice has to have a feminist perspective, as the mass of women in the Third World or the Global South are working in the informal sector. From this point of view, the experience of the NFF [National Fishworkers Forum – PW] is encouraging, as its leadership has been willing to create space for a feminist perspective on fisheries and the women involved, despite much hardship, have also not given up on asserting themselves in a heavily male dominated environment. However, this alternate perspective on interaction with nature, energy use, subsistence production as base for extended production, production of life and livelihood as central concern, has not found support from any of the mainstream trade unions. This can be explained by the fact that organized trade unionism had its origin in the very concept of industrialism which has turned out to devastate the resource base. Organized labor has the same insensitivity to the informal sector and resource management as patriarchy has had towards women’s housework and other subsistence labor. Even in Seattle, the unions of the organized sector deflected the mass struggle against market fascism of the WTO by demanding that the WTO include the social clause [the inter/national union attempt to establish labor rights through the WTO – PW]. The position in India is that social clause must be separated from trade agreements.
./english/401.txt:189: Lambert and Webster/Southern Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights. This paper deals with a particular attempt to create a new kind of union internationalism, originating in and primarily oriented toward the South. ('South' is here defined not geographically but politically, as a common project of 'some of the world's most exploited working classes, many…denied basic ILO…rights') SIGTUR is a network of old and new left or radical-nationalist unions, 'which would still claim to be fighting for a socialist transformation'. Under the provocation of neo-liberal globalization, it is taking direct and common action across, or regardless of, particular party-political affiliations locally, or international affiliations globally. Rooted in the left and internationalist traditions of Perth/Fremantle, in Western Australia, it began life around 1990, as an Indian Ocean network. It was, and is, most effectively linked at this ocean's two extremes, the other one being Durban, South Africa. However, the network has expanded, with growing links to Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea. And then, with a link to the Brazilian CUT (which has its own warm relations with South Africa's COSATU), it adopted its present name. It has seen a series of effective solidarity campaigns, including those of the South African and Indian with Australian workers and unions. The network claims to combine the old (union institutions) with the new (networking, campaigning, computer communication). L&W – both of them academics long-involved with the South African and/or West Australian and international unionism – set up an opposition between the Old Labor Internationalism (hierarchical, centralized, bureaucratized, formal, diplomatic in orientation, workplace-focused, etc) with the New Labor Internationalism (networked, decentralized, de-layered, oriented to mobilization, focused on coalitions with new social movements and 'Southern'). SIGTUR is presented as exemplifying the latter. Despite earlier opposition from the ICFTU internationally, and from rightwing unionists or neo-liberal governments nationally, SIGTUR evidently meets a common desire for leftwing unions confronted with globalization and aware of the ineffectiveness of the existing internationals. Recognizing, on the one hand, the severity of the neo-liberal offensive, on the other the commonly weakened condition of unionism, SIGTUR is working out a modest and practical alternative:
./english/401.txt:195:Following its 1999 conference in South Africa, SIGTUR undertook three campaigns: for a common Mayday 2000, around the issue of jobs; a corporate campaign against the anti-union Rio Tinto mining multinational (involving union cooperation with environmental, indigenous and human rights campaigners), and a 'global unionism' project. The authors report success on all three campaigns. The Rio Tinto campaign is of particular interest in so far as it involved a traditional international labor organization, the International Chemical, Energy and Mineworkers Federation (ICEM). By 'global unionism' SIGTUR apparently means direct cross-national ties of intensive practical exchange and solidarity, as here exemplified by an agreement between port/dockworkers' unions in Durban and Fremantle. L&W recognize four present challenges: uneven union organizational capacity and different local political traditions; the lack of resource commitment to the network by even the stronger national confederations; the necessity for unions to broaden their support base by organizing the casual, part-time and informal sector workers, as well as forming structured coalitions with women's, ecological and other such movements; and finding the right way of relating to the traditional institutionalized union internationals.
./english/401.txt:256:The studies certainly reveal the unions as either defenders of worker and democratic rights under neo-liberal or global attack, or as proponents of a deeper or more extended democracy. The attachment to democracy, the attention to citizenship, the extension of those addressed from union members to working people, women, children and others – all these are new, notable and valuable. In many cases, however, what the unions are trying to establish is a meaningfully liberal democracy in situations where this does not yet exist. Given the multiple shortcomings of liberal democracy, as revealed yet again by its globalized war against Afghanistan, this is a utopia turning into a distopia: islands of political democracy in oceans of social fascism - as Sousa Santos somewhere declares) – with the implication that the two spheres are inter-dependent. Even where the talk is of 'counter-hegemony', this is mostly in recognition of its non-achievement. And, even where it is seen as being achieved, such 'counter-hegemony' does not seem to amount to either the old socialism, nor a post-capitalist political alternative - nor even the old union utopia of the welfare state! The issue of 'international', 'cosmopolitan' or 'global democracy' does not arise here. Moreover, the extension or transformation of democracy within the trade unions is hardly (if at all) mentioned, though this has been recognized as the problem of unionism ever since the classical formulation of the 'iron law of oligarchy' early in the last century (Michels 1915).
./english/401.txt:260:The question of citizenship is raised directly by at least one of the papers and less directly by others. The re-assertion that the labor movement is a citizenship movement (and the suggestion that citizenship theory is relevant to union strategy) is a welcome rediscovery and claim (Johnston 1999). There is also the occasional suggestion that a regional/international union power or identity could reinforce (and/or re-empower?) national ones. But no major issue is made of women's, indigenous or ethnic minority identities and rights, even where these are significant within the democratic movements of the countries concerned.
./english/401.txt:262:It is no surprise that knowledge sources, rights or claims should remain un- addressed in these cases/studies, given that this aspect of emancipatory struggle is not only the newest but the furthest from traditional (not classical) labor concerns. The labor movement used to have its own knowledge – various socialist theories and ideologies – many addressed to the areas raised by the RSE Project. It also had its own means of knowledge-production and conservation – schools, papers, journals, colleges, archives. The shortcomings of the old theories, the collapse of Communist, Social-Democratic and Populist projects, and the frontal assault by (neo-)liberalism, seem to have provided the coup de grace to any independent notion of labor knowledge, to its classical values and to any self-confident identity. Whilst the contemporary movement might make gestures, or preserve rituals, referring to classical labor traditions, it can hardly be expected to be sensitive to new and unfamiliar issues, claims and challenges to raison du capital - positivist, instrumental, consumptionist, technocratic and possessive-individualist.
./english/405.txt:16:Ten years later, this enchantment is broken. An expressive and growing part of public opinion, in many countries, has adopted values whose anti-systemic potential is evident. A few examples: the fight for human rights is even more present in the agenda of societies but it has also gained another sense. Today, it means that the right to a decent life (in terms of its political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental aspects) must be assured for everyone, notwithstanding what they earn which is something that follows a logic that goes against capitalism.
./english/409.txt:52:Perhaps by transforming the anticorporate, antiglobalization movement into a pro-democracy movement that defends the rights of local communities to plan and manage their schools, their water and their ecology. In Porto Alegre, the most convincing responses to the international failure of representative democracy seemed to be this radical form of local participatory democracy, in the cities and towns where the abstractions of global rule become day-to-day issues of homelessness, water contamination, exploding prisons and cash-starved schools. Of course, this has to take place within a context of national and international standards and resources. But what seemed to be emerging organically out of the World Social Forum (despite the best efforts of some of the organizers) was not a movement for a single global government but a vision for an increasingly connected international network of very local initiatives, each built on direct democracy.
./english/417.txt:173:ESF’s are important to strengthen the local/national movements in their struggles for rights.
./english/417.txt:260:-> Trade union should bring much more proposals for common initiatives for defending rights
./english/417.txt:267:rights, the role of EPA is undefined
./english/417.txt:380: rights
./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:9:The conference calls for the United Nations to publish without any delay the report that the (UNHCR) United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has made about the Missions in Western Sahara.
./english/418.txt:16:This agreement between the EU and Morocco about fishing in the water territories of Western Sahara is an act of exploitation which is against international rights and legality.
./english/420.txt:133:human rights well into the 20th century. Secular citizens, for their part,
./english/420.txt:143:And it guarantees basic rights within the family. It avenges violence,
./english/467.txt:9: Yet Friedman visited Chile during the dictatorship, anointing the radical free-market, export-oriented thrust of the regime, praising Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet for his commitment to a “fully free market as a matter of principle,” and delivering talks with a title “The Fragility of Freedom” that could only be ironic in the Chilean context. Even as he accused his critics of being bent on “tarring and feathering” him with the regime’s human rights abuses, Friedman took pride in his doctrinal inspiration of what he described as the “Chilean Miracle.”
./english/472.txt:7:Since 2001, activists from around the world who are opposed to neoliberal corporate globalization have gathered annually at the World Social Forum (WSF). The Forum brings together tens of thousands of people from the world’s social movements and nongovernmental organizations in pursuit of varied agendas: for women’s rights, small-scale worker-controlled enterprises, public health, community-controlled schools and a host of other causes. In the words of Naomi Klein, it’s a movement of “one no and many yeses.”1 The phrase captures the pluralism and diversity of the movement, but at the same time makes clear that there is a core of unity about what it opposes. It also shows why it is difficult to analyze the movement.
./english/472.txt:13:The Forum held its first three meetings in Porto Alegre, Brazil and the fourth in Mumbai, India. The fifth met in Porto Alegre from January 26 to 31, 2005, as this article went to press. The WSF has been a heady experience for its many participants. Imagine a gathering with tens of thousands of people (100,000 in 2003) successfully communicating across barriers of language, political orientation and issue emphasis. The scene bursts with energy as people who work on particular causes at home—feminism, the environment, indigenous rights, economic justice, human rights, AIDS treatment and prevention and many more—compare notes and strategies. Musicians and other performers entertain in the open air during breaks, and dozens of organizations and publishers promote their projects and publications.
./english/502.txt:16:Ten years later, this enchantment is broken. An expressive and growing part of public opinion, in many countries, has adopted values whose anti-systemic potential is evident. A few examples: the fight for human rights is even more present in the agenda of societies but it has also gained another sense. Today, it means that the right to a decent life (in terms of its political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental aspects) must be assured for everyone, notwithstanding what they earn which is something that follows a logic that goes against capitalism.
./english/513.txt:10:The rapid emergence of regional, national and thematic Forums soon led to the emergence of a process anchored in diverse realities being built from a basis of multiple critiques, but which merge together in shared hopes of a world of peace, justice, rights, diversity, and radical changes in patriarchal, class-based, racist and exclusive relations.
./english/519.txt:42:The WSF has shown itself very efficient in giving impulse to the left wing’s political struggle in the beginning of this century. Innumerous declarations, platforms and calls have been coming out of the process’ events and have been fundamental to organize from the referendum on the FTTA in Brazil to the protests against the invasion of Iraq on February 15th, 2003. In each forum, social movements network meetings agree on an agenda for global mobiliza-tions, which is reference to thousands of movements and organizations. Declarations such as the “World Charter on the Rights to the City” have been produced in many forums. During the Caracas Forum, de declaration “Another integration, urgent, possible and necessary” was made. The “Ba-mako Call”, written in a seminar that took place one day before the Forum, is an important refer-ence to our days, assembling much of what the WSF has produced up to now. Some examples of “conclusions” produced “during the Forums” could be multiplied infinitely, and many would point out its efficiency as an impelling force to the organization of initiatives which are central to the left-ist movement nowadays.
./english/524.txt:17:Debt cancellation and a call for a forceful response to shameless robbery in the exploitation of Africa’s natural wealth (“how is it possible that we who possess the biggest natural wealth on the whole earth are the poorest continent at the same time?” a participant wondered). There was an appeal to develop Africa’s full potential, taking as a basis precisely those youth who are now looking for possibilities elsewhere due to lack of work. A primary issue then is education – “Eduquer ou périr” (educate or perish) the African philosopher Ki Zerbo said already fifty years ago – but directly connected with work. This implies changes in the political, economic, and socio-cultural environment. Remarkably, participants did not just see African culture as a good thing but also as an impediment for initiatives coming from people themselves. The individual deserves respect, not just as a member of a group, but also based on her own values and dignity. Organizations for human rights implementation are active all over the continent, also precisely in the struggle against poverty.
./english/527.txt:28:Houtart’s dichotomy, then, is very useful to bring some clarity in the debates on the forum, but it is clearly not complete. Moreover, many movements have completely different objectives. The best example comes from the advocates of an ecologically sustainable development that very often go beyond the anti- or post-capitalist dividing line. This certainly is one of the weakest spots in the WSF, since there surely are very interesting analysis of all that goes wrong in our environment, but no one apparently can or dares to say how the rich countries of the North have to change their non-sustainable production and consumption patterns. Debates are organised on the privatisation of water, on the rights of indigenous peoples and on the ecological debt, but only very rarely on how the rich have to change. Little attention is paid to the dividing lines within these movements. Some are clearly post-modernists, condemning all ideas about progress and advocating a totally different development. Others are more or less openly and consciously anti-modernists, believing only in small scale economies, autarky and self-management.
./english/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/544.txt:14:But in the chaos traditionally there in the WSF, a semblance of order normally emerges to enable the moot to play its due role of allowing social movements to interact with one another and create awareness among the people and mobilise them. Regrettably, this proved to be the weakest spot of WSF 2006 (Karachi). The organizations which attended - those working for landless peasants, bonded labour, fisherfolks’ rights, the Baloch, the Sindhis’ and the Kashmiris’ rights - were delighted with this opportunity to meet and strengthen their movements. But their message didn’t spread far and wide as it could have. This is a pity because so much human energy was available, waiting to be harnessed. There were so many issues waiting to be raised to create public opinion in favour of a struggle.
./english/544.txt:22:Pakistani NGOs have never been famous for mobilising the masses for any cause. The process of creating awareness and bringing people together for social change has not been easy in this country. The basic tool used by activists, namely interpersonal meetings, has had limited application in a society where community participation and social capital have not been its strength. The agencies which facilitate these contacts, such as trade bodies, students unions, human rights groups, have been destroyed over the years by oppressive governments that feared their power. Another tool used by social activists, namely, lobbying to influence policymakers has been more widely used. But in the absence of mobilisation and the backing of a large number of people, the lobbyists have at times not had the political clout that is needed to persuade those in office to change policies.
./english/544.txt:26:The Pakistan Social Forum, which organised the Karachi event, was formed in March 2003 when 50 civil society organisations, labour federations and trade unionists, rights-based people’s movements, teachers, journalists associations, political and social activists had a two-day consultation in Lahore. Their idea was to disseminate in Pakistan the ideals of the WSF - a forum of progressive, social democrats, socialists and other anti-imperialist, pro-peace and democratic forces from all over the world.
./english/544.txt:28:This consultation rightly perceived the WSF as a long-term process of engaging forces of anti-war and anti-neo-liberalism under one banner. “Realizing the need to diffuse the process in Pakistan the group committed itself to a continued struggle and efforts to take it further to all corners of the country. The group also pledged to continue its struggle to unite all progressive, rights-based and democratic forces in Pakistan against the common threats to the world and marginalised groups,” the press statement released on the occasion had said.
./english/549.txt:28:Thirdly, by redefining the scope of the World Trade Organisation and by democratising its mechanisms for participation and decision-making, the WTO could function more democratically. The Intellectual Property Rights should be re-transferred back under the UN, and the General Agreement on Trade and Services should be renegotiated.
./english/553.txt:27:On 4 October 2006 the European Commission unveiled a new Communication entitled Global Europe: Competing in the world,[1] which outlines how Brussels will pursue bilateral free trade agreements with major emerging economies in order to secure new and profitable markets for EU companies. The EU will also push for stronger intellectual property rights and reduced non-tariff barriers in its trading partners – and for even more business-friendly ‘domestic reforms’ within Europe itself.
./english/553.txt:70: * Enforcement of intellectual property rights, including geographical indications.
./english/553.txt:167:So the home front is where Mandelson wishes to redouble his efforts, and where the true threat he poses becomes clear. All those European groups opposing the free market model on social, environmental or developmental grounds must be overcome through a new concentration on “competitiveness”, the favoured EU code word for the neoliberal agenda. Anyone concerned with agricultural sustainability, workers’ rights, climate change or the European social model itself stands in the way of the Mandelson vision. The defenders of such interests threaten the EU’s capacity to compete with Japan and the USA today, or with India and China tomorrow.
./english/553.txt:171:The clearest example of how this will affect Europe is to be found in Mandelson’s plans for the downgrading of EU standards and regulations. The deregulation agenda forms a central part of Mandelson’s agenda for Europe, euphemistically described as “an open and flexible approach to setting our rules”. The fixation with minimising inconvenience to business even at the risk to public health, workers’ rights or the environment pervades the Mandelson vision, and forms the most immediate threat to people across the EU.
./english/553.txt:195:However, today many different civil society groups in Europe all want discussion and dialogue to understand the impacts of Mandelson’s proposed policies. These groups include social movements, trade unions and others working on issues such as agriculture, workers’ rights, consumer interests, development, environment, women’s issues, corporate accountability, climate change, migration, war, etc. Trade policy can no longer be an issue which a few groups address from a development or an environmental angle. It has to be understood within the context of how the EU is pushing forward a neoliberal agenda not only in countries outside of the EU, but also within the EU borders.
./english/553.txt:219:We would like to invite all progressive forces in Europe and internationally, all our allies working in farmers’, workers’, consumer, women’s, environment, development and public services networks, to join us in the analysis of the EU’s trade policy and its assault on the vast majority of people and the environment. We would like to invite all these forces to prepare a space that allows us to start a Europe-wide debate for spring 2007 and to discuss how we can work together to resist this aggressive agenda and to work for alternatives that are based on human rights, solidarity and sustainable economic activity.
./english/565.txt:52:by sharing code; without recipes nor the rights, others wouldn't get an
./english/565.txt:149:grant everyone the same freedoms, rights and duties, they involve a
./english/565.txt:175:their social rights for incoming money, takes the most prominent part in
./english/569.txt:25:This had the great advantage, compared to previous forums at Porto Alegre, of physical contiguity (although the walk from one end to the other, particularly in the summer heat of a city in the grips of a drought, was pretty arduous!). But this gain was undercut by the division of the site into 11 distinct 'Thematic Terrains', each devoted to their own political theme: Thus Space A was devoted to Autonomous Thought, B to Defending Diversity, Plurality, and Identities, C to Art and Creation, and so on. The effect was tremendously to fragment the Forum. If you were interested in a particular subject - say, culture or war or human rights - you could easily spend the entire four days in one relatively small area without coming into contact with people interested in different subjects.
./english/576.txt:59:Strolling through the Forum space could produce rewarding surprises. A colleague, Zeynep Toufe of the Institute for Public Accuracy, told of how, "tired, hot, severely underslept," she stumbled into an afternoon panel on land rights and the "untouchable castes" of India. She was unexpectedly blown away by the testimony of homelessness and dispossession offered. "It was so uncynical that I didn't know what to feel," she reported. And when they burst into songs or chants, she stated, "It was one of the most sincere, the least contrived instances I have ever encountered of people shouting slogans.... I tried to explain what a privilege it felt like to be in their presence."
./english/576.txt:76:The need to move on is not an altogether happy truth. On the last evening of the Forum, I walked along the Guaiba feeling vaguely disappointed by the lecturing I had seen that day. But then I felt a breeze off the river and looked around at the crowds meandering in the dusk. A group in union shirts sat on curb, chatting with vendors selling grilled meat; a capoeira troop sparred on the street; anti-Bush satirists leafleted for their web site; a circle of people outside an indigenous rights tent performed a dance. At that moment, I felt sad to see it all go. Porto Alegre, no doubt, will be sad for it too.
./english/580.txt:86:· Generally, it is our assessment, that the opening up of the large events for “self organisation” left a positive impact on the Forum. It allowed a large diversity of concerns not usually focused in large measure in Social Forums to be reflected in the large events – for example issues related to child rights, human rights, disability rights, concerns of sexual minorities, caste and race, etc.
./english/582.txt:24:There were 140 installations like this, and the Forum of the workshops and the seminars was as diverse, plural and colorful as those of Porto Alegre. Who walked 19th morning, along part of one of the corridors, could find debates about the increasing abortion of female embryos in India ( qualified as “ hidden femalecide”); about the international campaign against North – American bases (promoted by a 25 organizations network based in different countries); about Cordillera Peoples’ Alliance ( a Philippine woman explained, in English, that for many Asiatic communities, the concept individual, sees in each human being, a part of the community), about the new international relations system ( emerged from a refined critic about the lack of transparency and democracy in WTO, IMF and WB); about dwelling rights and livable cities ( a fiction in Mumbai), about the struggle against monarchy in Nepal ( besides the rounded faces and the hard eyes of the Nepalese, it attracted the attention the fact that they reached to understand each other, even if they were speaking so low, that many times the voices were replaced for the microphone of the room next door), about the impact of globalization among the “ untouchable” Indians ( the debates on these topics were always the most crowded and able to attract the street Forum).
./english/582.txt:41:Present at the last conference in Porto Alegre 2003, next to Noam Chomsky, the Indian writer Arundhati Roy attracted attention also in Mumbai 2004. She participated in the opening conference, next to almost ten speakers. But she stood out because of her concrete proposal. The WSF, she suggested, should identify two international firms very involved in Bush imperial war, in human rights attack or in nature destruction – and it should spark off an international boycott against them.
./english/587.txt:12:The success of the WSF in Mumbai must be judged by the determined heart-and-mind political adhesion to its message, to the dream. In fact, the cacophony was a powerful demonstration of the diversity of social individuals who hold to the idea of a different world and want a hand in its making, where the standard is all human rights for all people. Until 2003 we were mostly Latin; now we are more universal, well rooted in Asia, where half of the world’s people live. The World Social Forum has come to be adopted as a place where broad grassroots sectors can express their identities and proposals. That was a huge quality leap towards overcoming the geographical and social deficit in terms of individuals embodying the WSF.
./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/587.txt:16:All in all, it was a Forum that caused impact because it was surprising. Certainly, we are still just spinning our wheels in terms of methods for dialoguing and collectively constructing proposals and strategies. We are aware that, by building on the diversity of social actors and respect for pluralism, we are grasping the opportunity to bring into being a new political culture, one that is universal, cosmopolitan, inclusive; that is, a new way of doing change-making politics. However, we have set ourselves a task that calls for more daring and radicalism than first apparent. Given the crisis besetting the dominant order that grants almost exclusive rights to capital, adhesion to the message is a guarantee of the strength of the wave of citizens action. However, we must transform that into strength for reconstructing a sustainable, democratic world in solidarity, for ourselves and for future generations. That is the main lesson to be drawn from Mumbai.
./english/589.txt:13:While participating in the World Social Forum 2004 in Mumbai, several members of the CADTM delegation (Committee for the abolition of the third world debt) were in touch with various NGOs and social movements in order to assess some current struggles such as the one against the Coca-Cola Company in Kerala. They tried to understand the specificity of the Indian social background, particularly the caste system, by focusing on the Dalits, who represent about 200 million inhabitants out of a total of one billion Indians. They are the victims of traditional and age old oppression, and we wished to meet the men and women among them who did something to put an end to this situation. It was also an opportunity to find out about various aspects of the Indian current reality: from the issue of street children to the effects of neoliberal policies on some economic sectors like tea production. The trip to India made it possible for us to speak with a large number of activists who are active in several fields: environment, human rights, health, education, housing, languages [1], culture, gender, religions [2]. It was interesting to try and understand how they perceive the World Social Forum and the world alternative movement in which they are actors. We started in Mumbai, the town where the fourth Word Social Forum took place. Then we travelled to the state of Karnataka, some thousand kilometres from Mumbai, to the southwest. Finally, we went to Kerala.
./english/589.txt:23:Mumbai demonstrates the inefficiency of the open market to guarantee every man and women the satisfaction of the most basic human rights.
./english/589.txt:29:VAK works with grass-roots organisations by providing them with data, research studies and advocacy material related to their work. Major areas of concern since 1981 have been: a) Dalits and Adivasis, b) Gender Rights, c) Livelihood Security, d) Environment and Ecology, e) Religion and Society: Secularism and Communal Politics, f) Theory and Practice of Social Transformation, and g) Ideology and Culture.
./english/589.txt:35:The Goa Programme Unit focuses on the prevention of child sexual abuse and the protection of the rights of the children to live in dignity. VAK has initiated a number of activities such as Campaigns, Advocacy, Open Schools for Street and Beach children, Seminars, Consultations to address the growing phenomena of pedophilia and other forms of child sexual abuse related to tourism. VAK also has initiated network of organisation on the West Coast working to prevent sexual abuse of children.
./english/589.txt:37:In Gujarat the activities are mainly centered on human rights issues of minorities and issues of Muslim Womens’ Rights and Empowerment, issues of democracy, communal harmony, training workshops for elected Panchayat members, gender training, and legal action etc.
./english/589.txt:50:This entails developing and promoting more focussed advocacy, lobbying and campaigning strategies ranging from Dalit to gender rights and from rights of minorities and children to the struggles of the people for livelihood and against suppression of human and democratic rights and erosion of cultural values. The programme also seeks to promote and strengthen civil society organisations in building solidarity- action networks on critical issues affecting the lives and “rights” of the people, to challenge the structures, cultures and dynamics of violence, inequality and injustice, and for the promotion of participatory, democratic politics and economics which makes people as the centrality of the social process.
./english/589.txt:52:The major social clusters of concerns have been the urban and rural poor, Adivasis, Dalits, children and women. In recent years, VAK has concentrated on issues of livelihood and food security, combating fundamentalism/communalism, promoting democracy and rights and exposing parochial and sectarian cultural expressions.
./english/595.txt:32:Naturally, we have progressed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and apartheid in South Africa. New values have been brought to the fore, a new relationship between humanity and the biosphere has been formulated, and relations of respect between men and women have been emphasised. During the last decade we have made progress on human rights. We even believed that Pinochet was going to be judged at one point ! The International Criminal Court is now a reality. Large networks have developed, hundreds of meetings have been organised and dozens of proposal papers have been produced. All the above are significant advances and the social forums and different alliances are important, but the question remains : “What are we going to do with these forums and alliances to be equal to our hopes and expectations ? Can we really topple the empire ? Will we be able to get humanity away from its position between the devil and the deep blue sea ?”
./english/598.txt:34:Everyone at Mumbai expressed the excitement of connecting their struggles with those of others. Homa Kadeep, for example, helps coordinate campaigns defending forest peoples rights to land and natural resources across India. She said: What is happening here is that we are connecting with people from Brazil, South Africa, Canada… We go home knowing we are not alone. We are also discovering how to be more effectively coordinated.
./english/607.txt:4:THE 2004 World Social Forum (WSF) was for the first time held in Mumbai (Bombay), India, between 16-21 January. More than 100,000 delegates came together for the biggest anti-neoliberal globalization meeting ever, representing trade unions, environment, women, human rights, peace, alternative sexuality and other movements.
./english/607.txt:8:The World Social Forum contends that, instead of ensuring even in the long run, equitable development, neoliberal globalization actually globalizes poverty and aggravates inequality and oppression. Globalization is not an alternative. Only a people-friendly, sustainable, egalitarian and secular development is possible. With the diversity and complexity of the world, no one alternative or model is feasible, which is why the discussion of many alternatives makes eminent sense.Looking to Europe, the WSF seeks allies - not only in like-minded movements but also in governments and the EU - to deal with such core issues as agricultural subsidies, intellectual property rights and trade-related investment measures. There is also a need to reform and reconsider the economic models presented by institutions such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund - which are so unfriendly to the South, to a degree protested even by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.Debate at the WSF focused on these issues and others: how much does the UN need to be changed? Is the expansion of its Security Council enough, or does the General Assembly need to be empowered so the opinion of members is not sidelined by the council? What are the specific policies and slogans that can ensure the unity of the South? How can democratic forces in the North be mobilized to support the suffering peoples of the South? Which are the most effective ways of combating religious fundamentalism and sectarianism when Muslims are being demonized in the course of the global war against terror? Can new ways of resisting militarism be more effective in isolating warmongers and replacing dominant concepts of national security and power as innovative strategies of peace?
./english/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:20:From Bhopal gas victims to Hiroshima survivors, from Narmada dam oustees to North American peaceniks, from Dalits to disabled rights advocates, from South Korean socialists to South African AIDs activists, from Peruvian peasants to Pakistani anti-nuclear activists, from Brazilian landless workers to Bombay slum dwellers, from queer rights activists to child labour abolishers, from theologians to trade unionists, from feminists to free Palestine crusaders, from anti-Coca Cola campaigners to cotton farmers… the Forum offered space for expression, for exchange, for discussion, for disagreement, for debate, for celebration.
./english/629.txt:80:It would be in fact a pity if this joy of the “square” was lost - as it would tend to occur if it wasn’t a “square” anymore. It’s a joy - the same joy that we would like to always see in the “other possible world” - that ends up by taking hold of and invigorating everybody, inspired as it is by another finding of the Forum, while destroying the divisions that segregated the struggles that the different movements fostered: the fact that we are many in the same fight. In that way, in the open space provided to all by the Forum, the militants of these different movements meet up with and recognize each other: the ones fighting for the women’s rights, for the rights of the urban and rural workers, of the environment, of the children, the ones who seek new economic domestic relations or at the level of international organizations, the ones who work for democratic participation in the governments or for the enhancement of the spiritual dimension in the human being, etc., in the great diversity of the existing “movements”.
./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/643.txt:8:It is also important because it has achieved the unification of the two generations of civil society: the NGOs that emerged in the 1970s to fight for human rights, sustainable development, full participation for women, etc, and in defence of human rights, of a sustainable environment, of the full participation of women, of the indigenous movement, and the movement that arose in the 1990s as an opposition force to the neoliberal globalisation process.
./english/645.txt:21:The start of the conference demonstrated the Porto Alegre way, with Iraqi delegates handing their flag to U.S. delegates, and Israelis and Palestinians holding hands. The rights of Palestinians and the wrongs of an attack on Iraq dominated the conference. The attack on Iraq has clearly become a test case for a peoples movement fighting the U.S. government and the oil giants on its side.
./english/645.txt:39:Issues around human rights, diversity, equality and ethnicity were debated extensively at several meetings. Education, health and social security were discussed as matters of rights, rather than benefits.
./english/646.txt:114:Gender tensions have also been present in the WSF. Even though there exist no major gender differences in the numbers of overall participants, certainly the Brazilian OC consists predominantly of middle-aged men. In the IC, representatives of feminist organisations and other women have played a more visible role reflected in the programme, and struggles for sexual preference rights have played an increasing, though still somewhat marginal, role in the events.
./english/651.txt:10:Concrete proposals are being demanded of this movement that contests the reigning world (dis)order. It first and most fundamental response is to build a new outlook, a new agenda. This will deny legitimacy to the economist priorities imposed by the logic of economic and financial globalization by making proposals that simply correct its social evils. We are committed to building a social, democratic and sustainable approach to the economy and to globalization which will serve to foster human freedom and dignity. No to the absolute primacy of trade and the market! The need we face is to radicalize the call for human rights for all as the fundamental priority capable of conveying the new consciousness of mankind. Breaking down the separation between economy and society, between economy and nature, between nature and society, these are tasks central to building a global agenda capable of promoting planetary citizenship.
./english/668.txt:6:The only way to really describe the World Social Forum (WSF), that just ended here in Brazil, is a global political "carnaval." Not that there was much of the glitter and hedonism associated with that most famous Brazilian street party which begins later this week. Rather, inside the conference halls and out, this astounding event--part-political convention, part-art and music festival, part-intellectual gathering of social movements, was in a state of nearly perpetual celebratory protest for five days and five nights.In the friendly territory of the socialist-run Porto Alegre government, one demonstration followed another. Protests spilled into the streets for womens rights, Indigenous rights, Palestinian rights and for land reform.