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./english/35.txt:32:7. Béla Fekete, of the Movement of Democracy in Society (TDM)

./english/36.txt:6:2. The demonstrations of May 6 can be considered as a historic moment for the Greek social movements. It is the biggest demonstration ever organized in Athens without the participation of the Greek Communist Party. The massive participation in this demo is not only an undeniable proof of no global movement’s popularity. It is at the same time a sign of the rise of a new political culture within the Greek society. Although the denial of a potential war on Iran was the No 1 political issue of this demonstration, we should not underestimate the fact that for a great number of demonstrators this massive mobilization was a way to express their will for a social change. This will is still too vague to constitute a real political program. Nevertheless, it can be the starting point of such a procedure.

./english/37.txt:12:regarding a new society in which human and social rights could be

./english/37.txt:47:New Society, what kind of Another World do we want and do we

./english/40.txt:12:It wasn’t just the size and composition of the demonstration that made the concept of social movements likely, at last, to become a potent part of the language of public debate in Greece. It was also the forum itself, which was organised very consciously to illustrate that it is possible to run a 30,000-strong extravaganza of political discussion and cultural experience in a participatory, egalitarian and way illustrating the values of the society we are trying to create.

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

./english/45.txt:11:2 Mental health – central for citizens, society and policies

./english/45.txt:54:2 Mental health – central for citizens, society and policies

./english/45.txt:69:Mental Health is attached to several cultural problems in Europe. People who suffer from mental health illnesses are often excluded from social society.

./english/45.txt:84:This view, combined with the capitalistic marketing motives, which makes concerns willing to conquer and broaden every inch of the market, leads to a society where more and more diseases are literally established. In this way, psycho oriented industry is creating a market for itself, and the interests of the market distorts to do what is best for us, the people, the patients.

./english/45.txt:89:• People who suffer from mental health illnesses are often excluded from social society.

./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:146:Underneath also lays a main cultural problem, which we intend to call the neoliberal explanation of “Own responsibility”, which causes individualism across society, where people are like rivals, and not helping each other. In this neoliberal climat pointing at the borders of acceptance, dropping each other down and “own responsibility” is way more accepted than to make efforts to help the not-working, and help-needing class.

./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:153:• From a social point of view, based on pluralism and social inclusion, cultural efforts should be made to establish more tolerance and a better understanding of ‘humanity’, ‘wealth’ and ‘own responsibility’ in society, and replace the neoliberal explanations of these themes.

./english/45.txt:165:- exchange information with society and professionals

./english/45.txt:200:• Prevention of all admissions by integrating mental health care into society, is probably the best option to end the stigma of mental health problems.

./english/45.txt:208:Forceful measures are an old-fashioned habit, based on the idea that patients who show different behaviour than others, should be trained to behave themselves. In the past, mental health care has established group-activity-schedules for patients daily life, for example: to get up at 7, eat at 8, go to creative therapy on 9. When the patient could follow this scheme, he would be cured enough to go back to society.

./english/45.txt:275:Every communication means more signs and signals. So therefore a sphere of openness in society and in every mental health care facility is very important.

./english/45.txt:295:• ‘Developing diseases’ in mental health industry strengthens the neoliberal explanation of ‘wealth’, which leads to individualism and harms the society. (* also see 4 developing responses: policy initiatives on mental health)

./english/45.txt:305:• In the last analysis, capitalism and neoliberalism, when executed in society, and especially in mental health care, leads to more mental health problems of the population.

./english/45.txt:309:The patients with a mental health illness should not be excluded from society, and should not be put in large hospitals, where re- traumatizing evidently takes place.

./english/45.txt:336:18. Eventually mental health care should completely take place inside the society, and by the society.

./english/45.txt:353:30. More accessibility for sharing contacts and more possibilities for the patients to participate in daily life of society.

./english/62.txt:43:However, the differences between movement scholarship and activism are not exhausted along the lines of different forms of knowledge produced by them. There are also significant differences in terms of who are the actors that compose the constituencies of each one of them and of how – through which processes – such a social aggregation and representation is enacted. From this point of view, in principle, it is academia or the scientific community (Kuhn) the social subject, which validates the work of science, in general, and social movement studies, in particular. But it is known that science as social institution operates according to a set of pertinent norms, criteria of validity, ways to measure academic productivity and systems of reward, accreditation, promotion and success (Merton). As for the question of whether science is social accountable, this is indeed tantamount to posing the claim of the democratization of scientific expertise. Furthermore, up to the degree that the very bulk of scientific community is integrated into the system of higher education – through research conducted in universities – modern science tends not only to serve big business and the market but in many cases it becomes big business and it is marketized and privatized – for instance, in the lucrative areas of technological and medical research but not only. Consequently, the study of social movements appears to by drastically underfunded and, therefore, rather marginalized, when compared to many other social science topics. Thus, given the dominant trend of corporatization in higher education and politicized government funding, social movement scholars in academia would face many difficulties if they wanted to direct their research on studying social change and conflict for the empowerment of the powerless and the exposition of inequities in the status quo and inequalities in the distribution of resources (Croteau, Cancian). Hence, the very majority of social scientists tend to be restricted in analyses of a smoothly functioning society, mild policy reforms and studies of how to achieve an efficient social control and to manage social problems.

./english/62.txt:52:My argument is about the way that recent social movements, in their understanding and production of knowledge, are pre-figuring and therefore also experimenting with new forms of social organisation and co-ordination relevant for society as a whole. At present, this potential is insuficiently recognised and discussed. One of the purposes of the aims of activist researchers must be (in my opinion) to encourage social movements to be more self – conscious about this character and potential of their activity. So I will start by emphasising how understandings of knowledge are key to conceptions of human agency and social organisation. All forms of organisation and co-ordination are based, usually implicitly, on assumptions about the character of knowledge, (and related to this, intelligence and creativity): assumptions about what aspects of human consciousness actually constitute knowledge, and therefore who is contributing to knowlwedge; about how it is produced and about whether it is social or individual.

./english/62.txt:53:Think of the main forms of social and political organisation that we have known hsitorically: the state and the market (I’m being very schematic here) and the way that they are underpinned by distinct understandings of knowledge. In the case of the political ideologies which relied primarily on the state, the implicit understanding of knowledge of society, especially the economy, has been one which stems from a positivist epistemology in which knowledge is a matter of what are understood (within a positivist epistemology) as scientific laws: that is, laws based on the empirically observable constant conjunctions of events or phenomena. All other claims to knowledge are dismissed as either derivative from scientific laws, as mere instance of such laws or simply as `gossip’, `emotion’, or some other form of human consciousness or expression that is dismissed as epistemologically valueless. The implication of this for social organisation, is that on this understanding of knowledge and science, scientific laws can be codified, they can be known by a central `brain’ or point of co-ordination, or command. Moreover they are only known by experts in these laws. Hence this approach to knowledge underpins or leads to state centred and heirarchical visions of social change.

./english/62.txt:55:The innovation and paradigm shift coming from the social movements – initially implicitly and now being increasingly self-consciously developed by them - is to recognise the tacit and practical dimension of knowledge (paradoxically sharing an understanding with the neo-liberal, free market ideologues!) but in practice to treat knowledge as social and sharable, the subject of argument and experiment. Indeed one could argue that one of the main motives driving social movements’ ways of organising is to search for means of sharing, communicating, expressing and debating forms of practical, experience based and often hidden knowledge as a vital part of creating their transformative power. This has taken us beyond the dichotomies of the cold war, of market versus state. It has led us to create forms of co-ordination that are horizontal and fluid; that acknowledge uncertainty and the incomplete, open character of knowledge and that create space for experiment and self-reflection as we resist and attempt to create alternatives. The connection here between knowledge and co-ordination concerns the relationship between the intention/purpose of human action and the social consequences. A positivistic understanding of knowledge presumes that it is possible to achieve more or less complete knowledge and therefore to be able to predict and control the consequences of human action, individual and collective e.g. the action of the state in solving a social problem. The neo-liberal understanding of knowledge on the other hand, denies any connection between intention and outcome, assuming we enter society blindfold, beyond a knowledge of limited number of statistically based laws. And therefore where mechanism or co-ordination are necessary, in particular in the economy, we have to rely on mechanisms that do not involve an conscious co-ordination, that do not require any centre of control or direction; hence the importance of a market based on a price mechanism.

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

./english/62.txt:70:- effects/outputs, the challenge being the forums in the society and in ourselves. The aim is to be able to tell how do social forums change the world, transforme their participants, change the movement(s), etc.

./english/147.txt:74:The Italian movement of movements has been mixing and forming coalitions for years and is now trying to take root in popular society. The new Social Forums are an attempt to bridge differences in ideology, practice, and theory to create an open plural space.

./english/147.txt:121:The European Social Consulta represents a shift away from pure opposition towards constructive alternatives. It was conceived as a complement to the People’s Global Action, which is itself centered, first and foremost, on direct actions of resistance. The Consulta emphasizes the “transformation of society.”

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

./english/161.txt:130:where ‘the movement’ ends and ‘society’ begins). It might take ten phone calls to

./english/161.txt:200:of movements and society at large! The effect of our protests on the G8’s policies

./english/161.txt:203:unrest and movement of society. When we say Shut Them Down! we also mean Let

./english/162.txt:28:Following the Zapatistas, people in the movement of movements tend to call the current economic structure "neoliberal." But the word evokes a political philosophy stretching back to the eighteenth century. One can speak instead of flexible accumulation, which describes the computer-linked, finance-driven, just-in-time model of the globalized economy. (6) By subordinating the other spheres of social life – education, science, culture, etc. – this organization of production and consumption produces a veritable hegemony, a mode of regulation for society as a whole. To grasp the way this hegemony is experienced by individuals, I have proposed the notion of the flexible personality. (7) It is an ambiguous notion: because although it primarily designates the managerial culture that legitimates the globalized economy, and that renders it tolerable or even attractive for those who are its privileged subjects, it also recalls the profound opportunism that this organization demands, as well as the "flexible" nature of the workforce that it subjects to increasingly individualized forms of exploitation. The flexible personality designates the lived experience of a relation of domination. It is essential to define its limits.

./english/162.txt:29:One can begin to do so by pointing to the different kinds of social struggles that have intensified over the last ten years. Ecological struggles, against resource waste, polluting industry, invasive infrastructures. Workers' struggles, against falling wages, worsening labor conditions, insufficient health coverage or unemployment benefits. Struggles against the privatization of medical and scientific knowledge, against the control of the university and of cultural production by business. And finally, struggles against the preponderance of the financial sphere in the taking of democratic decisions. This list of different fields of struggle refers us, in a more abstract way, to four "fictive commodities": land, labor, knowledge and money itself. That is, four major articulations of social life which capitalism claims to treat as things to be sold, confiding their destiny to the operations of a self-regulating market. (8) The problem being that the basic conditions under which these "things" are produced do not all have a price tag, and so escape any monetary regulation. These four major articulations of society exist at least partially outside the market: they are "externalities."9 And the maintenance of their fictive status as commodities implies a perpetually deferred cost, which in the long run can only manifest itself in a phenomenon outside any imaginable accounting. This is the phenomenon of systemic crisis. Its looming shadow has motivated the increasing levels of social struggle.

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

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

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

./english/162.txt:74:These admissions of defeat are well known. (21) But in recent publications, another history of conceptual art has been coming back to light. It is a history that unfolds in Latin America, and particularly in Argentina, in the cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario. It would seem that here, in the context of an authoritarian government and under the pressure of American cultural imperialism, conceptual art could only be received – or invented – as an invitation to act antagonistically within the mass-media sphere. Certain Argentine pop artists considered that the commercial news media could actually be appropriated as an artistic medium, like a canvas or a gallery space. To do this, Roberto Jacoby and Eduardo Costa created an artificial happening, one that never really happened, and they stimulated the media with information about it, so as to achieve specific fictional effects. (22) But this attempt was only a first step towards a fully political appropriation of the communications media by artists. The most characteristic project was Tucumán Arde, or "Tucumán is Burning," realized in 1968. (23) The military government was attempting to "modernize" the sugar-cane industry in the province of Tucumán, with a shift from small, locally owned businesses to larger factories owned by foreign capital; at the same time, the official media painted an idyllic picture of a region which in reality was wracked by impoverishment and intense labor struggles. So a group of some thirty artists and intellectuals from Buenos Aires and Rosario researched the social and economic conditions in the province, carrying out an analysis of all the mass-media coverage of the region, and going out themselves to gather first-hand information and to document the situation using photography and film. They then staged an exhibition that was explicitly designed to feed their work back into the national debate, so as to counter the media picture. Yet the project, although it did not shy away from advertising techniques, could not be reduced to counter-propaganda. As Andrea Giunta writes: "In many of its characteristic traits – such as the exploration of the interaction between languages, the centrality of the activity required from the spectator, the unfinished character, the importance of the documentation, the dissolution of the idea of the author, and the questioning of the art system and the ideas that legitimate it – Tucumán Arde maintains a relation with the repertory of conceptual art. But not with the tautological and self-referential form of conceptualism, in which, from a certain viewpoint, one finds a reconfirmation of the modernist paradigm. Language does not refer back to language, to the specificity of the artistic fact; instead, the contextual relations are so strong that in this case, reality ceases being understood as a space of reflection and comes to be conceived as a possible field of action oriented toward the transformation of society." (24)

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

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

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

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

./english/187.txt:23:The necessity of creating a Common Space for sustained coordination: Given the growing capacity of our calls to action and mobilization, the system is creating the most favorable conditions to fight against us: new economic resources, police impunity, restriction of our liberties, intimidating the population and manipulation information. One vital strategy in this new situation, which was already vital before, is deepening our contact and communication with society, decentralizing our struggle and working intensely in local and regional contexts in a coordinated way and with common objectives. In order to do this, we need to provide ourselves with strategic, long-term projects. There is no better path for moving forward than from an informed social debate, from collective participation and mobilization, from the cohesion of our groups and social movements. In order to advance in the construction of responses and in the coordination of actions in local and global contexts, we need to create a common meeting space from which to begin elaborating common proposals and projects as the basis for this other possible world.

./english/187.txt:33:We propose that the European Social Consulta have one broad goal: Transform Society. In order to make this possible, the ESC should also have three specific objectives:

./english/187.txt:35:Deepen the analysis and critique of current economic, political and social system and build alternatives and proposals that allow us to transform society. We will do this through the creation of space at the European level, which integrates teh vision and action of the largest number of people and sectors.

./english/187.txt:37:Provide social movements and society in general with instruments for the expression of our common will, so that we can all participate in the construction of our own future. These instruments constitute, in and of themselves, a denunciation of the total lack of democracy in our current political, economic and social system.

./english/192.txt:37:The truth is very many activists in the rest of Europe find the support that much of the French left and union movement gave the law banning the hejab in French state schools quite incomprehensible. ATTAC France's recent assessment of the ESF complains about the role of 'confessional organizations' in London. But a secularism that excludes the most oppressed sections of French society is as communalist as any of the Islamist organizations it denounces.

./english/192.txt:38:The issue of the hejab is really a symptom of the real problem, which is how to expand our movement to embrace those at the bottom of European society who suffer both economic exploitation and racial oppression and many of whom, for that very reason, strongly attach themselves to their Muslim faith. Once again, this isn't a question on which we will reach rapid or easy agreement. But at least we should recognize the importance of the debate, rather than take refuge in arguments about how one seminar was organized.

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

./english/193.txt:13:State vs. society, parties vs. movements? 1

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

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

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

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

./english/193.txt:29:In contrast to post-structuralism, Holloway reformulates an essential notion of subjectivity outside of concrete social relations, assumes Joachim Hirsch, a prominent author writing on critical state theory.5 Instrumental power in Holloway’s understanding alienates the subject from its immediate subjectivity, ‘dehumanises’. He therefore misses Marx’s cognition that the ‘essence’ of human beings in reality is the ‘ensemble of social relations’. Moreover in contrasting instrumental and creative power Holloway on the one hand denounces all forms of intermediate institutions and representations, and on the other hand offers creativity as a possibility free of contradictions. That is bound to a romantic notion of original communism, of a nonalienated community. But it might be necessary in a complex society to develop some objectified forms of institutions for mediation (Versachlichung und Vermittlung) – not all forms of objectification necessarily lead to fetishism, although there is a danger. Without intermediation it is doubtful if such a society would be a free one. Developing creative anti-power in itself is a contradictory process: there is a need for alternatives beyond fragmented local struggles, for an understanding about theoretical, social and political concepts, goals and strategies. Such conflicts in the movement are also conflicts about power that could not be negated. But it is of great importance, Hirsch tells us, that Holloway has formulated a clear critique of all political concepts trying to fight the existing power relations with their own weapons. And he has brought back the notion of revolution into our thinking and acting.

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

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

./english/193.txt:45:Taking the government does not mean taking power – cultural hegemony is rooted in complex state structures, in civil society and in webs of private institutions, in everyday thinking, in habits and of course: cultural hegemony is always ‘a political one, but also and especially a economic one, its material basis rooted in the decisive functions the hegemonic groups exercise in the core of economic activities’ (Gramsci, Gef.3, 499; Marx, MEW 3, 46). Therefore the dangers for self-deception, strategic misjudgements, exaggerated self-assessment, cooptation, and entanglement in the traps of Realpolitik etc. are manifold. Therefore a critical distance vis-à-vis the state and political parties is essential for the survival of social movements. But we enforce these dangers if we understand the party as something outside from us – than it becomes ‘a fetish’ (Gramsci, Gef.7, H.15, 1730).

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

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

./english/202.txt:17:Moreover, the programme structure reproduced the categories of bourgeois society. For example, the thematic structure fragmented practical reality: the ‘war on terror’ was nearly lost through its separation into three themes (war, civil liberties, migrants). Party activists in the programme group narrowly defined those issues according to their party agendas, sometimes even acting as if their own agendas represented all the relevant movements. At many sessions, speakers harangued the audience with cliched slogans, aimed mainly to elicit applause and preclude debate.

./english/205.txt:44:On the one hand, there are the groups that remain attached to the identity formed in that period: the heroic times of the Global Days of Action, the massive street protests against international institutions, brought to an impasse with the threat of violence that has hung in the air since Genoa. These groups live the tension between the closing down of the public sphere and a progressive criminalization that pushes them into a dead end, between the difficulty to open up some kind of dialogue with society and the dangers of an escalation of violence. If that period was of enormous importance for the creation of a new political subjectivity, a new political generation, the transformations in the political context and the move towards a period of permanent global war poses questions that have to be answered – the risk of not doing it being isolation, fragmentation, becoming a subculture. The condition of survival of the subjectivity of those days is finding ways to overcome it.

./english/205.txt:56:The most remarkable thing about it is how it clearly is about capturing subjectivities made diffuse and disjointed by the transformations of the last years and provide them with a new class subjectivity. While the concept of the ‘multitude' was too abstract for any immediate political use, what we saw this year was a rise of the ‘precariat': precisely the new ‘class' created by the regime of flexible accumulation, the ‘flexible', ‘flexploited' workers of the world. With no fixed job, no access to welfare, the precariat is the anomalous contradiction within the historical trend of capitalism towards the decrease of the labour journey: they work more for less. More than that, the concept makes possible a transversal analysis of contemporary society, in the sense that the precarious condition is extended to issues like housing and legal status, thus incorporating struggles such as those of the sans papiers and migrants, which were also very visible in the autonomous spaces.

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

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

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

./english/236.txt:23:The Forum promoted as a learning or pedagogical space would expand the current focus on national and international links among movements and organisations in society and on connections and dialogue focusing on similarities. In outreach strategies to activist groups this view has the potential to help demystify the divide between theory (thinking) and practice (doing) and support the emergence of a culture of dialogue across differences. It could also justify the creation of outreach approaches for non-activists – as an invitation to a process of collective reflection and construction of an alternative world, increasing and expanding the Forum's political impact. We also claim that fostering the culture of self-reflexivity that is already emerging within the Forum could generate systematic considerations of the Forum's own contradictions, which could encourage Forum participants to re-negotiate their subject positions, bring in new actors and create new possibilities for the future of the space, reinforcing its potential as a catalyst of change in society.

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

./english/238.txt:45:At a deeper level, in its efforts to bring to life these principles of ‘learning from practice', ‘solidarity, ‘horizontality' and ‘equality', Babels embodies the two main positive achievements of the Social Forum process. The first is its Gandhian philosophy of ‘being the change we want to see', also known as ‘pre-figurative politics'. In other words, Babels attempts to put into practice the very egalitarian and internationalist principles of the ‘good society' the alter-globalisation movement calls for in facilitating communication across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

./english/239.txt:9:At the official ESF we were further astonished to find that a space for children to sleep or to play was not available. Where should a parent go with a three-year-old? In a 2 hour seminar should they sit in the first row? At the information desk we had asked where a quiet corner was to feed our children, we were told to go to the media-centre. Is this a place for kids??! This is appalling when a movement dresses itself with the words that 'another world is possible'! Mothers and fathers are already marginalised in capitalist society. Do we want another world where mothers and fathers are excluded?

./english/242.txt:7:Technolgical development in the recent past has redefined social relations and transformed society. Today, control over technology and knowledge determines the way society is organised. Re-appropriating the knowledge of technology and developing alternative technical solutions can enable us to re-think and transform our social relations.

./english/244.txt:15:• How does the ESF confluence process communicate with the rest of society, in other words, how do actors and groups that care about social transformation communicate with actors, groups, and institutions not directly involved with the dynamics of the ESF and more widely with social transformation in general?

./english/244.txt:23:Some theories from the science of communication and guerrilla communication have shown us that the delivery of an argument and the multiple analyzes of the social facts that have produced this argument (like “women” and “men” are not receiving the same treatment in working places and in society in general) are not going to be accepted and integrated by an increasing number of individual receptors in a way that is proportional to its “trueness”. It is not because you multiply the supports and ways to spread a “true” fact, that you really get to provoke indignation and conscious amongst the population that is not personally involved in social transformation, people with a political restlessness. And so what? What's so new in all that? Nothing particularly, just my increasing stupefaction at the fact that spreading alter communication, contra-information, and building alternative medias ICT structures, is not perhaps the only solution we should contemplate when we want that information to become effective in a political sense. To say it another way, how can social transformation information become aggressive and perceptive enough to affect mass media information production, in other words, mass public opinion?

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

./english/246.txt:9:Since the first WSF in Porto Alegre, 2001, Social Fora have aroused great interest from people working in areas we can loosely define as ‘cultural’. There have also been since the beginning many discussions at Social Fora on the role and the present condition of ‘culture’ in our society; as well as cultural programmes that have accompanied the events. If one reads the statements issued by the culture working groups (or their equivalents) in different editions including their different spaces (Youth Camps , autonomous spaces etc.) it is easy to notice one common thread running throughout, quite often stated in similar words: that culture must be at the heart of the event, and must inform it as a whole, both in the discussions and the programme, and the way it is organised – it must not be ‘the icing on the cake’.

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

./english/246.txt:41:These are not isolated issues, and we can only lose while we discuss them as such. Knowledge is a common par excellence – i.e., a non-scarce good that can be shared without any part having less of it than before – and not only do we have a society and an economy whose functioning is increasingly dependent on it, we also have today the technological means to develop a society where each and everyone is at once producer and consumer – ‘sharer’ – of it. Issues ranging from the medicinal knowledge of indigenous peoples to digital inclusion, intellectual property to art, alternative to mass media – all of these have essentially to do with knowledge, which is one of the most important questions for the years to come. In culture, this tends to translate as the end of mediation – the distinction between high and low art, artist and audience, producers and consumers. Perhaps a new world will see the suppression of art as we have come to know it since we have known it for the last centuries. All the better: it makes room for culture.

./english/248.txt:15:Money bought power at the ESF in London , but it was only the political culture and institutional context that really made this possible. That this ESF was dominated by left parties and the local state was nothing new. The background involvement of political parties, for example, has been a feature of virtually all social forums and an important factor in mediating the relationship with local government. The difference in London , if anything, was not the dominance of organised Left parties but their relative weakness. This meant that the London ESF offered a real opportunity to break the mould of past forums and become the ‘civil society' initiative it has often promised to be. The fact that this did not happen shows, if anything, the role that parties play for the forum in its current form. The task of organising a forum is still primarily addressed at local and national levels, where political parties remain an important vehicle for articulating political demands and organising collective activities. In the absence of strong Left parties in the UK , the GLA took on this role by proxy.

./english/249.txt:29:My conclusions are that it is fundamental to our movement and to our chances of any success in our aims that we put forward a democratic world where people, not power or money (whether from public resources or private corporations) are the sources of decision making in our society. We need to have more clear rules of how a meeting is prepared, conducted and how the decisions are made and communicated to those not present at the meeting. And we need some kind of policy about how groups can act at ESF events in order to prevent abuse like the one made at our demo.

./english/260.txt:46:of greek society and state with national identity, and b. reproduce rather than challenge

./english/269.txt:31:The experience has been tremendously rich and a bit overwhelming. The questions multiply, little is certain. But a few tentative hypotheses emerge. In the first place, we know that precariousness is not limited to the world of work. We prefer to define it as a juncture of material and symbolic conditions which determine an uncertainty with respect to the sustained access to the resources essential to the full development of one’s life. This definition permits us to overcome the dichotomies of public/private and production/reproduction and to recognize the interconnections between the social and the economic. Second, more than a condition or a fixed position (‘being precarious’) we prefer to think of precariousness as a tendency. In fact, precariousness is not new (much of women’s work, paid and unpaid, has been precarious since the dawn of history). What is new is the process by which this is expanding to include more and more social sectors, not in a uniform manner (it would be difficult to draw a rigid or precise line between the ‘precarious’ and the ‘guaranteed’ parts of the population) but such that the tendency is generalized. Thus we prefer to talk not about a state of precariousness but about ‘precarization’ as a process which effects the whole of society, with devastating consequences for social bonds. Third, the territory of aggregation (and perhaps of ‘combat’) for mobile and precarious workers is not necessarily the ‘work place’ (how could it be, when this so often coincides with one’s own home, or someone else’s, or when it changes every few months, or when the possibilities of coinciding with a substantial group of the same co-workers for long enough to get to know each other is one in a thousand?) but rather this metropolitan territory we navigate every day, with its billboards and shopping centers, fast-food that tastes like air and every variety of useless contracts.

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

./english/272.txt:15:Applied to public policy, the presumption was that social scientific laws about the workings of society could be codified and centralised and thus state and party institutions could know and adequately plan for the needs of the people.

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

./english/272.txt:22:3. Their origins as self-organised movements arising from their own experiences of subordination and exploitation led to a strong sense of themselves individually as well as collectively, as agents of social change – in contrast to the traditions of parliamentary socialism or party socialism more generally in which a culture of delegation, or deferred action was established: of simply `putting demands’ on others – leaders, governments, officials – to take action. There was a strong sense of taking personal responsibility: that people were faced with everyday choices of either being complicit in oppression – including their own – or acting to transform it. Implicitly, the movements had what is now understood as a `relational’ view of society as consisting of enduring but transformable relations that individuals either reproduced or resisted. ( Rather than the supra-individual wholes of bureaucratic collectivism or the sum of individual action of dogmatic, atomistic individualism).

./english/272.txt:24:4. This understanding of society implies a strong relationship between knowledge and action, between facts and values. It points to the value-laden character of our knowledge of the world, daily illustrated in the way that we reproduce or transform social institutions. New knowledge about the consequences of passive acquiescence in these institutions can lead people to take transformative action in their own lives. The reproduction or transformation of society depends on actors’ understandings of the relationships and structures in which they participate.

./english/274.txt:12: Face it. Anarchists on the whole have not articulated any sort of coherent alternative vision of what a society not based on capitalism and the state might look like. We have produced copious amounts of political, economic, and social critiques – but a comparatively smaller amount of work has focused on developing alternatives to what we’re critiquing.

./english/274.txt:14:But when faced with the question “I understand what you’re against, what are you for?” far too often radical activists and organizers on the whole are stymied; at best we end up mumbling something about a world of autonomous or semiautonomous communities based upon mutual aid, self-organization, and voluntary association. And those are all very well and good, and could form the basis of a liberatory society - but for many people such statements mean virtually nothing. It’s one thing to say that we want a world where people manage our own lives, the environment isn’t destroyed, and life is life desolate and alienating – but it’s another to start talking about what such might actually look like. And starting to

./english/274.txt:18:operated. Chances are what you’ll find is that most people have a relatively easy time imagining what a different political order might look like, how a different religion might work, and perhaps even how a family might be structured differently. But chances are they will find it difficult to imagine how a different economic arrangement or society not based around the state would work. Try it a few times. Ask someone how an economy would run if not based on private ownership. Ask them describe economics relations in Greece. Ask them how society would operate without a state. Chances are they will find it very difficult to describe, which is odd considering that for thousands of years of human history there was no state or a market economy. But yet such has become so normalized that thinking outside of such is nearly impossible for many people. Such“stateness” (and “market-ness”) has become so normalized in political theory that it is argued that that democracy itself cannot exist without a state. (Linz and Stepan 1996: 7)

./english/274.txt:28: The point here is not that one should have a blueprint for exacting details of a new social order. Such would be silly and more destructive than helpful. But unless one has at least a rough idea of how such an alternative social arrangement might work it would extremely difficult to convince others that such is desirable or achievable. Marx knew that he was going to fish in the morning and hunt in the afternoon, but other than the functioning of a post-capitalist society was at best anyone’s guess, at worst the decision of those with the most guns. The question then becomes how one can best approach the task of creating a utopian vision in a way that does not recreate current forms of domination and brings the utopian vision put forth into the realm of possibility in a way that show avenues for how that order can be brought into existence in

./english/274.txt:29:the here and now. It is part of trying to sketch out the functioning of what Raoul Vaneigem described as generalized self-management, or when the logic and methods of the worker’s councils could be extended over society as a liberated whole.

./english/274.txt:31:The problem is that you can’t study utopia. The study of utopia is the ethnography of nowhere. There is no ready made existing liberatory society which one can go and study, takes notes on, and then return and try to recreate here. It is also debatable even if one could find such an existing situation that trying to recreate such out of the context where such emerged would be the best of ideas. And that’s the problem of utopian vision, is that it doesn’t exist anywhere – that’s implicit in the word. But there have existed a multitude of examples of cooperative structures and non-hierarchal social practices that have existed through out history. Little slices of liberation and non-alienated experience – what Pierre Clastres describes as the “vast constellation of societies in which the holders of what elsewhere would be called power are actually without power; where the political is determined as a domain beyond coercion and violence, beyond hierarchal subordination.” (1977: 5) And

./english/274.txt:34: The typical approach to considering radical social and economic change is to select a set of values and ends and then try to create some social structures based upon those values. For example, we could say that we want a society based upon solidarity, mutual aid, voluntary association and so forth – so what would social institutions look like based upon those values? One example of this sort of approach is found in the example of Parecon, or participatory economics. Parecon and its founders should be praised for articulating a vision, as at the very least regardless of what you think of their ideas they at least offer up some sort of overall vision which can be looked at and evaluated as to whether or not such would ultimately be desirable and effective. However, I think that when you look at this formulation (and not just Parecon in particular) you can see the flaw in this approach.

./english/274.txt:60:human history. As observed in regards to African societies, “To a greater or lesser extent all of these traditional African societies manifest‘anarchic elements’ which upon close examination lend credence to the historical truism that governments have not always existed. They are but a recent phenomena and are, therefore, not inevitable in human society.” (Mbah and Igariwey 1997: 27) This is not to say that one should go around declaring that Balinese tribes are really anarchists and just don’t know it – but that one can learn from the vast historical experience of the cooperative institutions and practices which have existed. Such grounds utopian theory and hopes not in wild speculations, but in the lived realities of daily experience, in the extension of what people already know to a broader vision.

./english/274.txt:73: Through this process knowledge and vision are created through experience, through the result of human experience and creation. The goal of utopian thinking should not be to come up with impractical schemes of a how a future society might work or to formulate plans that preclude them from starting to be created now. When Marx labeled his socialist predecessors as “utopian” that was his objection, that they had plans and dreams which were unobtainable, and therefore to a large degree useless in trying to alleviate the totally unnecessary suffering brought about by capital and the state. While neo-liberals like to pretend that the market is autonomous and self-supporting, working off of principles inherent to itself, such conceals the inventory of ideas, practices, and values which underlie it and allow it to adapt to continually changing circumstances. Similarly, the long-term success of building movements against the state, capital, and all forms of oppression, is to create those reserves of knowledge, experience, and ideas that will enable us constantly redefines the specifics of non-hierarchal organizing based upon the changing circumstances of time and place.

./english/274.txt:86:Pierre Clastres. Society Against the State: The Leader as Servant as Servant and the Human Uses of Power Among Indians of the Americas (New York: Urizen Books, 1977)

./english/275.txt:56:As Eyerman and Jamison have observed,23 such movements tend to generate their own counter-expertise precisely out of the clash between their own experience, needs and concerns and officially sanctioned ‘knowledge’. The knowledge thus generated runs all the way from criticism of the risks involved in new technologies24 via techniques of protest for opposing ecologically damaging developments25 to complete alternative theories of society and nature.26

./english/275.txt:57:Gramsci phrased this insight as follows: ‘All men are intellectuals27, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.’28 He goes on to say:

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

./english/276.txt:74:The first step in this direction is the development of a social ontology which is referred to as ‘the relational conception of society’ [henceforth RCS] (Collier, 1994: 138-141). In opposition to both methodological individualism and collectivism, RCS draws on the notion of the recognition of real complex wholes with emergent powers that defines the notion of the stratification of nature and focuses on the ever-present relations between individuals and groups and with the relations between these relations:

./english/276.txt:76:Our social being is constituted by relations and our social acts presuppose them. Yet relations and the related individuals may be ontologically independent … Relations presuppose other relations, relations are related to other relations. The lattice-work of relations constitutes the structure of ‘society’ (ibid.: 140-1).

./english/276.txt:78:It is these relations that form the subject matter of the social sciences. The lattice-work of relations that constitute the structure of society can be understood as those mechanisms – ‘the real’ – which generate the events – ‘the actual’ – which are in turn the stuff that people’s experiences – ‘the empirical’ – are made of. The task of social science, then, revolves around investigations of the social phenomena that occur and that people experience and how they can be explained in terms of – but not reduced to – the social structures that endure.

./english/276.txt:80:The nature of the relationship between society/structure and individual/agency needs to be further specified. Bhaskar proposes ‘the transformational model of social activity’ [henceforth TMSA] for grappling with the task of understanding the relationship between structure and agency (Collier, 1994: 141-151). What distinguishes TMSA from the humanist assertion that societies only exist as the outcome of human agency, the structuralist assertion that human action presupposes the existence of society, and the assertion that the social process is an interaction between society and people is the argument that we should not only distinguish between human practice and social structure, but between two aspects of both structure and agency (ibid.: 145). Hence Bhaskar proposes ‘an ontological hiatus between society and people’ (cited in Collier, 1994: 147) which entails that ‘people are not relations’ and, vice versa, that ‘societies are not conscious agents’ (Collier, 1994: 147)15. The crucial logical conclusion that follows from this is a distinction between ‘the properties possessed by social forms’ and ‘[the properties] possessed by the individuals upon whose activity they depend’ (Bhaskar, cited in Collier, 1994: 147). The TMSA thus follows the logic of the RCS in that allows us to question people’s views of the reasons why they do what they do and what is the outcome of what they do in terms of underlying structural mechanisms that condition their actions and the way in which these actions contribute to the reproduction of those underlying structural mechanisms:

./english/276.txt:82:On this transformational and relational conception, society is a skilled accomplishment of active agents. But the social world may be opaque to the social agents upon whose activity it depends in four respects, in that these activities may depend on or involve (a) unacknowledged conditions, (b) unintended consequences, (c) the exercise of tacit skills, and/or unconscious motivation. Accordingly, the task of the social sciences is to describe what social processes … must be going on for a Stock Exchange Crash or some other manifest phenomenon to be possible (Bhaskar, 1989: 4).

./english/277.txt:18:The paradox in question is that of the Marxist theory of social movements, or more accurately the lack of such a theory. It is not, of course, that Marxist writing on social movements does not exist; but rather that to the best of my knowledge no systematic attempt has been made to formulate a Marxist theory of social movements. What is by now the standard analysis of the field identifies an “American” mode of theorising, with roots in rational choice theory, and a “European” mode of theorising, normally seen as “post-Marxist” in its stress on the development of “new social movements” (cf. Cohen 1985, Diani 1992); it is commonly argued that these perspectives are now converging, though what this means theoretically is far from clear (Melucci 1989). These are not, of course, the only options on offer; recent years have seen the publication of Weberian (Scott 1990), cognitivist (Eyerman and Jamison 1991), culturalist (Eder 1993) and state-centred (Foweraker 1995) analyses, among others. Yet, acknowledging a steady stream of Marxist critiques of the concept of “new social movements” (Bagguley 1992, Barker and Dale 1997), the only systematic theoretical formulation on social movements from anything like a Marxist position would seem to be the body of writing associated with contemporary critical theory (Habermas 1984, 1987, Offe 1985, Cohen 1982, 1996), which asserts an essentially liberal view of social movements as the defence of civil society and of the life-world.

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

./english/277.txt:32:The guiding thread which I think runs through these theories is a commitment to a view of history as nothing other than the product of human activity; and, more specifically, as the product of collective human action, articulated in conflicts which encompass the totality of society and in turn define that totality; conflicts which are not only grounded ultimately in the material activity of human beings but are at the same time conflicts over how that activity is to develop. In other words, I am arguing that western Marxism, so defined, is a theory of social movements, and one which elevates social movements to the central, perhaps the only, feature of the historical process and the social structure.

./english/277.txt:44:If nothing else, I think the problematic nature of these examples illustrates the way in which western Marxist theories of social movements raise central questions about the totality of power relationships and modes of social organisation within particular states. When they are extended, as I think they must be, to the level of an entire society or “economic world-system”, to borrow Wallerstein’s phrase, we are starting to ask the kinds of questions which should be central to a Marxist understanding of contemporary society. To name contemporary attempts at answering even some of these questions is simultaneously to identify how complex the challenge is: for movements from above, Harvey (1990), Lash and Urry (1987), or Sklair (1995); for movements from below, Katsiaficas (1987) and Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein (1989) offer starting points. In particular, Katsiaficas’ discussion of “world-historical movements” (1987: 6) is an ambitious pointer to how much remains to be done, not only theoretically but practically.

./english/277.txt:50:This is then the first difference to be mentioned: social movements are not seen as unusual phenomena in need of particular explanation, occasional blips on the otherwise passive or institutionalised landscape of society. Rather, situations of passivity and institutionalisation just as much as situations of activity and unconventional practices need to be seen as part and parcel of an actively created and maintained dynamic tension between opposing social forces. One of the great merits of this perspective has been to open up new areas of social life for analysis: to mention Gramsci, Thompson and Williams is simultaneously to point to the intellectual preconditions for the cultural studies project. Social movements, then, are the way in which human practices are socially articulated.

./english/277.txt:52:Secondly, social movements include not only the actions of the dominated and exploited, but also the actions of those who dominate and exploit - including, centrally, the practices of exploitation and domination themselves. The changing relations of ownership (identified in feudal society by Marc Bloch (1961)) and the changing form of the state in capitalism, just as much as the developing forms of political and cultural organisation from below, are forms of collective practice geared to maintaining or transforming social relations. Social movements, then, come not only “from below”, but also “from above” - and the presence of the latter is rather more systematic than that of the former.

./english/277.txt:96:This ontology of skilled practical activity as the starting-point of human society, then, offers a more general and I think more fundamental starting-point for social movement research than one which assumes specific institutions and practices as defining; it directs attention precisely to the historical question of how skill is embodied in particular places at particular times; and it offers a direct connection to the other available starting-point for research, that of the conflictual social totality, to which I now turn.

./english/277.txt:147:Pursuing this project, I went first to Hamburg to carry out research; as a postgrad, the research became a defining feature of my situation as researcher and teaching assistant, and came to involve attempting to bring the activities I was already familiar with into the externally-defined categories of the conventional social movements literature. At the same time, this “theoretical” history was paralleled by a political one. In Dublin, as an active member of the milieu, I had been involved in what were essentially its self-controlled activities: a college occupation, a student peace society, a semi-anarchist group, later street theatre and the attempt to set up an infoshop among others. In Hamburg, however, as part of my research I joined the German Green Party, coming to act as liaison between the Party and a peace camp during the Gulf War, and later helping run a local section.

./english/277.txt:160:It seems that the lapse of time between interview and transcription (1 - 2 years) and the unusual experience of seeing accurate transcriptions of one’s own speech, made reading transcripts something which could be done with sufficient “distance” to be useful and “objectifying”, in other words to help participants gain a clearer sense of their own self-understanding and history: an important part of “intervention” research. A second example, at the other end of the spectrum, is that participants have given me considerable assistance in producing an alternative magazine that grows out of much the same roots as the research. It is hard to know precisely what value they feel it has, but help has often been given unsolicited, which suggests that it is contributing to the shared project. Thirdly, as I have mentioned earlier, prior to the specific methods and process of research are the social conditions of research. To research a milieu means among other things to find a way of taking part in it and contributing in whatever way one can to that milieu. Thus, for example, one part of this role was for several years to maintain as an open room a college society which served as a crashpad, a drop-in centre, a library and other things for members of the milieu.

./english/278.txt:17:There have been, of course, numerous Marxist studies of the working class, particularly by historians and sociologists, that describe important aspects of their class consciousness. E.P. Thompson (1966), Eric Hobsbawm (1984), David Montgomery (1979), Herbert Gutman (1976), Harry Braverman (1974), Andre Gorz (1967), Serge Mallet (1975), Erich Fromm (1984), Michael Mann (1973), John Leggett (1968), Stanley Aronowitz (1973), Eric Wright (1985), Adam Przeworski (1977), John McDermott (1980), and Paul Willis (1981) are some of the chief figures here. But few of these authors have made consciousness their main focus. And fewer still have made independent studies of the consciousness of today's workers. In the main their evidence comes from non-Marxist research (which they reinterpret), working class actions (which they deconstruct), government statistics, literary texts, personal experiences, anecdotes, and unique events and testimonies. More serious still, there is no consistent method that helps us as readers and potential researchers and political actors to get what we want and to understand what we have once we've gotten it. Usually, we are provided with a highly suggestive collage, generally with many parts missing, of theoretically undigested facts and insights. Until these findings are reformulated in terms of Marx's theory of class consciousness and integrated in turn within Marx's broader analysis of society, their full potential for helping us either understand or change capitalism cannot be realized. Clearly, a better focused, more systematic, and more effectively theorized Marxist study of class-consciousness of today's workers remains to be done.

./english/278.txt:31:We find that defining "class"—or indeed any other important notion in Marxism—proceeds from the whole to the part (class, in this case) rather than from still smaller parts (individuals) to class, viewed as some larger composite notion. According to Marx, "the subject, society, must always be envisaged as the precondition of comprehension" (1904, 295). This whole, this society, is capitalism, or more specifically, Marx's analysis of capitalism, which captures both its distinctive character as a social formation and the unique dynamics, or "law of motion," that has transformed it from its beginnings in feudalism to and through the present to whatever future awaits it. Before we can offer more precision on Marx's notion of class, we need to have a better idea of the whole in which it plays such a crucial role.

./english/278.txt:53:Having defined "class" and "class interests" as both objective and subjective, we are now in a position to approach class-consciousness. First, as regards its content, its main elements include one's identity and interests (subjective and objective) as members of a class, something of the dynamics of capitalism uncovered by Marx (at least enough to grasp objective interests), the broad outlines of the class struggle and where one fits into it, feelings of solidarity toward one's own class and of rational hostility toward opposition classes (in contrast to the feelings of mutual indifference and inner-class competition that accompany alienation), and the vision of a more democratic and egalitarian society that is not only possible but that one can help bring about. These are the main things that a class conscious working class is conscious of. Studying workers' class-consciousness, then, is looking for what is not there, not yet present in the thinking of real workers, as well as for what is. How can this be?

./english/278.txt:71:Finally, and possibly what distinguishes it most from individual consciousness as ordinarily understood, class consciousness is elastic and changing, and encompasses all the stages in the process of becoming what it potentially is along with the time it takes for this is occur. As such, class consciousness cannot be captured in any instant, nor can it be expressed in any simple, straightforward description. The time frame is stretched to cover the whole journey, but it is a journey with an end, a goal established by the situation of the class as such and evoked by all the conditions and pressures that constitute that situation, though most members of the class may not recognize this until very late. One of the most puzzling features in Marx's use of "class" is how he could claim that class is "the product of the bourgeoisie" while maintaining that "All history is the history of class struggle," and refer to various pre-capitalist groups as "classes" (Marx and Engels, 1942, 77; 1945, 12). In fact, class (in all of its aspects), class struggle, and class-consciousness all develop, mature, become over time, and only in late capitalist society do they realize their full potential. It is in this sense that each may be said to be a product of capitalism. In so far as many of their elements are present earlier, however, class, class struggle, and class consciousness can be said—if this limited sense is kept in mind—to have existed before. Moreover, viewed as historical processes, the mature form of each can be taken as present as a germ in its earlier stages and vice versa. Such is the nature of becoming as a dialectical category. As regards class-consciousness at the present time, rather than what any single person thinks, class-consciousness refers to how, when, from and towards what a whole class of people are changing their minds.

./english/278.txt:79:What if the majority of the workers in capitalist society never become class conscious? This certainly is a possibility. Our effort to integrate the probable future into the present is not an exercise in crystal ball gazing. But imputed class consciousness, the workers' rational understanding of their situation and of what kind of actions are required to serve their interests, can be treated as future class consciousness even if it never takes place. It is after all only the probable future as determined by Marx's analysis of the worker's situation together with its developing patterns and trends. What needs to be stressed is that the probable future is an internally related part of the present, and exists there (here) as the point toward which real pressures are directing us. Grasped as "becoming", it is a form assumed by the future within the present, and as such affects how we understand the present, how we should study it, and what we can do to help change it.

./english/278.txt:81:Does understanding imputed class consciousness as future class consciousness imply that socialism is inevitable? No, because class conscious workers are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a successful socialist transformation of society. How effectively these class conscious workers are organized, what political action they take, the character of the then opposition, and even luck will help determine the final outcome of the class struggle. Marx himself offered barbarism—the disintegration of advanced civilization—as one alternative to socialism, but living one hundred years ago, he did not give it the attention that it would receive today. The Cold War has led to the recognition that another all too realistic alternative to socialism is the death of humanity brought about by nuclear holocaust. Still another awful possibility is ecocide, or the destruction of our species through the rapidly escalating destruction of our natural environment. Many rate this last as the most likely outcome of our species' relatively brief sojourn on this planet. While occasionally sympathetic (if this is the right word) to this view, it should be clear that the factors effecting this outcome are, at least to a large degree, of a different order than those that influence the progress of class consciousness. Consequently, the possibility of ecocide, like the possibility of barbarism and nuclear holocaust, does not prevent us from treating imputed class consciousness as future class consciousness within a notion of present class consciousness viewed in the process of becoming.

./english/278.txt:83:What emerges from the foregoing is that our object of study, class consciousness, is much larger than the mind or understanding of any individual and much longer than the present moment. It is the class, its interest and self-understanding, in the context of the situation, especially its interaction with opposing classes, that constitute it as a class, and all this as it has developed, is developing and will continue to develop into the future. At its broadest, the study of class consciousness is a study of an important part of capitalist society, which, through its interconnections, is simultaneously an investigation into capitalism, into how it works and where it is tending, viewed from the perspective of that moment when the mass of workers have acquired the understand that is necessary for engaging in revolutionary activity.

./english/278.txt:89:What is the alternative? Until now, I have been constructing a dialectical conception of class consciousness that could be studied directly and not only as a dependent aspect of class structure or class struggle. In what follows, I sketch what such a study would look like, its advantages and problems, and its relation to political practice. The dialectical alternative to examining class consciousness in the attitudes of individual workers, then, is to study the objective aspects of class consciousness in the situation of the class, and its subjective aspects in the thinking and activity of the group of people who make up the class, and both of these over time. On the objective side, what we have called the situation of the class must be studied on two different levels of historical specificity. First, we must clearly establish the place and function of the working class together with its objective interests in capitalism as such, that is in capitalism as it has existed for the past three to four hundred years, in order to derive the class consciousness that is appropriate. Reconstructing this situation not only provides the goal or finished form of class consciousness but puts us in touch with social and economic pressures arising out of the most basic relations of capitalism that move the actual consciousness of living workers in the direction of this goal. Given our concern with class consciousness, the focus is on the workers and hence the rest of capitalist society comes into view chiefly as part of the necessary conditions and/or results of the workers appearing and functioning as they do. In reconstructing how capitalism looks and works from the vantage point of the working class, there are some tendencies that deserve special attention. Among these are the accumulation and centralization of capital, the falling rate of profit, the increasing rate of exploitation, and the immiseration of the working class (that is relative to capitalists and viewed on a world scale). Though sometimes referred to as "laws," Marx's tendencies all admit—indeed often require—counter-tendencies, and should be understood and investigated with this in mind.

./english/278.txt:97:How these contradictory tendencies (promoting class consciousness and undermining it - whose main parts I have only been able to list) are related to each other in each modern capitalism and capitalism overall, and how the sum of the tendencies in the former facilitate, give expression to, or inhibit all the tendencies in the latter constitute the core of a Marxist study of the objective side of class consciousness. One way to bring out the objective character of these heterogeneous elements is to subsume them under the notion of class struggle. The class struggle is not, as most commentators left and right would have it, a subjective, consciously chosen form of class behavior. Rather, it is "the form of motion of classes." It is what a class—grasped as a place/function in the system, as the group of people who embody this function and who as a result tend to develop other common characteristics, and as the common element in their alienated social relations—becomes in and through its complex interaction with other classes, particularly over class interests and the conditions and possibilities for their realization. All that a class does, or what happens to it, that directly or indirectly affects its power vis-à-vis other classes is class struggle. Viewed in this way, class struggle encompasses what Gramsci calls the war of position, the adding and subtracting of advantages and disadvantages, as well as what he calls the war of movement, or those occasions when all that has been acquired (and lost) serves to fuel more direct forms of confrontation; and both of these "wars" rage throughout all sectors of society (1971, 108-110, 229-235, 238f., 243). The contradictory tendencies within class consciousness that we referred to above are recast here as internally related causes, expressions, and effects of the interaction of classes.

./english/278.txt:123:As for which subsection of the workers should be given priority as subjects of study, the answer can be found in an updated reading of Marx's texts. Besides constituting the largest section of the working class in nineteen-century capitalism, industrial workers worked and lived in conditions that were in the process of becoming generalized. In this, as in so much else, they led the way. Because of their place and numbers in industry, industrial workers also had the power to bring the entire capitalist system to a halt. Hence, Marx's political as well as economic emphasis on this section of the working class. Today, industrial workers are no longer the majority of the working class, and their proportion as part of the class is becoming smaller, and while they set the pace when material conditions for the whole class were improving, the current drop in real living standards finds them trailing after other less favored, generally less unionized, sections of the class. Granted, they are still the main source of all real (as distinct from paper) wealth in our society, and they still have the force to bring capitalism to a halt by withdrawing their labor-power. From this, it would seem that industrial workers should continue to be a main subgroup in any study of working class consciousness, but—on the basis of current trends in capitalism—they must now share the spotlight with others. As the fastest growing sectors of the working class, highly skilled technical workers, low skilled services workers, and government and office workers should also be heavily represented in studies of working class consciousness.

./english/281.txt:21:achieve a cross fertilisation between ‘critical psychology’ and ‘anti-capitalist movements’, we should start by streamlining the definition of ‘anti-capitalist movements’. To complicate matters a further set of questions occur to me: Is there a relationship between academia’s general interest in social movements and the media’s sudden fascination with the ‘anti-globalisation movement’? Are self-defined anti-capitalists really subversive? And, finally, is academe the proper arena for discussing such issues? On this note, let’s start with some concrete reflections on the problematic. Being within or being for... What are we talking about? Why are we talking? When I decided to write a thesis on gender relationships of militants in the radical social movement7, I wanted to work from within (Plows, 1998; Wall, 1999). The aim for me, as an insider was to understand and improve our gender relations and to reduce sexism in all its manifestations8. I was completely unaware of theories on social movements and I immersed myself in the literature. I found both really interesting texts and awful ones, but there was something that was escaping to me, and I wasn't able to put my finger on it. Then I participated in my first Social Movement congress and then, and only then, did I see the light.☺ In my opinion, the problem was that the majority of participants were SM outsiders and were, in any case, trying to explain SM dynamics to academia, to society in general or to a political party, instead of trying to create a debate within SM. In a recent contribution, Barker and Cox (2001-02, page 2), analyse the relation between research on SM and being activists. They use the Gramscian distinction between ‘traditional’ (in this case, academic) and ‘organic’ (activist) intellectuals and pose three fundamental questions in order to decide which side the researcher represents. These are: 1. What kind of knowledge do they produce?

./english/281.txt:25:2. What’s their ‘relevant community’?, and 3. Who plays the part? They believe that ‘traditional intellectuals’ tend to produce a system of knowledge, which is more static and explanatory so that it can be validated by academia. In contrast, ‘organic intellectuals’ develop a more situated and dynamic analysis related to the possibility of action, which then has to be debated and accepted by militants. I find this distinction interesting despite the authors’ romantic vision of activists9, and also despite their more expansive definition of activism (they include trade union stewards and leftist party apparatchiks as activists). Nevertheless, I believe this situation is not specific to Social Movement studies. It emerged from an ethical position within academia (Biglia, 2000). The problem occurs if we set out to explain and justify the SM point of view instead of using its theoretical tools to subvert mainstream knowledge. We, as activist-academics, have to ensure this by introducing the Radical Social Movement’s (RSM) ideas into academia. Some of us have already attempted to do that with feminism10, researching and producing knowledge in all areas (and not just women’s issues) using an ‘autonomous’ feminist perspective. We need to tread carefully otherwise activist theories become ‘rapidly recolonized’ and may even become ‘a source of new, sexy courses and research subjects whose purpose is to attract students, funding and status’ (Barker and Cox, 2001-02, 9). When the Radical Social Movement (RSM) was powerful and involved large sectors of society, the interaction between the two kinds of intellectuals was particularly strong. For example, the Italian anti-psychiatric movement of the 1970s, was firmly connected to street protests. It was characterised by an intense interaction between ‘professionals’ and ‘non professionals’. There was no separation between theorists and activists- theories were constructed collectively and shared practices played a big part in the process. In this context we could locate the Calate di Reggio Emilia11, characterised for the interaction between some psi-

./english/281.txt:40:In this sense activist critics of academia are still relevant; for example, Cecilia17, criticises academic Italian feminists who did not come out against the reformists who wanted to forbid abortion. The second painful example comes from the Italian anti-psychiatry movement. Law 18018 which in theory aimed for a more open model of psychic pain, left three enormous legislative holes: First, it retained the TSO19; second, it didn’t close the criminal ‘madhouses’ (Barbieri, 1995); and, finally, it supported the inabilitazione20 (Biglia, 1999). The government passed these laws with the approval of society since they were seen as liberating. The supposed empowerment either didn’t materialise or was pushed through in a reformist manner (Telefono Viola21). In this way the government boycotted all the genuinely alternative approaches. First, subsidies were eliminated and later on draconian laws were employed to shut down individual and collective radical projects. Ironically, the Italian psychiatric laws are still deemed ‘progressive’ by some. These were two examples from the past but I believe the germ of a very similar process can be seen in various sectors of the ‘anti-globalisation movement’. Academic writings have often favoured reabsorption of critics by recolonising collective knowledge within the borders of ‘scientific space’. The second phenomenon, which needs discussing, is the ‘divide-and-rule’ tactics of the state. Within autonomous groupings the development of a collective identity has always been a necessary component of recognising a common struggle and the fight against oppression. We need a group consciousness in order to be subversive, since ‘any group that leads an autonomous existence [...] constitutes a constant danger for the dominant group’ (Apfelbaum, 1999, p 269). Obviously if the identity becomes homogenising it could suffocate the group and the subjectivity within it (Biglia, 2003). As I explained before, various occasions are used to

./english/282.txt:148:'Feminism', similarly, represents a long-drawn-out process of theorization, which by the late 19th century had acquired some stability as a body of knowledge linked with 'the first-wave women's movement', and which shares with Marxism the experience of a creative revival in the West associated with the social movements of the late 1960s and subsequently. It also shares something else with Marxism in this period, which is that of a migration into the academy. In part this is a reflection of movement success - the creation of departments of sociology and schools of women's studies undoubtedly reflects a need on the part of the university to respond to (and benefit from) perceived changes within society. It is also, however, a reflection of movement weakness.

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

./english/284.txt:71:Spivak’s call for a deep engagement with the subaltern leads to a strong epistemological shift. She insists on the persistence of the “epistemic violence” product of the colonial process where Europe is erected as the undetermined Subject holding the explanatory power, and the colonized are relegated to be the Others –the Objects waiting to be explained- whose voice and agency have been stolen. Through recognizing the international division of labor and power, one is able to perceive its impact on the current ‘epistemological world order’. She is offering an epistemology that takes the subaltern into account not only as a case study, but as a source of knowledge and ‘expert’ production-the subaltern must be heard. Among global resistance movements in North America and Europe there is a lot of internal discussion about this topic. Mainly due to the mass media, the ‘spearheading role of southern social movements has been obscured, portraying the ‘anti-globalization movement’ as a negligible affair of ‘white-US and European-middle class kids’. However, in much movement discourse there exists an explicit attempt to recognize the role of grassroots communities from ‘poor’ countries as referential examples of movement building –from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, to the unemployed/piqueteros in Argentina, to peasant women in India- showing a similar effort to revert the canons of expertise. In this process, civil society from Europe and the US become the ‘students’ of their southern ‘teachers’ challenging colonial patterns.

./english/284.txt:82:This positionality is key to understanding the goal of this piece which is to disarticulate discourses of misrepresentation and prejudices about the Mexican low-wage workers in the US. Against interpretations of the Mexican language as “crude”, “ordinary” and the Mexican male as “an animal whose ferocious pantomimes are designed to terrify others” (Ramos in Limón, 1994: 124) he is trying to put forward an alternative analysis. Instead of beasts’ roars, Limón find voices of resistance. He wants to rethink them as revolutionary narratives. The marginalized peoples’ jokes, plays and cooking are ways through which the participants are transforming themselves into mastering subjects challenging the norms of a dominant social order. Their activities become ideological devices, antagonistic performances against a hegemonic culture and society. Limón discerns a grammar of insurgency encoded in apparently crass sexual jokes. Similar to Mexican language, the space of the rancho is transform into a “temporary forum of non-alienation” (135), into an interim non-capitalist space.

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

./english/284.txt:109:Limón, J. (1994) Dancing with the Devil. Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas, The University of Wisconsin Press

./english/285.txt:11:To illustrate, but also to help you better understand (and possibly dismiss ;-) my point, I may be permitted to sketch briefly my rather long passage through the academic system. After high school - a very fine training in do's and don'ts in itself - I started my university career in 1972, 'reading Classics' as the nice English formula goes. I was not fresh from high school then, but had spent a year traveling in (West and South)Asia. Taking such a 'gap year' was not common in those days, nor was it very much appreciated by my professors, since it further diminished the,in their view, paltry command of Greek and Latin grammar imparted to us at the 'gymnasium'. Hence I was told that despite the Latin maxim inscribed on the frontispiece of my high school, life is for learning and not the reverse. I was also told, in no uncertain words, that the prime purpose of studying the classics at university was to become a certified secondary school teacher in the same, in order to "salvage the antique culture from the barbarian forces in society". Finally I was to discover that one

./english/285.txt:14:When I quit classics, like the majority of my fellow students (in Dutch, the appellation 'classicist' is usually followed by 'gesjeesd' - dropped-out), I had acquired the disabused cynicism that enabled me to become a passable, then average, and finally quite a brilliant geography student. I learned a few more 'tricks of the trade' along the way, most if not all related to the management of the remorseless but malleable power balances within the academic establishment. Whatever I did learn about geography, (and a host of other subjects, since I was always a multi-disciplinarian, again, not a popular position), I taught myself, not thanks, but despite the institutional environment. On completion of my thesis (which was the first to be published and accepted as such, without need for revisions, by the Royal (!) Dutch Geographic Society), I was offered a position at my institute, but due to budgetary constraints without pay. I made 'them' to regret this decision ever since as I always stuck to that status. My critical stance being not very popular, there is precious little I was made to contribute to the actual running of the institute, leading to the comical situation that when the outfit was rechristened after the umpteenth 'reorganisation' as "research institute on global issues and development studies", I was probably the only person to have an overall view of what 'global'(-isation) actually meant - never mind development...In the meanwhile I pursued my own research objectives, mostly liaising with innovative, usually self-organised ventures in the 'new social movements'. These had the uncanny knack of always propelling themselves at the forefront of current societal developments, and someway behind, of academic research, and also always turned out to have a clear geographic component, just as routinely ignored by the mainstream, but

./english/285.txt:46:(Patrice Riemens, 1950, is geographer. Formerly he is associate researcher (without pay) at the University of Amsterdam and fellow of the Waag Society for Old and New Media, also in Amsterdam. However, he is mostly known as 'cultural activist' in the realm of the 'new social movements' associated with the information and communication technologies.

./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/290.txt:116:When we speak of "placing" we refer, more exactly, to re-placing. Because care, as we understand it, already is, in fact, in the center. Even more: it always has been and will continue to be, today more than ever, the center. The center in the sense of principle and principal, as an arche of human existence and of social relations. Because care is what makes life possible (care generates life, nourishes it, makes it grow, heals it), care can make life happier (creating relations of interdependence among bodies) and more interesting (generating exchanges of all types of flows, knowledges, contagions), care can give like, definitively, some meaning.[20] But this reality, which has been silenced in the maligned area of reproduction and time and again recovered from patriarchal mystifications by feminist critiques of political economy, today comes to be blurred even in those indispensible Italian postoperaismo analyses of immaterial labor, the forms of exploitation and subversive possibilities of the new forms of labor. One of the gravest errors of this analysis resides, following Negri, in "the tendency (ä) to treat the new laboring practices in biopolitical society only in their intellectual and incorporeal aspects. The productivity of bodies and the value of affect, however, are absolutely central in this context.≤[21] As such, our proposal for placing care in the center would consist, among other things, in recovering the affective component of immaterial labor from the periphery or the silence to which it is customarily relegated in analyses of reality, and in recognizing the impossibility of separating the materiality of bodies - despite the determination of late capitalism to do just that. In returning to situate this in the place to which it corresponds and which, in fact, - we insist - it occupies.

./english/291.txt:21:Notwithstanding, in the present context it is not possible to speak of precarity as a differentiated state (and, as such, to distinguish neatly between a precarious population and another guaranteed one), but rather that it is more fitting to detect a tendency to the precarization of life that affects society as a whole as a threat ("... be careful to behave yourself because the situation is tense, don't push it...")

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

./english/291.txt:41:The social context that we live in today is the network-society. The factory has overflowed and has invaded the social, changing it into the principal lever of production. The wave of struggles in the 1960s and 1970s, on one hand, and the saturation of markets, along with the high levels of competition that introduced the process of globalization, on the other, obligated firms to develop techniques and technologies to make themselves more mobile and flexible and also more resistant to conflictivity and crisis: their survival depended, on one hand, on their capacity to detext (and take advantage of) the politico-institutional and social conditions and of the supply of most optimum raw materials, software, and machinery and work force; on the other hand firms' survival depended on their ability to respond within very brief time spans to oscilations of demand, thus in order to create (with a whole set of identification of needs/desires/forms of life and production of signs) the demand for a product even before manufacturing it. The key thus was in the multiplication of contacts and in a flexible and network organization that allowed a maximum fluidification of the circulation of information about local and international markets and an immediate production response to this information. In this manner, externalization, dislocalization and flexibilization became the slogan and communicative and relational work became the essential pivot, the active interface, of this ever more networked production.

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

./english/291.txt:107:Biosindicalism has nothing to do with bifidus. It is an attempt to name a series of recent practical and everyday experiments that are happening in the terrain of precarity, in a provisional, provocative, and extremely pragmatic manner. Biosindicalism is a contraction of life and sindicalism, where life crawls toward that tradition of struggle that has been sindicalism and deprives it of its most corporative and economistic elements. But: why insert into this medium? 1) Because life is productive. We are not among those who say, "Life has been put into production." It always produced: cooperation, affective territories, worlds... but now it also produces profit. The capitalist axiomatic has subsumed it. 2) Because precarity cannot be understood only from the laboral context, from the concrete conditions of work of this or that individual. A much more rich and illuminating position results from understanding precarity as a generalized tendency toward the precarization of life that affects society as a whole. And 3) because the labor has ceased to be a place that organizes (individual and collective) identity), a place of spontaneous encounter and aggregation and a place that nourishes the utopia of a better world. The reasons? The failure of the worker movement and the process of capitalist restructuration that accompanied it, as much as the push of the desire of singularity (of the feminist movement, the black movement, the anticolonial movements and other movements linked to the spirit of '68) that made the worker movement stall from the inside.

./english/291.txt:165:Copyleft is, also, an axis of fundamental articulation for a politics from below adequate for our times. Some times traversed by crossroads such as the overcoming of the society of labor in forms prescribed by the social system based on waged labor, knowledge converted into the principle productive force when labor time is maintained as a unity of measure or 18th century property laws applied now to immaterial goods (pillars of our global economy) whose qualities are completely distinct from those of tangible products.

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

./english/298.txt:42:Getting beyond either schizophrenia is a hazardous project that ultimately threatens the faculty’s ‘directorial’ position. In the US, for instance, more than half of tenured faculty in public higher education are unionised. This is not impressive by European standards, but it’s three times the average level of worker organisation in the US. I bring it up because – with a few exceptions – it has thus far been very much an old-style craft unionism, a labour aristocracy that preserves workplace hierarchy, and has been very much complicit in the perma-temping of the university workforce, preserving their own jobs while selling out the future. While those unions are moving slowly to address casualisation, the kind of dramatic change implicit in the notion of a mass intellectuality or even the smaller fraction of mental labourers off the campus, would really imply a reverse of the trajectory we usually imagine: not, ‘how can the university serve as a platform for changing society on behalf of the casualised,’ but ‘how can the casualised hijack the university in their own interest?’

./english/298.txt:80:TT: Well this would be consistent with Louis Althusser’s notion of education as ‘Institutional State Apparatus’ wouldn’t it? And there is no doubt, as Foucault once put it, that the university still partially ‘stands for the institutional apparatus through which society ensures its uneventful reproduction at the least cost to itself’. Sadie Plant used this quote to contest what she thinks is the ‘Platonic’ bias of many pedagogical approaches to higher education which contribute to making the university what Foucault said it was: the idea that knowledge is something that is ‘recalled’ ready made from an original source and then simply transmitted from mind to mind. This is really the uneventful reproduction of readymade knowledges for the purposes of social reproduction.2

./english/298.txt:124:TT: This is a really interesting question. Gramsci was a keen observer of ‘civil society’ – and he was very aware that the complex relation between social classes was a historical and dynamic relation of shifting alliances, with hegemony constituting a kind of ‘moving equilibrium’. The space of civil society, however, is relatively solid, stratified and bounded. Classes enter relationships of alliance but are clearly distinguishable within the overall boundary of the nation state and the dialectic opposition between the dominant and the dominated.

./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:71:What the public consideration of sex work introduces is an argument phrased in moral terms. Prostitution, they say, threatens the dignity of women converting their bodies in an object of commerce (and violence).[14] Nevertheless, when the activity is consensual we find ourselves in front of a crime with no victim from which we donπt really know very well who to protectäsociety? Public morals? Any considerations from the point of view of the professionals stays, within this perspective, quite out of the picture, and those who claim to be protecting end up victimizing.

./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:205:But let us go bit by bit. By hegemonic reproductive scheme we understand the nuclear patriarchal family with a strong sexual division of work which determines the division between the public and the private, production and reproduction; it is indubitably a white, middle class family, legitimate heir to the bourgeois family of the 19th century, and extended as a model (attention, as a model, not necessarily as an experience) to almost all other layers of society throughout the first half of the 20th century. This scheme maximizes biological and social reproduction, in Bourdieuπs sense, both that which has to do with the transmission of inheritance and that which has to do with the care of offspring in intimate collaboration with the State and with the maintenance of the moral order. In Francoist Spain, this model was colored by the special hue of an authoritarian welfare State[32], the moral and institutional predominance of the Catholic religion and the propaganda about women as ≥angels of the home≤. The crisis of this model began in the PostFrancoist period and has become more acute in the last decades.[33] åCrisisπ here does not suggest that sexual division does not continue to be produced, that previously women of the lower class were not subjected to an intensive model of work outside and inside the home, that this model is deployed in the same ways in different contexts (for example in the rural context) or that the same things happen everywhere at the same time. The nuances are important, nevertheless it seems pertinent to us to speak of a hegemonic model and to clarify that when we talk about the sexual division of work we do not assume that women do not work outside of the house but we do see that reproduction ceases to take place primarily in the bosom of the extended family and that, from the 18th century onwards in Europe a series of collective services are established that, leaning upon the family and upon women, are oriented towards educating, pacifying and integrating the population and quiet the danger that in that period, and in others thereafter, the popular classes have represented.[34] We neednπt mention that this model has been object of successive crises and readaptations; for example, after the two World Wars.

./english/300.txt:14:These interactions between social spheres though don’t occur out of the blue. One of the main arguments of this essay is that the impetus for the combination of radical geography and participatory research (or even similar projects such as popular education) comes from ‘society’ in periods of heightened conflictuality and mobilization. In a more general sense, as Harvey puts it: “The history of our discipline cannot be understood independently of the history of the society in which the practices of geography are embedded… The difficulties and alternatives geographers now face are likewise rooted in conflictual processes of societal transformation” (Harvey 2001; p.108).

./english/300.txt:22:Just prior to the emergence of its critical wing, geography during the mid 60’s was primarily seen as a spatial science fully immersed in (or taken over by) the quantitative revolution. The subject matter addressed by the discipline was varied (from the study of glaciers to neighborhood segregation) but the theoretical bases that had often given geography it raison d’être-the synthesis of the human and physical sciences- seemed a thing of the past (Harvey and Smith 1984; p. 102). The writers of the history of radical geography often give the impression that while geography had its niche, there was a feeling of a certain stagnation (Peet 1977, Blaut 1979, Harvey and Smith 1984). It is interesting to note that up until the 1960’s there seems to have not been anything that could be called a critical ‘tradition’ or lineage. Although many geographers hark back to the work of anarchist geographers such as Kropotkin and Réclus, there had not been a body of work or string of authors that one could say had picked up where those two had left off in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. In the decades prior to the 60’s there had been individuals and small groups of people involved in critical work (Sauer, and Lattimore are cited by some) but no ‘body’ of work that could be called ‘critical’ much less ‘radical’. Blaut attempts to explain the lack of this tradition as due, at least partly, to: the cultural monotony of the professoriate (mostly white male), the affluence (in the U.S. at least) of the post-war period and McCarthyist repression (Blaut 1979; p. 160). Harvey even ventures that due to McCarthyism, at least some ‘progressive’ geographers began to “…express their social concerns behind the supposed neutrality of ‘the positivist shield’” (Harvey 2001; p. 114). To break through this ‘quiet’ then would require something fairly massive to occur, a ‘social crisis’ according to Blaut: “Radical geography certainly emerged out of such a crisis, in my view the most serious crisis yet faced by capitalist society,” (Blaut 1979; p. 159).

./english/300.txt:25:As stated in the quote above, it was at this intense moment of protest that the tradition of the new Geographical Expedition came about under the initial guidance of William Bunge. The Expedition projects came to be an extremely interesting experiment at uniting both community concerns and mobilization with academic expertise and research. In fact, during the first several years of the development of radical geography, simultaneous to a period when high levels of social mobilization were maintained, the pages of Antipode often reported the experiences of the expeditions, the complexities around ‘advocacy geography’ and community involvement, and even an entire issue was dedicated to ‘radical methodologies’ with several of the articles addressing similar questions. During this initial period of the critical tradition, the idea of constructing those bridges between activism and the academy were in the forefront along with developing more general critiques of either society or the discipline itself. We will now proceed to a brief ‘exploration’ of these experiences, focusing on the ‘expedition’.

./english/300.txt:29:The tradition of the new Geographical Expedition and the ‘Society for Human Exploration’, came about largely as a result of the contacts and initial exchanges of ideas between William Bunge and Gwendolyn Warren- the main academic representative and community representative initially (Horvath 1971; p. 74). It was an engagement between the serious problems of marginalization (of all sorts) in an African American community in Detroit, and engaged faculty and students at the University of Michigan. The idea was to combine academic and local expertise to create effective political tools, community empowerment, consciousness and provide educational opportunities (suited to greater or lesser degrees) for those inner-city communities. After several years of initial forays and exchanges-the final result became the D.G.E.I. Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute which lasted approximately from the summer of ’1969 until the fall/winter of 1970.

./english/300.txt:44:While the expedition is one of the most salient examples and is cited by many who write histories of critical geography the discussion of how to bring together the production of research within the university and mobilization occurring in different sectors of society was occurring at a more general level amongst those geographers who were attempting to respond to the social reality they were embedded in. Many articles in the early editions of Antipode reflect this spirit, for example an article on ‘advocacy geography’ speaking to a wider audience on how to challenge notions of advocate-advocee and allowing communities to articulate their own ‘problems’ to be solved instead of the advocate dictating the problem. Mention of popular education and the methods of radical pedagogy of Paolo Freire come up (Campbell 1974). The experiences of critical planners attempting to work with community organizations are another example. In fact, the second issue of Antipode was dedicated to discussions of ‘radical methodology’. While that is a very broad term and included articles on bringing critical analysis into geography more generally, discussions also took place of how to make research more participatory and develop new ways of interfacing official academic work with non-official intellectual/political work.

./english/300.txt:53:It seems then, that while intellectual complexity developed, even to the point of having multiple specialties and foci within critical geography, the emphasis on ‘participation’ seems to have dissipated. At times, one can even find comments from the period in the mid and late seventies that could be construed if not as critiques of the participation model in research, then as calls for a change in emphasis (Peet and Harvey 1974; p. iv & Breitbart and Peet in Peet 1979; p. 15). In keeping with one of the themes of this paper dealing with the influence of social mobilization on the academy, it is important to note that it is during this time period that a general demobilization of society is beginning to take hold. While many thousands had been radicalized by the 60’s and early seventies, the same mass mobilizations around any multiplicity of issues that had occurred then were becoming more and more distant by the mid-late seventies. This was also the period when the ‘militaristic logic’ emerged in many small radical groups. Groups such as the Weathermen and the Black Liberation Army in the U.S. got involved in very short-lived armed conflicts with the state having misread the historical moment and chosen a strategy were these groups were a thousand times the weaker. In this ambiance it becomes easier to explain that while the development of radical geography pushed forward the ‘wall’ between the academy and more general activism re-hardened [1].

./english/300.txt:57:Possibly the most important development in geography during this period being playfully called the ‘Long March’ with regards to challenging the degrees of separation between academic knowledge and other sources of knowledge comes from the development of feminist geography. The influence of the women’s movement and the challenges it posed to many pre-held notion in society was brought to geography during this time as the gains made by the movement facilitated the entrance of more women into the discipline that had been previously feasible. Those same destabilizing challenges were brought to research in order for feminist geographer to be able to do research on women as women.

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

./english/306.txt:15:«Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore, and no aspect of this society being in any way relevant to queers, there remains to the civic-minded, responsible and thrill-seeking queer only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy compulsive heterosexuality.»

./english/306.txt:63:Living life as political is a potent challenge, taking up the spirit of so many feminist, anti-racist and anti-homophobic struggles which have insisted in NOT accepting violence, exclusion or annoyances as “normal.” If these struggles have achieved important changes in society it is thanks to many years of fighting and wagering on the collective. But lets not fool ourselves; much remains to be done, it is not time to rest on our laurels.

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

./english/316.txt:49:Initially appearing as a classical armed guerilla movement, based on the discriminated and land-hungry Mayan ethnic communities of Chiapas, the Zapatistas rapidly revealed entirely novel characteristics: an address to Mexican ‘civil society’, a high-profile internationalism, a sophisticated understanding and use of both the mass media and alternative electronic communications. All can be found in the speeches and writings of its primary spokesperson, Sub-Commander Marcos (Rafael Guillén), a university-educated non-indigene, trained in guerilla warfare in Cuba. Activities of the Zapatistas, particularly two international encuentros, one in Chiapas, 1996, one in Spain, 1997, gave rise, or shape, to a new wave of internationalism. The powerful, poetic and playful words of Marcos, who switches between, or combines, popular Mayan and Mexican idiom with the language of cosmopolitan intellectuals, enchanted a dulled world. It also had dramatic appeal to an international left, battered, bruised and disoriented by: the downscaling of the welfare state; the downsizing of the working class; by the halting of the forward march of labour; by the collapse of Eastern Communist and Southern Populist states; by the crisis of the international movements identified with such. Zapatista encounters also inspired at least two significant emanations of the movement, People’s Global Action(PGA) and the WSF itself. (de la Grange and Rico 1997, Holloway and Peláez 1998, Olesen Forthcoming, PGA website, Wahl 2002)

./english/316.txt:53:Finally, one has to recognise as forerunners the so-called New Social Movements, and theorising around such, in the 1970s-80s. Considered as expressing ‘identity’ more than ‘interest’, these movements – of women, of indigenous peoples, of sexual minorities, for media democratisation, on ecology and consumption – were noted in the South as well as the North. They brought to public attention hidden forms of alienation, suggested new forms of ‘self-articulation’ (both joining and expression). As much addressed to the transformation of civil society as of the economy or state, these movements raised issues that the major old international ‘interest’ movement – that of unionised labour – had long subordinated, ignored or marginalised. (Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar 1998, Cohen 1985, Melucci 1989, Omvedt 2003).

./english/316.txt:66:This movement, as suggested, has many names, these reflecting sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping, approaches, theories, strategies and aspirations. These understandings vary from the traditional leftist, the non-traditional leftist, to the innovatory, and even the insistence that this is not a movement but a ‘field’. Elsewhere an attempt has been made to capture, or at least conceptualise, the phenomenon under the rubric of ‘global civil society’. The ways even sympathetic theorists/strategists try to identify groups or tendencies within the movement is revealing both of their orientation and of the novel nature of the phenomenon. (Aguiton 2001, Bertinoti 2003, Callinicos 2003, Crossley 2002, Glasius, Kaldor and Anheier 2002, Pianta 2001, Starr 2000, Santos 2003).

./english/316.txt:70:Christophe Aguiton (2001), from France, a Trotskyist of another feather, and a leading figure within the World Social Forum, tentatively identifies three 'poles' within the global justice movement: a ‘radical internationalist’, a ‘nationalist’, and a ‘neo-reformist’ one. The first looks beyond both capitalism and the nation-state, the second is a mostly-Southern response, and the third is the kind of 'global governance' tendency also strongly present within the WSF. (Global Civil Society Yearbook website, Rikkilä and Patomäki 2001).

./english/316.txt:76:Mario Pianta (2001), from Italy, considering the movement in ‘global civil society’ terms, divides responses to neo-liberal globalisation into ‘supporters of current arrangements’, ‘reformists’, ‘radical critics favoring another globalization’, ‘alternatives outside the mainstream’, and ‘nationalist rejectionists’.

./english/316.txt:78:Suggestive is that, with the exception of Callinicos, none of the above uses the terminology of Left (Right, or Centre), and that, in practice, each of these understandings cuts across the left-as-we-know-it, the left of a national-industrial-(anti-)colonial-capitalism. Whilst many activists and some internationally-influential left movements do refer solely to this tradition, the question of whether the GS&JM is not potentially surpassing traditional left internationalism is also being raised. 'Emancipation' might seem a more appropriate term than ‘left’ when discussing today the transformation of society, nature, culture, work and psychology – as well, of course, as that increasingly important but placeless place, cyberspace. (Boyd 2003, Cardon and Granjon 2003, Escobar 2003, Löwy 2003, Waterman 2001a,b,c).

./english/316.txt:100:India has seen similar or even greater waves of such protest over the last decade. But these are traceable back a half century or more. They include worker, rural, urban, regional, adivasi (indigenous) and dalit (untouchable) movements, religious and ethnic protest (often sectarian or communalist), ecological and women’s movements. Over the past two decades there has been an increase in dramatic, often massive, protest demonstrations and marches, explicitly aimed against neo-liberalisation and globalisation/imperialism. With the possible exception of the ecological and women’s movements, and projects for regional civil society linkages, however, these have shown little consciousness of, or significant linkage with, movements elsewhere. That this has continued till recently may be due not simply to the relative size, poverty or isolation of India but to the framing of such protest within the protest discourses of the 19th-20th century, such as socialism (of a decreasingly international/ist nature), of nationalism and populism. The recently rising consciousness of, and connection with, the GJ&SM, is symbolised by the holding of the first Asian Social Forum (Hyderabad 2002), and the hosting of the first WSF outside Brazil, in 2004. Exceptionally, in India, this initiative has been taken (in hand?) by the old Left. Whether, at Mumbai, the clearest note will be struck by the old traditions of national subaltern protest, or the new ones of global counter-assertion – or how these will be mutually articulated – may be significant for the future of not only the WSF but for the GJ&SM in general. (Desh Bachao 2003, Dietrich and Nayak 2001, Featherstone 2002, Muricken 1999, Omvedt 1993, Sen 2003, Waterman 1982)

./english/316.txt:111:Alongside such new international/ist media practice has gone democratic international media-campaigning, itself traceable back to the thirdworldist (i.e. statist) New World Information and Communication Order of the 1970s-80s. Today this has a more radical-democratic or social-movement orientation. Media/cyberspace activity finds multi-faceted expression within the World Social Forum, partly in official panels, partly in more marginal ones. It may also, however, find expression within alternative or oppositional spaces during the World Summit on the Information Society, 2003-5. Such activities, within the United Nations system, may now be being seen as secondary to activity within the framework of the WSF. (Cyberspace after Capitalism 2003, ISIS 2003, Leon, Burch and Tamayo 2001, Putting People First 2003, WSF Thematic Area 3 2003).

./english/320.txt:24:For activists, this approach means two things. On the one hand, it meansdemystifying their own action – or more exactly pushing beyond a narrow, “technical” or field-specific understanding of their own activity to one which identifies both its roots in everyday practice and the nature of the opposition it encounters. On the other hand, it means demystifying that opposition: moving beyond seeing it simply as that of a poorly- informed, or consumerist, “mass”, or (at a more refined level) of simply expressing a“system” or a “society”, to a point where activists can see the active role of their opponents within society and as constructing a system.

./english/320.txt:76:Social movement projects are defined by the following features: (a) they pose challenges to the social totality which (b) aim to control the self-production of society and (c) possess or are striving to develop the capacity for the kind of hegemony - i.e. giving direction to the skilled activity of different subaltern social

./english/320.txt:84:What follows from the approach to social movements as coming both from above and from below is a notion of social structure as the sediment of social movement struggles. An extant social organization of human practice – a society – can be conceived of as a "truce line" between collective actors from above and below, with inherent antagonisms and contradictions that may give rise to new rounds of contestation and struggle that may engender new processes of change in this social organization. In this section I outline very briefly some concepts that allow us to grapple with these processes of change.

./english/320.txt:95:In each of these periods, global upheavals were spontaneously generated. In achain reaction of insurrections and revolts, new forms of power emerged in oppositionto the established order, and new visions of the meaning of freedom were formulatedin the actions of millions of people. Even when these movements were unsuccessful inseizing power, immense adjustments were necessitated both within and between nation states, and the defeated movements offered revealing glimpses of the newly developed nature of society and the new kinds of class struggles which were to follow (ibid.: 6).

./english/323.txt:50:relating it to my mother’s real life as a woman living and breathing in a very sexist society.”

./english/325.txt:14:In this paper I will elaborate the contemporary connections between different protest movements that criticize dominant western culture. I want to show that, just because these movements are influenced by postmodern notions (like rejecting uniformity and essentialistic identities and taking ‘responsibility for “otherness”’(White 1991))i, their members really try to bring multiculturalism into practice. Multiculturalism means simply: different cultures within a society. Physical characteristics or nationality have nothing to do with it (Nottelman 1996: 3). Every society has to be considered as multicultural, because within all societies there are different cultures (between classes, hetero-homo’s, rural and urban cultures, different –interpretations of- religions etc.). Also without coloured people a discussion about multiculturalism is important.ii Because this conference is about ‘new social movements and sexuality’, I restrict myself to three contemporary movements that criticize dominant culture: the squatters, queers and alterglobalists. I will start with the squatters’ movement, because for a part this movement is the oldest one.

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

./english/325.txt:35:Queer theory also has its critics. For example Jackson (2003: 70) and Storr, 2003: 157) state that queer theory is limited to the extent that it takes place at the level of culture and discourse, paying little attention to social structures and material social practices; in queer theory the material conditions of society and culture have been lost. And Jackson adds (p. 80-81) that Judith Butler’s ideal, a world of multiple genders and sexualities, does not envisage the end of gender hierarchy or the collapse of institutional heterosexuality. Other critiques on queer theory, for example of Max Kirsch (2000), are the same as those of some feminists against postmodernism, stating that social action couldn’t take place without a clear (female or gay/lesbian) identity: because of a destabilization of queer identity, collective action and organization are hardly possible.

./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:44:Saying ‘I am queer’ means that you don’t agree with mainstream society’s categories, so you have added a new category, one that criticizes all existing, fixed, categories. This criticizing opens fresh perspectives, according to Beck (2003: 281): ‘It is impossible not to be inspired by the queer: the diversity of queer strategies and perspectives testifies to the enormous creativity and imagination of American “post-gay” undertakings in language, theory, art and actions’.

./english/325.txt:52:1) The notion of outsiderhood. All interviewed queers expressed the feeling that in some stage of their life, they did not quite ‘fit in’ the neat categories of society at large or their local culture. When society deems an individual as deviant of abnormal, he/she can either opt for a process of adaptation or actively choose to reject society’s norms and take a certain pride in being an outsider. Then the search for those with a common identity or experience starts. So in a way this notion of being an outsider forms the glue that keeps gatherings like Queeruption together. However, Turner (2000: 8) states that since most individuals will experience a failure to fit precisely within a category, this experience opens up the possibility that we’re all queer. Many queers told Van Husen they also did not fit into the mainstream gay and lesbian culture because they either refused to identify as man or women or as gay or lesbian. Besides this, they consider the gay and lesbian scene as conservative and commercial. A lot of them connected their own position in relation to other oppressed groups. This feeling of solidarity seems to form one of the cornerstones in a community like Queeruption (Van Husen 2004:10).

./english/325.txt:54:2) Freedom. Closely connected to the sense of being an outsider is the need for freedom. ‘“The right to be oneself” thus becomes a mechanism for self-protection rather then a call for equality’ (Kirsch 2000:122). Van Husen diagnosed that a lot of visitors did not even venture out of the squat building in which Queeruption took place. Their aim seemed to be to create a –temporary- Free Place were queers had the freedom to be themselves. ‘The whole atmosphere at Queeruption to me was one of squatters on camp’ (p. 10). These queers showed an unwillingness to change mainstream society and preferred to stay in their self-created special place.

./english/325.txt:56:3) A close connection to the anarchist squatters’ movement. Van Husen was surprised to see how the two scenes, at least in Amsterdam, do overlap, although not all queers are part of the squatters’ subculture and not all squatters identify themselves as queer. Some queers told her they ended up in the squat scene through their taste of music, or by frequenting squat parties (for these parties see also the end of part 1 of this paper). Others explained this link through political affiliation; for them, being queer automatically means having a radical left political orientation because political right denies them their existence. And other queers stated that the personal freedom within the anarchist movement made it into the one scene where queers could express themselves. As I told in part I of this paper, in the end of the eighties the squatters’ movement expanded their ideals and became ‘the’ movement, criticizing all kinds of abuses in society (see also Poldervaart, 2004: 127). According to Van Husen both queer and the anarchist movement are cultures of resistance; they share the same rejection of sexism, racism and other inequalities in mainstream culture. The DiY (Do it Yourself) aspect in Queeruption comes directly from anarchistic ideals and some queers told her that anyone unwilling to participate in DiY wasn’t welcome in Queeruption.

./english/325.txt:89:-The movement is global and local. Never has a movement been so international while at the same time local initiatives are emphasised (Klein 2002). Because of this emphasis on local initiatives, DiY-activists reject the idea of one program as an alternative. They don’t construct social models for one future society, because in such a way they do the same as neo-liberalism (Klein 2002). They want to respect the autonomy of groups and that don’t fit in one universal model for everybody.

./english/331.txt:51:"Often overlooked, there is also a moral case for a liberal economic order, which is based on individual liberty as a "good" in itself. The freedom of choice, including the freedom to engage in international transactions… enables progressively better life chances for individuals in the broad mass of society rather than for the select few." Sally (2002:1)

./english/331.txt:107:Ruggie is optimistic about a future built not on centralised hierarchies developed from the existing international economic institutions, but one, which utilises the global capabilities of TNC’s to “pull the mantle of public authority in a more global direction”. He has faith in Kofi Annan’s Global Compact in providing a framework for socially responsible corporations to lead by example, and in creating a truly global social domain, “a space that allows for the direct expression of human interests and values in global governance” (Ruggie, 2002:9). The resurgent civil society has a role to play in ‘generating, deepening and implementing transnational norms’ through campaign activities and governance forums.

./english/336.txt:5:the spliting in two of the hungarian society and the rising of situations

./english/336.txt:7:overwhelming majority of the Society, our Forum is not interested in the

./english/336.txt:14:together with the Society, and not without it. Millions and millions of our

./english/336.txt:24:way out from the crisis must be found with the People and the Society.

./english/336.txt:30:a Real Democracy, a democracy of the Society. We call everybody to

./english/336.txt:33:direct voice to the Society in the process of preparing and taking

./english/336.txt:34:decions. It is time to act together including the Society itself. The

./english/336.txt:41:imposed on the majority of the society. The new State Balance and the

./english/336.txt:47:the desintegration of the society, to overcome their strict party

./english/336.txt:63:conformity with the will of the Society. We call the forces in power and

./english/339.txt:10:7.Although at this moment it is impossible to organise the so-called "assemblies", every national organising committee should be given the chance to shape the events that would facilitate the connection of the European Social Forum with the local society.

./english/343.txt:16:Other forms of violence, such as the forced displacement of people and expropriation of land, are the result of a desire to commodify land, water and other natural resources. This state of war affects society as a whole and violence becomes the natural means of oppression. Women are amongst the first victims.

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

./english/344.txt:62:This proposed merger has turned its back on the great founding principles of proletarian internationalism, based on the understanding that society is divided into social classes with opposed and contradictory interests - that is, on the one hand, the exploiters of wage labour and, on the other hand, the exploited who are forced to sell their labour to survive [] All the sectors involved in this trade union unification project would be well[] advised to reflect before heading down a road that could lead to a dead-end with totalitarian implications. (Sandri 2005)

./english/344.txt:97:Waterman, Peter and Jill Timms. 2004. ‘Trade Union Internationalism and a Global Civil Society in the Making’, in Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius and Mary Kaldor (eds.). Global Civil Society 2004/5. London: Sage. Pp. 178-202

./english/361.txt:24:What about the good trajectory of contemporary anarchism, less visible in the media? This seems to me to be far more uplifting and inspiring. It is the widely awakening impetus to fight on the side of the oppressed in every domain of life, from family, to culture, to state, to economy, to the now very visible international arena of "globalization," and to do so in creative and courageous ways conceived to win improvements in people's lives now even while leading toward winning new institutions in the future. The good anarchism nowadays transcends a narrowness that has often in the past befallen the approach. Instead of being solely politically anti-authoritarian, as often in the old days, nowadays being an anarchist more and more implies having a gender, cultural, and an economic, as well as a politically-rooted orientation, with each aspect taken on a par with and also informing the rest. This is new, at least in my experience of anarchism, and it is useful to recall that many anarchists as little as a decade back, perhaps even more recently, would have said that anarchism addresses everything, yes, of course, but via an anti-authoritarian focus rather than by simultaneously elevating other concepts in their own right. Such past anarchists thought, whether implicitly or explicitly, that analysis from an overwhelmingly anti-authoritarian angle could explain the nuclear family better than an analysis rooted as well in kinship concepts, and could explain race or religion better than an analysis rooted as well in cultural concepts, and could explain production, consumption, and allocation better than an analysis rooted as well in economic concepts. They were wrong, and it is a great advance that many modern anarchists know this and are broadening their intellectual approach in accord so that anarchism now highlights not only the state, but also gender relations, and not only the economy but also cultural relations and ecology, sexuality, and freedom in every form it can be sought, and each not only through the sole prism of authority relations, but also informed by richer and more diverse concepts. And of course this desirable anarchism not only doesn't decry technology per se, but it becomes familiar with and employs diverse types of technology as appropriate. It not only doesn't decry institutions per se, or political forms per se, it tries to conceive new institutions and new political forms for activism and for a new society, including new ways of meeting, new ways of decision making, new ways of coordinating, and so on, most recently including revitalized affinity groups and original spokes structures. And it not only doesn’t decry reforms per se, but it struggles to define and win non-reformist reforms, attentive to people’s immediate needs and bettering people’s lives now as well as moving toward further gains, and eventually transformative gains, in the future.

./english/362.txt:31:He spoke to V. Sridhar in Hyderabad, where he participated in the Asian Social Forum (ASF). He spoke about the changes in the nature of imperialism and globalisation and its consequences for the countries of the South. Articulating an alternative vision for the peoples and countries of the South, he pointed out that the plurality of visions against globalisation is a positive feature in the search for social change. He argued that any alternative system must allow each country and society to negotiate the terms on which it engages with the rest of the world. Excerpts from the interview:

./english/362.txt:65:There was some room for development because colonialism resulted in low levels of industrialisation in a few countries, and none at all in many others. So, there was room for industrialisation after national liberation. But as they moved along, it became costlier, in terms of cost of investment and technology. These countries also inherited social systems with very low levels of education, which offered enormous room for upward mobility for people, through education. As long as the children of the popular classes (the lower middle class and the peasantry) could move up through education - and this happened in a huge scale in India, Egypt and many other countries - the system benefited from legitimacy. Even if they were not democratic, they were seen as delivering something. Countries that had high rates of economic growth, accompanied by not-increasing levels of inequality (I do not mean socially just), and those that offered upward mobility for large sections of society, enjoyed credibility and legitimacy. Some of these countries were semi-democratic, like India. Others, like Nasserite Egypt, were not democratic at all. But they were equally legitimate and credible because they delivered. Once the system reached a point where it could not progress within the same logic and on the same basis, the political system became more corrupt and lost legitimacy. This created a vacuum, which reactionary forces started to occupy.

./english/362.txt:105:I shall summarise the principles that could possibly govern another kind of global system. The first is the logic of the transition to socialism. This will combine the criterion of capitalism, that is, efficiency as measured by profitability; and, the criterion of social justice. Although the term social justice is very elastic, certain elements can be defined in concrete terms. I am sure any Indian citizen from the popular classes can tell you what he/she means by social justice. It would necessarily mean jobs, reasonable and decent wages, schools for his/her children and decent health care. That is social justice, not socialism. These are not going to be produced by the market, but these will be imposed on the market by a social policy of the state. This kind of system associates capitalistic criteria with social criteria, which will be in conflict. But the system recognises that they are conflicting and therefore must be managed without allowing the market to dominate society unilaterally. It also recognises the fact that the free play of markets creates problems for society. Therefore, society will solve the problem through the exercise of political power. If such a system obtains in several countries, then we can create the conditions for regional arrangements among them, and of changes in the global system.

./english/362.txt:115:I am a Marxist and have always been a part of the communist movement. That is not a secret. As a child, during the Second World War, I was enthused by the Soviet resistance against Nazi Germany. In those days, Egyptian society was highly politicised; even 13-14 year-old youth were quite politicised. While in elementary school, only about 20 per cent of those in my age group were non-political. The rest were distributed equally in two camps, communists and nationalists. The nationalists used to say that the main enemy of the Egyptian people was Britain; but the communists said that capitalism, operating through Britain, was the enemy. Egyptian society is not as politicised now. Many of my contemporaries were or are communists. I came from a relatively privileged family. I came from a family of the intellectual bourgeoisie, a family of doctors. My father belonged to the Waqf party, very much like the Congress party here. My mother owed allegiance to the radical socialists, the Jacobins, in France. Incidentally, my great great-grandfather was among the first republicans in Egypt, in the 1860s.

./english/363.txt:51:In moments of defeat, downturn and depression these new syntheses of course start to come apart: solidarity is among the first things to suffer as "movements from above" reassert themselves, but the new fracture lines are not those of the old situation. "1968" fractured, in its moments of defeat, into three different images of transformation, three separate, equally aborted, programmes (Cox 1999a). The first was that of "1967", of a cultural transformation aimed above all at the everyday routines of the old society (Stephens 1998). The second was that of "1968", in the sense of a large-scale anti-authoritarian movement from below. The third was that of "1969", in the sense of the authoritarian cadre groups that tended to assert themselves as the true inheritors of the programme of revolution.

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

./english/363.txt:117:In essence the point is that in such societies "the state is everything, civil society is nothing" (Gramsci 1975) - the "free spaces" of civil society within which movements can develop their political structures are radically compressed, and at a very early point of their development they must engage with the state - usually entering into relationships of clientelism and co-optation, but on occasion situations of violent opposition. It might also be argued that a similar relationship holds between attempts at cultural radicalism and the hegemonic cultural structures of such societies, notably kinship and religion, but it would be difficult to demonstrate. In any case, the net effect of the importance of the state in such societies is that it is extremely difficult to develop large-scale popular movements of any kind whose modes of organisation are independent of the state.

./english/363.txt:131:That would not of course be a universal perception of what is happening among community activists (not all of whom see themselves as activists), and of course there are widespread forms of "consensual" community development in other parts of Irish society which are much less radical. But the fact remains that across working-class Ireland something remarkable is happening, not just in Irish terms but in European and perhaps global terms. If "the new movement" is to have an effect in Ireland it will need to make links here; but it is hard to envisage what that might mean in practice.

./english/363.txt:142:Populism, the "movement society" and self-limitation

./english/363.txt:145:The second is what is becoming called "the movement society" (eg della Porta 2000). Where movements are legitimate actors in the eyes of state and media, the process which happened with NGOs a long time ago - of organisations existing because they have an interlocutory role - can become dominant. This can happen even where those organisations engage in acts of stylised protest (consider the IFA!) As Peillon (1998) has documented, low-level but widespread protest is a fairly general feature of Irish society, and can as easily be used against immigrants as against incinerators. If populism fetishises "concrete results", the movement society runs the risk of fetishising "stepping out" in the most ritualised forms (the Mind-Body-Spirit festival at the RDS is hardly going to have the cardinals shaking in their boots, let alone the TDs?.)

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

./english/363.txt:221:Three kinds of things are particularly important here. One is the development of autonomous institutions. It is in the nature of contemporary capitalism, which has commodified or otherwise colonised so many of the needs met in previous generations by movement institutions, that there is (notoriously) little space for developed movement organisations. Nevertheless, if they are thought of not as "the new society in the shell of the old", but rather spaces within which we can learn how to interact with each other in new ways around practical tasks, to sustain even marginal institutions is a useful act in itself. (One important example, not so marginal at present, is the demonstration: the extensive participatory planning processes behind the current "global demos" and the widespread discussions after the events are quite remarkable in these terms.)

./english/364.txt:41:Proposed by a coalition of Brazilian civil society organizations and the Workers Party that controls both Porto Alegre and the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the idea triggered strong international support from organizations such as the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique and Attac, an influential Europe-wide organization supporting a tax on global financial transactions.

./english/364.txt:57:The centerpiece of this year’s gathering in Porto Alegre are 26 plenary sessions over four days structured around four themes: "the production of wealth and social reproduction," "access to wealth and sustainable development," "civil society and the public arena," and "political power and ethics in the new society."

./english/365.txt:5:(Forthcoming: Information, Communication & Society, 2003)

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

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

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

./english/365.txt:71:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 20 For example, the Audubon Society provided a credible source for claiming that the failure of coffee companies like Starbucks to pay a fair price for their beans resulted in the disappearance of the small shaded coffee farms which provided habitat for the migrating songbirds that enlivened Northern back yards each summer. The songbird represented a more effective lifestyle symbol for communicating the fair trade message than trying to communicate more ideological discourses about world coffee markets and the plight of peasant farmers (Iozzi, 2002; Bennett, 2003a).

./english/365.txt:90:In contrast to the diversity of the A16 organization, the organizing site for the demonstration against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) meeting in Montreal in April of 2001 had a much more focused agenda aimed at mobilizing people in localities and training them in direct action and street theater tactics before they arrived in Montreal (NAFTANet - International Day of Action - Stop the FTAA.htm). The site listed a different and much smaller set of lead organizations that those involved in the IMF protests above. The Ruckus Society featured prominently in the training and local mobilizing, and the Montreal Anti-Capitalist Convergence was identified as the lead organization at the protest site. A tighter focus on specific protest themes, training, and

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

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

./english/367.txt:39:From Penetrating Society to Building NGOs

./english/367.txt:40:But from the mid-1970s, new developments were taking place, both within the Maoist and the Socialist milieus. In Gujarat, the radicalizing youth launched a non-party movement called Nav Nirman (New Construction). Only a very small wing became Marxists. Others imbibed ideologies of different types and came up with basically a rejection of the party system, a determination to work within civil society for social transformation, and to fight for civil liberties. The long terror unleashed, first in West Bengal to smash the Maoists and the CPI(M), and then all over India during the one and a half year of dictatorial government by Indira Gandhi, increased the commitment to civil liberties.

./english/367.txt:52:A whole series of voluntary organizations were formed at that time. Initially, these were formed by radicals who thought they would be carrying on the class struggle, the caste liberation struggle, the women’s liberation struggle, etc., through these means. So these were open and democratic organizations. However, many of these groups soon found that there was a need to organize services, to work in such a manner within civil society that some self-help could be arranged, and so on. This meant the transformation of the structure of the organization. Willy-nilly, it was now working within civil society while accepting the existing social and political framework, especially the state. It was now making demands upon the state for reforms. This did not make the movement, or those sectors of the movement, automatically reformist. But this did pose serious questions before the Marxists working within those organizations or in those movements about what they should do in order to raise within every partial movement the historic, long-term goals of struggle, and what the appropriate ways of doing that should be.

./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:117:There are two souls of the NGOs, as we discussed earlier. On one hand they represent a desire to break out of the entirely party-dominated political culture, a desire to find or create space within civil society. On the other hand they also reveal major weaknesses — not merely because they are funded organizations, but also because, as single issue organizations, overall social transformation as an idea gets diluted, and struggle for a very specific aim takes such precedence that as long as that specific goal will be advanced, they are often willing to settle happily for lobbying bourgeois politicians and capitalists. The 65,000 whom I witnessed at the European Social Forum were mostly young, mostly committed to radical social transformation. The over 20,000 who thronged to Hyderabad likewise contained many who desire real social change. The way forward consists of trying to seriously link up with their concerns and, to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, of raising within these struggles the historic goals of the toiling people.

./english/367.txt:139:“These policies are underpinned and reinforced by the expansion of the participatory budget from Porto Alegre [the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, where the PT has headed the municipal government since 1989] and the other municipal PT strongholds to the state administration. The process has been surprisingly successful, and is already transforming the relationship between the state and society.

./english/367.txt:143:But the most lasting contribution of the PT project in Rio Grande do Sul may prove to be its reappropriation of democracy as a fundamentally progressive concept. According to Ubiratan de Souza, “The participatory budget combines direct democracy with representative democracy — which is one of humanity’s greatest conquests, and which should be preserved and developed. As we strive to deepen the democracy of human society, representative democracy is necessary, but insufficient. It is more important than ever before that we combine it with a wide variety of forms of direct democracy, where the citizen can not only participate in public administration, but also control the state. The participatory budget in Porto Alegre and the process of implementing a participatory budget at the level of Rio Grande do Sul state are concrete examples of direct democracy.”

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

./english/368.txt:20:Chiapas has been an integral part of Mexican and global capitalism for a long, long time. The workers of Chiapas have provided the rest of Mexico and the world with agricultural exports such as lumber, coffee and beef and their own labor power through migration north. For quite some time, they have also been providing hydroelectric power and oil, essential components of "modern" Mexican industrialization. Locally, they have labored in that most contemporary sector of post-industrial society --the tourist industry-- providing the services required, and coming into constant contact with people from all over the world. The people of Chiapas have moved in and out of capitalist labor markets (local, national and international) with increasing sophistication, even as they have fought for land so that they could be independent of them. Behind all this waged labor lies another enormous quantity of labor which has also been integrally related to the rest of the world: the unwaged labor of reproduction --mostly performed by the women of Chiapas-- which has procreated, reared and repaired the labor power of those who have been exploited directly.(2)

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

./english/368.txt:64:The result of such processes interweaving cyberspace and other zones of human space is a new composition of social relationships increasingly difficult for capitalists and the state to manage. Precisely to the degree that its self-elaboration has been outstripping the ability of managers of capitalist society to repress or co-opt, this growing "social" composition has moved beyond a "class" composition. It is not merely the self-reconfigured structure of power by workers against their exploiters; with new threads and new weaves the social fabric is being rewoven into textures with less and less of a "class" character. This self-activity, of course, continues to be constrained by the oppressions of class but it increasingly weaves according to it's own innovative designs.(20)

./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: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:152:At this point the reform movement itself is probably the key terrain of struggle between the Zapatistas and capital. Those forces within the movement pushing for the Zapatistas to convert themselves from a revolutionary force into one more traditional political party can be seen as the embodiment of the Mexican state's traditional strategy of co-optation (repression via assimilation).(64) As Ronfeldt and Thorup's joint work suggests, the conversion of the Zapatistas into a political party might not even be required for their neutralization. It might be enough to merely convert them into one more "independent" organization among others in a domesticated and neutralized civil society.

./english/369.txt:39:In this framework, a "new" anti-capitalist and alternative left is making visible, though still modest, progress in several countries, including on an electoral level. From this point on, the political situation cannot be summed up as a new right-wing offensive. The new factor is that the political situation also includes a polarisation towards the left in society as well as in the social and workers movement.

./english/369.txt:61:b) The EU "is not full"! It has never been so rich! What "prevents" the equal social and democratic integration of the immigrant population is the shameless enrichment of a tiny minority of big capitalists—at the expense of the EU's native populations (working classes)—which refuses to organise society on the basis of the social needs of the great majority of the population here and abroad. This is a compelling reason to struggle together, unite the working class and eliminate this double injustice.

./english/369.txt:91:This state apparatus is neither usable nor reformable for the peoples or the world of labour. It must be overthrown, so as to open up a radical democratic constituent process from below. It is up to the peoples and the world of labour to decide what kind of Europe they want to live in, with what sort of institutional relationship among the member states, and on what social and economic bases. Such a conquest of radical democracy will necessarily go hand in hand with overturning neo-liberal policies and replacing them with a program of urgent social measures in the interests of the workers and the poorest layers of society. Starting now, we must demand that at the very least any "new treaty" or "constitution" be submitted to a referendum organised simultaneously in all member and candidate states.

./english/369.txt:99:Moreover, the dismantling of public services (transport) and public enterprises (such as energy and water) will continue relentlessly, with its well-known disastrous consequences: growing social inequality, insecurity for workers and users, disorganisation and rising prices. Together with children, women are the first victims of neo-liberal policies. The relaunching, particularly under right-wing governments, of natalist policies and policies for restoration of the traditional family has aggravated the feminisation of the "new" poverty. This is also strengthening a homophobic mentality in society, despite some progress in terms of legal equality.

./english/369.txt:111:We, anti-capitalist parties and movements of Europe, are fighting against the EU, its institutions and policies, not in order to defend our national capitalist states, but in the name of a different Europe-social, democratic, peaceful and founded on solidarity. We are fighting for a radical policy reversal in the perspective of a democratic, socialist society, without exploitation of labour or oppression of women, based on sustainable development-self-managing socialism from below.

./english/370.txt:41:Before returning to our discussion of agent-based interfaces, there is one more point that needs to be stressed. As both Simon and Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, the dichotomy between bureaucracies and markets, or to use the terms that I prefer, between hierarchies and meshworks, should be understood in purely relative terms. In the first place, in reality it is hard to find pure cases of these two structures: even the most goal-oriented organization will still show some drift in its growth and development, and most markets even in small towns contain some hierarchical elements, even if it is just the local wholesaler which manipulates prices by dumping (or withdrawing) large amounts of a product on (or from) the market. Moreover, hierarchies give rise to meshworks and meshworks to hierarchies. Thus, when several bureaucracies coexist (governmental, academic, ecclesiastic), and in the absence of a super-hierarchy to coordinate their interactions, the whole set of institutions will tend to form a meshwork of hierarchies, articulated mostly through local and temporary links. Similarly, as local markets grow in size, as in those gigantic fairs which have taken place periodically since the Middle Ages, they give rise to commercial hierarchies, with a money market on top, a luxury goods market underneath and, after several layers, a grain market at the bottom. A real society, then, is made of complex and changing mixtures of these two types of structure, and only in a few cases it will be easy to decide to what type a given institution belongs.

./english/370.txt:65:To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us. {11}

./english/372.txt:23:I don't think this is just because the academy is behind the times. Marxism has always had an affinity with the academy that anarchism never will. It was, after all was invented by a Ph.D.; and there's always been something about its spirit which fits that of the academy. Anarchism on the other hand was never really invented by anyone. True, historians usually treat it as if it were, constructing the history of anarchism as if it's basically a creature identical in its nature to Marxism: it was created by specific 19th century thinkers, perhaps Godwin or Stirner, but definitely Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, it inspired working-class organizations, became enmeshed in political struggles... But in fact the analogy is rather strained. First of all, the 19th century generally credited with inventing anarchism didn't think of themselves as having invented anything particularly new. The basic principles of anarchism--self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid--are as old as humanity Similarly, the rejection of the state and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination (anarchism literally means "without rulers"), even the assumption that all these forms are somehow related and reinforce each other, was hardly some startlingly new 19th century doctrine. One can find evidence of people making similar arguments throughout history, despite the fact there is every reason to believe that such opinions were the ones least likely to be written down. We are talking less about a body of theory than about an attitude, or perhaps a faith: a rejection of certain types of social relation, a confidence that certain others are a much better ones on which to build a decent or humane society, a faith that it would be possible to do so.

./english/372.txt:35:Now, this does imply there's a lot of potential complementary between the two (and indeed there has been: even Mikhail Bakunin, for all his endless battles with Marx over practical questions, also personally translated Marx's Capital into Russian.) One could easily imagine a systematic division of labor in which Marxists critique the political economy, but stay out of organizing, and Anarchists handle the day-to-day organizing, but defer to the Marxists on questions of abstract theory; i.e., in which the Marxists explain why the economic crash in Argentina occurred and the anarchists deal with what to do about it. (I also should point out that I am aware I am being a bit hypocritical here by indulging in some of the same sort of sectarian reasoning I'm otherwise critiquing: there are schools of Marxism which are far more open-minded and tolerant, and democratically organized, there are anarchist groups which are insanely sectarian; Bakunin himself was hardly a model for democracy by any standards, etc. etc. etc.). But it also makes it easier to understand why there are so few anarchists in the academy. It's not just that anarchism does not lend itself to high theory. It's that it is primarily an ethics of practice; and it insists, before anything else, that one's means most be consonant with one's ends; one cannot create freedom through authoritarian means; that as much as possible, one must embody the society one wishes to create. This does not square very well with operating within Universities that still have an essentially Medieval social structure, presenting papers at conferences in expensive hotels, and doing intellectual battle in language no one who hasn't spent at least two or three years in grad school would ever hope to be able to understand. At the very least, then, it would tend to get one in trouble.

./english/372.txt:43:The term avant garde was actually coined by Henri de Saint-Simon, the product of a series of essays he wrote at the very end of his life. Like his onetime secretary and disciple (and later bitter rival Auguste Comte), Saint-Simon was writing in the wake of the French revolution and essentially, were asking what had gone wrong: why the transition from a medieval, feudal Catholic society to a modern, industrial democratic one seemed to be creating such enormous violence and social dislocation. The problem he concluded was that modern society lacked any force of ideological cohesion that could play the same role as the Medieval church, which gave everyone the sense of having a meaningful place in the overall social order. Towards the end of their lives each actually ended up creating his own religion: Saint-Simon's called his the "New Christianity", Comte, the "New Catholicism". In the first, artists were to play the role of the ultimate spiritual leaders; in an imaginary dialogue with a scientist, he has an artist explaining that in their role of imagining possible futures and inspiring the public, they can play the role of an "avant garde", a "truly priestly function" as he puts it; in his ideal future, artists would hatch the ideas which they would then pass on to the scientists and industrialists to put into effect. Saint-Simon was also perhaps the first to conceive the notion of the withering away of the state: once it had become clear that the authorities were operating for the good of the public, one would no more need force to compel the public to heed their advice than one needed it to compel patients to take the advice of their doctors. Government would pass away into at most some minor police functions.

./english/372.txt:45:Comte, of course, is most famous as the founder of sociology; he invented the term to describe what he saw as the master-discipline which could both understand and direct society. He ended up taking a different, far more authoritarian approach: ultimately proposing the regulation and control of almost all aspects of human life according to scientific principles, with the role of high priests (effectively, the vanguard, though he did not actually call them this) in his New Catholicism being played by the sociologists themselves.

./english/372.txt:47:It's a particularly fascinating opposition because in the early twentieth century, the positions were effectively reversed. Instead of the left-wing Saint-Simonians looking to artists for leadership, while the right-wing Comtians fancied themselves scientists, we had the fascist leaders like Hitler and Mussolini who imagined themselves as great artists inspiring the masses, and sculpting society according to their grandiose imaginings, and the Marxist vanguard which claimed the role of scientists.

./english/372.txt:49:At any rate the Saint Simonians at any rate actively sought to recruit artists for their various ventures, salons, and utopian communities; though they quickly ran into difficulties because so many within "avant garde" artistic circles preferred the more anarchistic Fourierists, and later, one or another branch of outright anarchists. Actually, the number of 19th century artists with anarchist sympathies is quite staggering, ranging from Pissaro to Tolstoy or Oscar Wilde, not to mention almost all early 20th century artists who later became Communists, from Malevich to Picasso. Rather than a political vanguard leading the way to a future society, radical artists almost invariably saw themselves as exploring new and less alienated modes of life. The really significant development in the 19th century was less to idea of a vanguard than that of Bohemia (a term first coined by Balzac in 1838): marginal communities living in more or less voluntary poverty, seeing themselves as dedicated to the pursuit of creative, unalienated forms of experience, united by a profound hatred of bourgeois life and everything it stood for. Ideologically, they were about equally likely to be proponents of "art for art's sake" or social revolutionaries. Contemporary theorists are actually quite divided over how to evaluate their larger significance. Pierre Bourdieu for example insisted that the promulgation of the idea of "art for art's sake", far from being depoliticizing, should be considered a significant accomplishment, as was any which managed to establish the autonomy of one particular field of human endeavor from the logic of the market. Colin Campbell on the other hand argues that insofar as bohemians actually were an avant garde, they were really the vanguard of the market itself, or more precisely, of consumerism: their actual social function, much though they would have loathed to admit it, was to explore new forms of pleasure or aesthetic territory which could be commoditized in the next generation. (One might call this the Tom Franks version of history.) Campbell also echoes common wisdom that bohemia was almost exclusively inhabited by the children of the bourgeoisie, who had--temporarily, at least--rejecting their families' money and privilege; and who, if they did not die young of dissipation, were likely to end up back on the board of father's company. This is a claim that has been repeated so often about activists and revolutionaries over the years that it makes me, at least, immediately wary: in fact, I strongly suspect that bohemian circles emerged from the same sort of social conjuncture as most current activist circles, and historically, most vanguardist revolutionary parties as well: a kind of meeting between certain elements of (intentionally) downwardly mobile professional classes, in broad rejection of bourgeois values, and upwardly mobile children of the working class. Though such suspicions can only be confirmed by historical investigation.

./english/372.txt:51:In the 19th century idea of the political vanguard was used very widely and very loosely for anyone seen as exploring the path to a future, free society. Radical newspapers for example often called themselves "the Avant Garde". It was Marx though who began to significantly change the idea by introducing the notion that the proletariat were the true revolutionary class--he didn't actually use the term "vanguard" in his own writing--because they were the one that was the most oppressed, or as he put it "negated" by capitalism, and therefore had the least to lose by its abolition. In doing so, he ruled out the possibilities that less alienated enclaves, whether of artists or the sort of artisans and independent producers who tended to form the backbone of anarchism, had anything significant to offer. The results we all know. The idea of a vanguard party to dedicated to both organizing and providing an intellectual project for that most-oppressed class chosen as the agent of history, but also, actually sparking the revolution through their willingness to employ violence, was first outlined by Lenin in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?; it has echoed endlessly, to the point where the SDS in the late '60s could end up locked in furious debates over whether the Black Panther Party should be considered the vanguard of The Movement as the leaders of its most oppressed element. All this in turn had a curious effect on the artistic avant garde who increasingly started to organize themselves like vanguard parties, beginning with the Dadaists, Futurists, publishing their own manifestos, communiquŽs, purging one another, and otherwise making themselves (sometimes quite intentional) parodies of revolutionary sects. (Note however that these groups always defined themselves, like anarchists, by a certain form of practice rather than after some heroic founder.) The ultimate fusion came with the Surrealists and then finally the Situationist International, which on the one hand was the most systematic in trying to develop a theory of revolutionary action according to the spirit of Bohemia, thinking about what it might actually mean to destroy the boundaries between art and life, but at the same time, in its own internal organization, displayed a kind of insane sectarianism full of so many splits, purges, and bitter denunciations that Guy Debord finally remarked that the only logical conclusion was for the International to be finally reduced to two members, one of whom would purge the other and then commit suicide. (Which is actually not too far from what actually ended up happening.)

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

./english/373.txt:16:Although certain changes can be felt in the rhetoric (especially when the notorious "civil society" is the issue), the practice has remained the same: trying to reform and humanize capitalism, lobbying over and through political parties, recruiting of new party members to fight for a new revolution that will not be the "revolution betrayed". The traditionalistic paradigm implicates loyalty towards the traditional practices of political action, as opposed to new radicalism and the intentional breaking of the old paradigms.

./english/373.txt:34:The lack of democratic approach and of "transparency" (the term favourite with the "civil society" theoreticians) permeates the institution of a forum, the way it is today, at all levels. An appropriate question can be posed here, which even the members of the so-called International Council have no answer to: Who actually organizes these forums? Reading of the list of organizations participating in the IC is like getting through the woods of names of anonymous non-governmental organizations. The IC, as it seems, is a kind of honoured body that only approves the already brought decisions, agreed on probably somewhere along the Paris-Sao Paolo path, that are brought by the OC. What is the OC? I have no idea. Probably the same people who have established the Orwellian Secretariat for Call of the Social Movements which is to be found somewhere in Sao Paolo. The same is valid for the ESF. I was the witness of the preparatory meetings of the ESF, in which the bureaucratic and old left, owing to the experience they had had in such a kind of political struggle, pushed out without difficulty the grassroots initiatives. Thus we bump into an unusual paradox: those who have made this movement interesting and distinctive and who, in a way, are the most deserving for its success, are not adequately represented in its "institutions", in the forums.

./english/374.txt:52:And what great people these are! What stoicism and courage! And what a lesson for the world is contained in this struggle! Not for a long time shall we be able to know if President Johnson ever seriously thought of bringing about some of the reforms needed by his people - to iron out the barbed class contradictions that grow each day with explosive power. The truth is that the improvements announced under the pompous title of the "Great Society" have dropped into the cesspool of Vietnam.

./english/374.txt:54:The largest of all imperialist powers feels in its own guts the bleeding inflicted by a poor and underdeveloped country; its fabulous economy feels the strain of the war effort. Murder is ceasing to be the most convenient business for its monopolies. Defensive weapons, and never in adequate number, is all these extraordinary soldiers have - besides love for their homeland, their society, and unsurpassed courage. But imperialism is bogging down in Vietnam, is unable to find a way out and desperately seeks one that will overcome with dignity this dangerous situation in which it now finds itself. Furthermore, the Four Points put forward by the North and the Five Points of the South now corner imperialism, making the confrontation even more decisive.

./english/375.txt:16:Here they differ from the oppressed classes of previous class societies. The medieval peasants could imagine that the peasant family could individually get more land and improve its conditions. In the world today there are still many hundreds of millions of peasants and of small proprietors, each of whom imagines that their family could grab more land or more of the market that they could improve their positions individually. Marx’s central notion is that workers are forced to fight collectively, whether they fight in the factory or at the level of the whole society. They do not fight collectively all the time. Marx described how they are driven to fight collectively, they suffer defeats, they fragment and then are forced again to fight collectively.

./english/375.txt:76:Now remember, in Marx’s time, what Marx said was that the industrial working class exercised hegemony over the other forms of labour, not in quantitative terms. When Marx was writing the industrial working class was very small in England. In the world generally it was miniscule. Most of the workers were in agriculture, in mining, in primary production. The industrial working class exerted a hegemony over the others. What did that mean? It meant it had the power to transform other forms of labour. Other forms of labour had to become more like it. Agricultural work had to industrialised, mining had to industrialise, society itself had to industrialise. And that was the hegemony of industrial labour over other forms of labour.

./english/375.txt:93:Like I say, Toni and I see multitude as a class concept, as a way of seeing class and its political uses. Generally, people accept the notion there are two conceptions of class. There is one which is usually associated with Marx’s own work which we think of as the unitary model of class. This is grounded in Marx’s work when he continually talked in his work about the tendency in capitalist society for a reduction of class differences so as to tend to a two class model of capitalism, the class of those with nothing to sell but their labour power, the proletariat, and the capitalist class. So Marx talks about the reduction to the two class, or unitary model, with one class of labour.

./english/375.txt:95:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 11We traditionally have as an alternative to that in the various academic and intellectual notions of class what is thought of as a liberal model in which is about a pluralism of classes. This liberal model says there is not just one category of labour but rather there is a variety of classes in society, none of which has priority over the other. This is the liberal pluralistic model as opposed to Marx’s unitary model.

./english/375.txt:133:The fact of the matter is that things are going wrong in Argentina because there’s a military imperialistic dictatorship. It’s a military struggle rather than the fact that the working class is not involved. All classes are involved, well maybe not the elites, but all segments of society are participating, and the problem is how to overcome the repression, not whether or not we have the banner of the working class flying. Everyone taking part, that is what is so amazing about Argentina.

./english/375.txt:151:I am from the Greek social forum. I feel that this opposition between the multitude and the working class is false. These terms do not mutually exclude each other. In the Marxist tradition the working class is a set of persons. In this society we can identify a number of people as being the working class, with the rest another class. For Poulatzas and other French writers from the 1970s we have a notion of a set of class positions. I think it is more correct to say the Marxist view is a way of functioning. Every twenty years we have this talk that the working class does not exist any more, and then we find it again.

./english/375.txt:175:I have not been arguing at all that we have to despise, ignore or spit on any struggle other than that of the working class. I have written a history of the world in terms of a history of struggle for the last 5000 years of class society.

./english/375.txt:183:What is our weakness? The reality is that we have not mobilised the force that capitalism itself creates. It is alright for Michael Hardt to say the working class exists. But he is ambiguous on this question. I wonder why his book is so difficult to read. I feel like asking sometimes how many people have read it from first to last page. It is difficult because of its ambiguities. The problem is not in the language, but in the thought. At one point it can say the working class is ‘close to invisible’, it can say in one passage the working class in the United States is getting smaller absolutely. When I show it is getting bigger absolutely, we are told the figures are irrelevant. They are relevant. And let’s be clear, when I speak of the working class I talk about people’s whose labour adds to the accumulation of capital. This is not just manual workers – operaios, obreros – it is also wider sections who have been drawn in. But they have been drawn into the global fordist society, into forms of exploitation that used to characterise manual workers. This is what is happening in the schools in Britain, even in the universities, among office workers on a massive scale.

./english/375.txt:189:It is not good saying we cannot talk in old fashioned terms and so forth. We have to say: What is the reality? The reality is a bigger than ever working class, a third of the world’s population, a third of the world’s population are seem-proletarian in this sense, and there are very large numbers of people who are unemployed, who have been driven to the margins of society, who can be drawn into the movement, but being marginal to society means they do not have the power to change it. How do we mobilise the force that can change it? And when people talk about mobilising against the war, there is one small example from Britain. I think the whole of the anti-war movement in Britain recognises this: when 15 traindrivers refused to transport weapons for the war, everyone in this is the way forward. How do we transform that into a mass movement of people refusing to use their labour for the war. It is not easy. There are not automatic answers. But unless we approach it in those terms, we are ducking the issue. And Empire ducks the issue.

./english/375.txt:206:The revolutionary subject is a combination of the exploited classes. The hegemonic role of the working class in that alliance is determined by its role in production. Its centrality is related to the centrality of that class in the reproduction of society itself. When Marxists talk about strategy, they are talking about a process that takes us from where we are towards an objective in the future. When we talk about the self organisation of workers today it is directly linked to how we see the organisation of workers in society in the future. So when we talk about the soviet style of organisation of workers with leaders who are subject to immediate recall we a looking towards a future society built around that form of origination with the great mass organisation sovereign. The party in this situation play the role of an intermediary, carrying the historical experiences. We have to centralise just as the bourgeoisie is centralised.

./english/375.txt:214:If you take the word hegemonic that has been used over and over again, I think the word has a useful genealogy within Marxism. It was about how the ruling class rules by having everybody in society conceiving themselves as individuals , as not part of a collective that constitutes the majority and therefore can overthrow the rulers. On the other hand, the other part of the classical understanding of hegemony was how the working class acts as a unify of all other forms of struggles. And that was not an organisational question be instruction – and the legacy of Stalinism over the last 70 years meant that was precisely was did happen. I think that Marxism cannot be used for such an understanding by decree, that you can make people follow the working class, whatever that might mean. That is why I am making some critique of Michael’s position. One the other hand if we have the understanding that all forms of opposed groupings and struggles, if we do not se

./english/376.txt:13:So far, there has been a critique that the official process is becoming a platform for an agenda that is not beneficial to all but only to a select group of stakeholders. Other critiques observed from other mailing lists like the point out troublesome principles in existing official and non-official documents like the Orientation Non-Paper which was drafted by the president of the Preparatory Committee. An example of the troublesome principle can be seen in how the paper deals with women (or the nominal mention of women, for that matter) in the key principles. Civil society players from NGOs monitoring the WSIS have also stated that official documents have problematic statements (concepts appear vague, ideas appear not properly/professionally drafted) that can have dangerous interpretations (or misinterpretations).

./english/376.txt:40:Take the decision-making out of the closed rooms of politicians and the corporate sector and into a truly public forum. Create a space or spaces where civil society truly has a diversity of voices in the discussion on what media and information technologies should be, with full participation beyond a rhetorical nod.

./english/376.txt:44:Mainstream all these groups throughout government, civil society, the private sector, multilateral bodies and processes related to information and communication, with adequate funding and mechanisms for participation.

./english/376.txt:103:>>World Summit on the Information Society

./english/376.txt:107:The Official Civil Society website is at

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

./english/379.txt:16:As the third millennium unfolds, one of the most dramatic technological and economic revolutions in history is advancing a set of processes that are changing everything from the ways that people work to the ways that they communicate with each other and spend their leisure time. The technological revolution centres on computer, information, communication and multimedia technologies. These are key aspects of the production of a new economy, described as postindustrial, post-Fordist and postmodern, accompanied by a networked society and cyberspace, and the juggernaut of globalization. There are, of course, furious debates about how to describe the Great Transformation of the contemporary epoch, whether it is positive and negative, and what are the political prospects for democratization and radical social transformation.[1]

./english/379.txt:20:In this paper, I will engage some issues involving globalization, technological revolution and the alleged rise of a new economy, networked society and cyberspace in relationship to the problematic of revolution and the prospects for a radical democratic or socialist transformation of society. Globalization and the rise of a new computer and information technology-based economy and society is interpreted in both popular and academic literature as a revolution in which new technologies are transforming every mode of life from how individuals do research to how people communicate and interact socially. There is some truth in this notion, but it is also true that the technological revolution perpetuates the interests of the dominant economic and political powers, intensifies divisions between haves and have nots, and is a defining feature of a new and improved form of global technocapitalism.

./english/379.txt:24:Yet even as I argue that there are novelties and discontinuities in the current configuration of economic, political, social and cultural constellations that constitute the contemporary moment, there are also continuities with the previous forms of åmodernπ society to be noted. In particular, the ånewπ economy exhibits crucial features of the åoldπ capitalism such as the driving forces of capital accumulation, competition, commodification, exploitation and the business cycle. From this perspective, globalization and technological revolution are best theorized as forms of the global restructuring of capitalism in which technological development and a turbulent socio-economic transformation are intrinsically interconnected.

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

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

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

./english/379.txt:156:Active citizens thus need to acquire new forms of technological literacy to intervene in the new public spheres of the media and information society. In addition to traditional literacy skills centred upon reading, writing and speaking, engaged citizens and public intellectuals need to learn to use the new technologies to engage the public and participate in democratic discussion and debate.[12] Computer and digital technologies thus expand the field and capacities of the intellectual as well as the possibilities for political intervention. During the Age of Big Media, critical-oppositional intellectuals were by and large marginalized, unable to gain access to the major sites of mass communication. With the decentralization of the internet, however, new possibilities for public intellectuals exist to reach broad audiences. It is therefore the responsibility of the active citizen to creatively work with these new technologies, as well as to critically analyze the diverse developments of the cyberculture. This requires dialectical thinking that discriminates between the benefits and the costs, the upsides and downsides, of new technologies and devising ways that the technological revolution can be used to promote positive values like education, democracy, enlightenment and ecology. Active citizens thus face new challenges, and the future of democracy depends in part on whether new technologies will be used for domination or democratization, and whether each individual will sit on the sidelines or participate in the development of new democratic public spheres.

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

./english/379.txt:198:[11] On the importance of the ideas of Debord and the Situationist International to make sense of the present conjuncture see Best and Kellner 1997, chapter 3, and on the new forms of the interactive consumer society, see Best and Kellner 2001.

./english/379.txt:242:Kellner, D. (1995) åIntellectuals and new technologiesπ, Media, Culture & Society 17: 427-48.

./english/379.txt:246:______ (1998) åMultiple literacies and critical pedagogy in a multicultural societyπ, Educational Theory 48 (1): 103-22.

./english/380.txt:13:Moreover, advocates of a postmodern break in history argue that developments in transnational capitalism are producing a new global historical configuration of post-Fordism, or postmodernism as an emergent cultural logic of capitalism (Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Jameson 1991; and Gottdiener 1995). Others define the emergent global economy and culture as a "network society" grounded in new communications and information technology (Castells 1996, 1997, and 1998). For others, globalization marks the triumph of capitalism and its market economy (see apologists such as Fukuyama 1992 and Friedman 1999 who perceive this process as positive, while others portray it as negative, such as Mander and Goldsmith 1996; Eisenstein 1998; and Robins and Webster 1999). Some theorists see the emergence of a new transnational ruling elite and the universalization of consumerism (Sklair 2001), while others stress global fragmentation of “the clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996). Driving “post” discourses into novel realms of theory and politics, Hardt and Negri (2000) present the emergence of “Empire” as producing emergent forms of sovereignty, economy, culture, and political struggle that open the new millennium to an unforeseeable and unpredictable flow of novelties, surprises, and upheavals.

./english/380.txt:33: For critical social theory, globalization involves both capitalist markets and sets of social relations and flows of commodities, capital, technology, ideas, forms of culture, and people across national boundaries via a global networked society (see Castells 1996, 1997, and 1998 and Held, et al 1999). The transmutations of technology and capital work together to create a new globalized and interconnected world. A technological revolution involving the creation of a computerized network of communication, transportation, and exchange is the presupposition of a globalized economy, along with the extension of a world capitalist market system that is absorbing ever more areas of the world and spheres of production, exchange, and consumption into its orbit. The technological revolution presupposes global computerized networks and the free movement of goods, information, and peoples across national boundaries. Hence, the Internet and global computer networks make possible globalization by producing a technological infrastructure for the global economy. Computerized networks, satellite-communication systems, and the software and hardware that link together and facilitate the global economy depend on breakthroughs in microphysics. Technoscience has generated transistors, increasingly powerful and sophisticated computer chips, integrated circuits, high-tech communication systems, and a technological revolution that provides an infrastructure for the global economy and society (see Gilder 1989 and 2000; Kaku 1997; and Best and Kellner 2001).

./english/380.txt:41: In order to theorize the global network economy, one therefore needs to avoid the extremes of technological and economic determinism. Technological determinists frequently use the discourse of postindustrial, or postmodern, society to describe current developments. This discourse often produces an ideal-type distinction between a previous mode of industrial production characterized by heavy industry, mass production and consumption, bureaucratic organization, and social conformity, contrasted to the new postindustrial society characterized by "flexible production," or "postFordism," in which new technologies serve as the demiurge to a new postmodernity (Harvey 1987).

./english/380.txt:45:For postmodern theorists such as Baudrillard (1993), technologies of information and social reproduction (e.g. simulation) have permeated every aspect of society and created a new social environment. In the movement toward postmodernity, Baudrillard claims that humanity has left behind reality and modern conceptions, as well as the world of modernity. This postmodern adventure is marked by an implosion of technology and the human, which is generating a new posthuman species and postmodern world (see Baudrillard 1993 and the analyses in Kellner 1989b and 1994). For other less extravagant theorists of the technological revolution, the human species is evolving into a novel postindustrial technosociety, culture, and condition where technology, knowledge, and information are the axial or organizing principles (Bell 1976).

./english/380.txt:53:Few legitimating theories of the information and technological revolution, however, contextualize the structuring, implementation, marketing, and use of new technologies in the context of the vicissitudes of contemporary capitalism. The ideologues of the information society act as if technology were an autonomous force and either neglect to theorize the coevolution of capital and technology, or use the advancements of technology to legitimate market capitalism (i.e. Gilder 1989 and 1999; Gates 1995 and 1999; Friedman 1999). Theorists, like Kevin Kelly, for instance, the executive editor of Wired, think that humanity has entered a post-capitalist society that constitutes an original and innovative stage of history and economy where previous categories do not apply (1994 and 1998; see the critique in Best and Kellner 1999). Or, like Bill Gates (1995 and 1999), defenders of the “new economy” imagine computer and information technologies producing a "friction-free capitalism," perceived as a highly creative form of capitalism that goes beyond its previous contradictions, forms, and limitations.

./english/380.txt:61: In addition to technologically determinist and reductive postindustrial accounts of globalization, there are economic determinist discourses that view it primarily as the continuation of capitalism rather than its restructuring through technological revolution. A large number of theorists conceive globalization simply as a process of the imposition of the logic of capital and neo-liberalism on various parts of the world rather than seeing the restructuring process and the enormous changes and transformations that scientific and technological revolution are producing in the networked economy and society. Capital logic theorists, for instance, portray globalization primarily as the imposition of the logic of capital on the world economy, polity, and culture, often engaging in economic determinism, rather than seeing the complex new configurations of economy, technology, polity, and culture, and attendant forces of domination and resistance. In the same vein, some critical theorists depict globalization as the triumph of a globalized hegemony of market capitalism, where capital creates a homogeneous world culture of commercialization, commodification, administration, surveillance, and domination (Robins and Webster 1999).

./english/380.txt:69: In particular, an economic determinism and reductionism that merely depicts globalization as the continuation of market capitalism fails to comprehend the new forms and modes of capitalism itself which are based on novel developments in science, technology, culture, and everyday life. Likewise, technological determinism fails to note how the new technologies and new economy are part of a global restructuring of capitalism and are not autonomous forces that themselves are engendering a new society and economy which breaks with the previous mode of social organization. The postindustrial society is sometimes referred to as the "knowledge society," or "information society," in which knowledge and information are given roles more predominant than earlier days (see the survey and critique in Webster 1995). It is now obvious that the knowledge and information sectors are increasingly important domains of our contemporary moment and that therefore the theories of Daniel Bell and other postindustrial theorists are not as ideological and far off the mark as many of his critics on the left once argued. But in order to avoid the technological determinism and idealism of many forms of this theory, one should theorize the information or knowledge "revolution" as part and parcel of a new form of technocapitalism marked by a synthesis of capital and technology.

./english/380.txt:73: Some poststructuralist theories that stress the complexity of globalization exaggerate the disjunctions and autonomous flows of capital, technology, culture, people, and goods, thus a critical theory of globalization grounds globalization in a theory of capitalist restructuring and technological revolution. To paraphrase Max Horkheimer, whoever wants to talk about capitalism, must talk about globalization, and it is impossible to theorize globalization without talking about the restructuring of capitalism. The term "technocapitalism" is useful to describe the synthesis of capital and technology in the present organization of society (Kellner 1989a). Unlike theories of postmodernity (i.e. Baudrillard), or the knowledge and information society, which often argue that technology is the new organizing principle of society, the concept of technocapitalism points to both the increasingly important role of technology and the enduring primacy of capitalist relations of production. In an era of unrestrained capitalism, it would be difficult to deny that contemporary societies are still organized around production and capital accumulation, and that capitalist imperatives continue to dominate production, distribution, and consumption, as well as other cultural, social and political domains.[3] Workers remain exploited by capitalists and capital persists as the hegemonic force -- more so than ever after the collapse of communism.

./english/380.txt:77: Moreover, with the turn toward neo-liberalism as a hegemonic ideology and practice, the market and its logic comes to triumph over public goods and the state is subservient to economic imperatives and logic. Yet the term technocapitalism points to a new configuration of capitalist society in which technical and scientific knowledge, computerization and automation of labor, and information technology and multimedia play a role in the process of production analogous to the function of human labor power, mechanization of the labor process, and machines in an earlier era of capitalism. This process is generating novel modes of societal organization, forms of culture and everyday life, conflicts, and modes of struggle.

./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:105: The use of powerful technologies as weapons of destruction also discloses current asymmetries of power and emergent forms of terrorism and war, as the new millennium exploded into dangerous conflicts and interventions. As technologies of mass destruction become more available and dispersed, perilous instabilities have emerged that have elicited policing measures to stem the flow of movements of people and goods across borders and internally. In particular, the USA Patriot Act has led to repressive measures that are replacing the spaces of the open and free information society with new forms of surveillance, policing, and repression (see Kellner, forthcoming).

./english/380.txt:109: Ultimately, however, the abhorrent terror acts by the bin Laden network and the violent military response to the Al Qaeda terrorist acts by the Bush administration may be an anomalous paroxysm whereby a highly regressive premodern Islamic fundamentalism has clashed with an old-fashioned patriarchal and unilateralist Wild West militarism. It could be that such forms of terrorism, militarism, and state repression will be superseded by more rational forms of politics that globalize and criminalize terrorism, and that do not sacrifice the benefits of the open society and economy in the name of security. Yet the events of September 11 may open a new era of Terror War that will lead to the kind of apocalyptic futurist world depicted by cyberpunk fiction (see Kellner forthcoming).

./english/380.txt:145: The present conjuncture, I would suggest, is marked by a conflict between growing centralization and organization of power and wealth in the hands of the few contrasted with opposing processes exhibiting a fragmentation of power that is more plural, multiple, and open to contestation than was previously the case. As the following analysis will suggest, both tendencies are observable and it is up to individuals and groups to find openings for political intervention and social transformation. Thus, rather than just denouncing globalization, or engaging in celebration and legitimation, a critical theory of globalization reproaches those aspects that are oppressive, while seizing upon opportunities to fight domination and exploitation and to promote democratization, justice, and a progressive reconstruction of the polity, society, and culture.

./english/380.txt:149: Against capitalist globalization from above, there have been a significant eruption of forces and subcultures of resistance that have attempted to preserve specific forms of culture and society against globalization and homogenization, and to create alternative forces of society and culture, thus exhibiting resistance and globalization from below. Most dramatically, peasant and guerrilla movements in Latin America, labor unions, students, and environmentalists throughout the world, and a variety of other groups and movements have resisted capitalist globalization and attacks on previous rights and benefits.[8] Several dozen people's organizations from around the world have protested World Trade Organization policies and a backlash against globalization is visible everywhere. Politicians who once championed trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA are now often quiet about these arrangements and at the 1996 annual Davos World Economic Forum its founder and managing director published a warning entitled: "Start Taking the Backlash Against Globalization Seriously." Reports surfaced that major representatives of the capitalist system expressed fear that capitalism was getting too mean and predatory, that it needs a kinder and gentler state to ensure order and harmony, and that the welfare state may make a come-back (see the article in New York Times, February 7, 1996: A15).[9] One should take such reports with the proverbial grain of salt, but they express fissures and openings in the system for critical discourse and intervention.

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

./english/380.txt:248: I would also suggest that the model of Marx and Engels as deployed in the "Communist Manifesto" could also be usefully employed to analyze the contradictions of globalization (Marx and Engels 1978: 469ff). From the historical materialist optic, capitalism was interpreted as the greatest, most progressive force in history for Marx and Engels, destroying a backward feudalism, authoritarian patriarchy, backwardness and provincialism in favor a market society, global cosmopolitanism, and constant revolutionizing of the forces of production. Yet in the Marxian theory, so too was capitalism presented as a major disaster for the human race, condemning a large part to alienated labor, regions of the world to colonialist exploitation, and generating conflicts between classes and nations, the consequences of which the contemporary era continues to suffer.

./english/380.txt:252: Marx deployed a similar dialectical and historical model in his later analyses of imperialism arguing, for instance, in his writings on British imperialism in India, that British colonialism was a great productive and progressive force in India at the same time it was highly destructive (Marx and Engels 1978: 653ff). A similar dialectical and critical model can be used today that articulates the progressive elements of globalization in conjunction with its more oppressive features, deploying the categories of negation and critique, while sublating (Aufhebung) the positive features. Moreover, a dialectical and transdisciplinary model is necessary to capture the complexity and multidimensionality of globalization today that brings together in theorizing globalization, the economy, technology, polity, society and culture, articulating the interplay of these elements and avoiding any form of determinism or reductivism.

./english/380.txt:256: Theorizing globalization dialectically and critically requires that we both analyze continuities and discontinuities with the past, specifying what is a continuation of past histories and what is new and original in the present moment. To elucidate the later, I believe that the discourse of the postmodern is useful in dramatizing the changes and novelties of the mode of globalization. The concept of the postmodern can signal that which is fresh and original, calling attention to topics and phenomena that require novel theorization, and intense critical thought and inquiry. Hence, although Manuel Castells has the most detailed analysis of new technologies and the rise of what he calls a networked society, by refusing to link his analyses with the problematic of the postmodern, he cuts himself off from theoretical resources that enable theorists to articulate the novelties of the present that are unique and different from the previous mode of social organization.[13]

./english/380.txt:260: Consequently, although there is admittedly a lot of mystification in the discourse of the postmodern, it signals emphatically the shifts and ruptures in our era, the novelties and originalities, and dramatizes the mutations in culture, subjectivities, and theory which Castells and other theorists of globalization or the information society gloss over. The discourse of the postmodern in relation to analysis of contemporary culture and society is just jargon, however, unless it is rooted in analysis of the global restructuring of capitalism and analysis of the scientific-technological revolution that is part and parcel of it.[14]

./english/380.txt:280: A progressive reconstruction of education that is done in the interests of democratization would demand access to new technologies for all, helping to overcome the so-called digital divide and divisions of the “haves” and “have nots” (see Kellner 2000). Expanding democratic and multicultural reconstruction of education forces educators and citizens to confront the challenge of the digital divide, in which there are divisions between information and technology “haves” and “have nots,” just as there are class, gender, and race divisions in every sphere of the existing constellations of society and culture. Although the latest surveys of the digital divide indicate that the key indicators are class and education and not race and gender, nonetheless making computers a significant force of democratization of education and society will require significant investment and programs to assure that everyone receives the training, literacies, and tools necessary to properly function in a high-tech global economy and culture.[15]

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

./english/383.txt:12:New Society Publishers; U.K.: Earthscan Publications.

./english/383.txt:21:widespread struggle to transform existing nature-society relations into ones that are nonexploitative,

./english/383.txt:26:Scholars'. Theory and Society, 26, 1-37.

./english/383.txt:75:society. McMurtry’s analysis is similar to Polanyi’s double movement analysis. McMurtry looks

./english/383.txt:130:Science and Society, Vol. 60 No. 3, Fall, 290-306.

./english/386.txt:52:Look at what we are as a nation, 291 million adults and still illiterate and substantial majority of them are females whose capabilities are the key to transforming society: 45 million children were out of Primary Schools in 1995. Nearly one third of children under 16 are forced into child labour. 135 million people are denied access to primary health care, 226 million are without safe drinking water, 640 million lack basic sanitation and so on (see Mahbub ul Haq (1997)), that 350 million people "live" below a poverty line which views people only as a statistical or biological entity and not as a social individual with self-respect. Ironically, the same India which houses the largest number of world's poor was ranked first in arms India imports among the developing countries.

./english/386.txt:72:The export-drive has lead to further inequalities in land ownership. Small land-owners, without the means to shift production to more profitable export-crops will have no option than but to sell off their lands and become landless labourers. Employment opportunities are minimum in the export-crops, the sector being highly capital intensive. This has resulted in massive unemployment, mass migration, disruption of family and family life, child labour and intensified exploitation of women. Thus, the globalisation of agriculture leads to the demise of rural life and society.

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

./english/386.txt:154:Mr.Ajit Muricken is the Director of Vikas Adhyayan Kendra. It was set up in the year 1981. The area of its activities is Western India viz.Gujarat, Goa and Maharashtra. Western India has been held as a model of development and pinnacle of achievements. VAK therefore examines the existing development paradigms critically. It does not stop to criticise the existing models of development but also looks of alternative models and indigenous systems. Particular concerns of VAK are the dalits, adivasis and women's issues. Besides, subjects of special concern to VAK are, environment and ecology, religion and society; ideology and culture; and practice of social transformation.

./english/388.txt:55:TP: The choice of making India the base of the 2004 WSF was pretty much a consensual process. At the last forum, it was proposed that India host the WSF in 2003. The Indian members of the International Council said no, and that they needed more time to consult Indian civil society. One of the representatives told me at the time that only 200 or so activists in India even knew about the forum. At the International Council meetings in Barcelona in spring 2002, it was agreed that India should first host an Asian Social Forum and, based on the success of that event, the International Council and the India Working Committee should decide whether India could host the WSF in 2004. The Asian Social Forum was held in January in Hyderabad and was a great event that has filled many people with optimism about the WSF being held in India.

./english/389.txt:2:Putting People First in the Information Society

./english/389.txt:5:ENDORSED BY 22 NGOs AND CIVIL SOCIETY ENTITIES

./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/389.txt:11:Technology and infrastructure are the means to human development and not an end in themselves. Any approach that reduces the information society to the tools and channels that store and transmit information, or that relegates citizens to the status of mere users of technology will be unable to achieve the goals of the summit.

./english/389.txt:13:As we consider the nature of the information society, we need to recognize that what matters is human interaction and the exchange of information and content. Communications should facilitate active citizenship, that is participation of all individuals and communities in the public space. As such, it is communication and information–sharing that should be the focus of the Summit.

./english/389.txt:15:To capture the complexity and diversity of views and perspectives, a summit of this nature needs to provide sufficiently broad thematic areas. This will make it possible to seek consensus on a common vision, shared goals and the means to achieve them. It is the strong view of civil society organisations attending the PrepCom –1 of the WSIS that the thematic areas as they are currently defined will not provide such a framework. The concepts of access and applications are insufficient for the development of clear goals and strategies.

./english/389.txt:43:Internet Society

./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/391.txt:10:The "older" and "younger" generations would not have met and combined to form a global civil society if it weren't for Porto Alegre.

./english/393.txt:74:effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to

./english/393.txt:76:and are committed to building a planetary society centred on the human person.

./english/393.txt:80:action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to

./english/393.txt:82:a planetary society directed towards fruitful re lationships among humankind and between it

./english/393.txt:120:civil society from all the countries in the world, but intends neither to be a body

./english/393.txt:121:representing world civil society nor to exclude from the debates it promotes those in

./english/393.txt:125:society from all the countries in the world, but intends neither to be a body representing world

./english/393.txt:126:civil society. [Rest missing.]

./english/393.txt:187:9. The World Social Forum asserts democracy as the avenue to resolving society’s problems

./english/393.txt:243:movements, and places special value on all that society is building to centre economic

./english/393.txt:247:and places special value on the exchange among them, particularly on all that society is

./english/393.txt:252:national and international links among organizations and movements of civil society, that

./english/393.txt:257:national and international links among organizations and movements of society, that - in both public

./english/395.txt:339:“… groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by

./english/395.txt:340:capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society centred on the

./english/395.txt:489:“… groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to … imperialist globalisation, militarism,

./english/395.txt:492:planetary society centred on the human person.”

./english/395.txt:533:society from all the countries in the world…”

./english/395.txt:571:— since ‘who do individuals represent ?’ In short, organisations of any kind ‘represent’ society, and

./english/395.txt:572:therefore are and should be the vanguard of change in society. The formation of the IC as it stands

./english/395.txt:606:of society ? In short, do we believe that organisations represent the only vehicle for the selfdevelopment

./english/395.txt:654:to be a body representing world civil society” [Clause 5], the reality today is that in many ways, this

./english/395.txt:715:neither to be a body representing world civil society” [Clause 5], and that it “does not constitute a

./english/396.txt:182:· Covered the presentation of the statement of the women’s NGOs at the official UN Regional Prepcom and gave it the place it should have in media, as the expression of civil society in an official UN meeting.

./english/396.txt:226:Each program dealt with one of the 12 critical areas of concern of the Platform for Action of the IV World Conference on Women in 1995 in Beijing, thus disseminating, in the voice of women, what each area of concern states, what has happened in the implementation of the issue discussed, what governments were debating across the street at the moment and what women in civil society have done to demand accountability of governments in light of what they signed on to do. The role of media in contributing to the advancement of the issue, or being an obstacle to its understanding was also included.

./english/396.txt:287:Sergia noted that incorporating women's perspectives into the conference agenda is a critical challenge at WCAR because "historically it has been very difficult to make the connections between race, gender and ethnicity." She continued, "Another challenge for us is to get the governments to make true commitment and to implement what they are approving in that conference. We also need to move forward with these issues in the agenda of the civil society."

./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:439:"The tendency of concentration of what is called the "world data processing society" is given by the rich countries, by which the dissemination is not determined only by the changes in technology, but should be understood in the specific structural and institutional context". (Guillian Marcelle, Coordinator of the Gender Equity working group of the African Information Society.)

./english/396.txt:487:These concerns affirm the need to consolidate media in hands and minds of women. Women aim to have more programs produced by them, but also to own media venues, as a legitimate right and a guarantee of continuity for their constructive insertion in the society at large.

./english/397.txt:6:For all its failings, the international system of the UN is based on principles of partnership. It has also recognized the parallel growth of ivil society?alongside the market and the state. An international form of ivil society?has begun to emerge. One of its tasks is to monitor international commitments made by national governments ?see chart below ? where serious problems are now evident. These are political issues, often in direct conflict with the self-interest of the market or the state. Whether effective international agreements are reached and implemented depends on the political influence of social movements t home? This is no less true of the official labour movement and its international bureaucracy which need to get closer to wider social movements.

./english/398.txt:1:'The alternative is not civil society but civil disobedience' - Naomi Klein

./english/398.txt:8:'So what will victory look like ?' asked one. 'Why is the movement projected as one led by groups in the North?' asked another while several complained about the way trade unions and political parties were being treated WSF organizers as lower down in the pecking order to NGOs and civil society groups.

./english/398.txt:10:'The alternative is not civil society but civil disobedience' said Naomi Klein, activist and author of the acclaimed 'No Logo', who in a hard-hitting articulate speech warned about attempts being made to turn the WSF into 'yet another big meeting' bereft of any impact on the real world. Dismissing critical arguments that the anti-globalization movement did not have any specific goals she said 'there are so many alternatives evident at the WSF that they are spilling onto the streets'.

./english/398.txt:16:Questions about the role and relevance of trade unions to the anti-globalization movement came up several times with a delegate from the Korean Congress of Trade Unions (KCTU) saying that there was a tension between trade unions and global civil society groups evident at the WSF. 'Trade unions have been at the forefront of struggles against neo-liberal globalization on a day-to-day basis in many southern economies' he said calling upon the WSF to adopt a clearer stand on the issue.

./english/398.txt:18:Eduardo Fernandez of the Southern Cone Trade Union Federation said that in Latin America in particular there were strong alliances between trade unions and civil society groups that were forged during the long years of dictatoriship throughout the region. 'If the WSF process has to go forward there must be respect for diversity within the movement' he said.

./english/399.txt:24:Derive: a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through various ambiances. Also used to designate a specific period of continuous deriving.

./english/399.txt:42:Unlike the Special Branch sergeant, Malcolm Mclaren obviously did'nt do his homework properly (Or maybe, schoolboy prankster that he is, he did'nt care about the exam results as long as he became a personality cult). However in 1957 the soon to be Situationists did not accept this as the way things would remain, not if they had anything to do with it. In opposition to this process they formed 'the Situationist International': a group consisting mostly of artists, intellectuals and the like (it has to be said), which set out to develop a new way of interpreting society as a whole. (Prior to the S.I. the Lettrists, who predated Punk by almost 30 years sporting trousers painted with slogans).

./english/399.txt:46:This was how (and why) leading Situationist, Guy Debord formulated his theory of The Spectacle. He argued, in their journal ('Internationale Situationniste') that through computers, television, rapid transport systems and other forms of advanced technology capitalism controlled the very conditions of existence. Hence the World we see is not the Real World but the World we are conditioned to see: THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE (the name of Debord's book). The Spectacle's audience is the lumpen proletariat, the bourgeoisie, even the bosses now merely look at the Show: Real Life: thinking about it as spectators, not actually participating or experiencing it.

./english/399.txt:48:Debord saw the end result as Alienation. Separation of person from person; crowds or strangers, laughing and crying together but ultimately isolated from everybody and everything. The Spectacle makes spectators of us all, because we've been conned into substituting material things for Real experiences. However, Debord felt this feeling of alienation could eventually break the stranglehold of the Spectacular society. People were already rebelling against being kept apart by mass culture/ commodity/ consumer society. In the early 60s thousands of young americans questioned their role in middle morality America and dropped out in the anonymous tenements of Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. In 1965, in the Watts suburb of Los Angeles, thousands of black kids burnt down their schools and factories.

./english/399.txt:50:To Debord these unconscious revolts against the Spectacle were evidence of it's vulnerability. It wasn't as invincible as it seemed. But before the Spectacle could be overcome it's safety net, Recouperation, had to be dealt with: to survive Spectacular Society has to have strict social control. This is retained, without much fuss, by it's ability to recouperate a potentially revolutionary situation. By changing chameleonlike it can resist an attack, creating new roles, cultural forms and encouraging participation in the construction of the world of your own alienation into the bargain.

./english/399.txt:54:Spectacular Society is made complete by the recuperation of the environment in which all this must be experienced: The Recouperators realized that people would no longer accept the damage the growth of the Spectacle: heavy industry: was doing to their physical surroundings: the world. Hence environmental recuperation or "Urbanism." This consists of replacing disordered urban-sprawl with more manageable structures; factory-towns, new-towns, shopping-malls, super-markets. Huge areas designed solely for the purpose of work and the creation of profit, with total disregard for the needs or the people forced to service it. The workers kept apart in 'new architecture, traditionally reserved to satisfy the ruling class...for the first time, directly aimed at the poor: 'Dwelling Unit, Sweet Dwelling Unit.' Rabbit hutches designed soullessly to isolate and instill formal misery.

./english/399.txt:56:The Situationists' answer to "Urbanism" 'was the reconstruction or the entire environment, according to the needs of the people that inhabit it. Their answer to modern society was to be nothing short of the "REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE" (the title of the companion book to 'The Society Of The Spectacle' by Raoul Vaneigem). Unlike traditional revolutionary groups, the Situationists were not concerned with the improvement of existing society, or reforming it. They were interested in destroying it completely and pulling something new and better in it's place. No half measures. No gestures. No immediate solution.

./english/399.txt:64:So by appropriating a bit of Marx, a bit of anarchist practice, plenty of Dadaism (Situationist practice owes more to Groucho Marx than Karl), even some Rimbaud, and by refusing absolutely to have anything to do with traditional hierarchies and the transfer of power from one ruling elite to another, the Situationists were ready to become a social force. By the mid-60's they were looking around for opportunities to intervene in existing radical situations; in order to speed up the inevitable collapse of the Spectacular Society.

./english/399.txt:66:Their first major opportunity arose in 1966 at Strasbourg University; a notoriously inactive careerist student body but with a leftist student union. 5 Pro-situ students infiltrated the union and set about scandalizing the authorities. They formed an anarchist appreciation society, appropriated union funds for situationist inspired flyposters and invited the SI to write a critique of the university and society in general. The resulting pamphlet, "On The Poverty Of Student Life (Ten Days That Shook The University)" was designed to wind up the apathetic students by confronting them with their subservience to the Family and the State. And it was none too subtle about it;

./english/399.txt:70:The pamphlet went on to dismiss the university as "The Society for the propagation of ignorance...high culture with the rhythm of the production line...With out exception the lecturers are cretins...bourgeois culture is dead...all the university does is make production-line specialists. But on the positive side, it pointed out that away from student life, in the Real World, working class kids were already rebelling against the boredom of everyday life;

./english/399.txt:72:"...the 'delinquents' of the world use violence to express their rejection of society and its sterile options. But their refusal is an abstract one: it gives them no chance of actually escaping the contradictions of the system. They are it's products - negative, spontaneous, but none the less exploitable. All the experiments of the new social order produce them: they are the first side-effects of the new urbanism; or the disintegration of all values; or the extension of an increasingly boring consumer leisure; of the growing control of every aspect of everyday life by the psycho-humanist police force; and of the economic survival of a family unit which has lost all significance.

./english/399.txt:74:"The 'young thug' despises work but accepts the goods. He wants what the spectacle offers him - but NOW, with no down payment. This is the essential contradiction of the delinquent's existence. He may try for a real freedom in the use of his time, in an individual assertiveness, even in the construction of a kind of community. But the contradiction remains, and kills (on the fringe old society, where poverty reigns, the gang develops it's own hierarchy, which can only fulfill itself in a war with other gangs, isolating each group and each individual within the group). In the end the contradiction proves unbearable. Either the lure of the product world proves too strong, and the hooligan decides to do his honest day's work: to this end a whole sector of production is devoted specifically to his recuperation. Clothes, records, guitars, scooters, transistors, purple hearts beckon him to the land of the consumer. Or else he is forced to attack the laws of the market itself either in the primary sense, by stealing, or by a move towards a conscious revolutionary critique of commodity society. For the delinquent only two futures are possible: revolutionary Consciousness, or blind obedience on the shop floor."

./english/399.txt:76:However existing student rebels, such as The Dutch Provos, the British 'Committee of 100' and the Berkeley students got the thumbs down: Basically for fighting the symptoms (Nuclear Arms/ the Vietnam war/ Racism/ Censorship) not the disease: And specifically for their tendency to sympathize with western society's apparent enemies; China especially whose cultural revolution pamphlet considered "a pseudo-revolt directed by the most elephantine bureaucracy of modern times." (it did begrudgingly have a good word for the Committee of 100's "Spies for Peace" scandal: where, in 1963 the anti-nuke movement invaded secret fallout shelters reserved for the British government.)

./english/399.txt:80:"We must destroy the Spectacle itself, the whole apparatus of the commodity society...We must abolish the pseudo-needs and false desires which the system manufactures daily in order to preserve it's power."

./english/399.txt:99:In the mid-60's the French University system was heading for trouble anyway - largely due to overcrowding. The government tried to deal with the crisis by setting up overspill colleges in the provinces and slum-outskirts of Paris. This made matters worse. One of the Paris overspill colleges in particular, Nanterre, situated amidst waste disposal tips and the spanish immigrant ghetto, was almost perfect for intervention. There was already a strong feeling of alienation amongst the students; uprooted from their former teeming cafe lifestyle in the Latin Quarter and dumped in council flat style blocks; separate residential blocks for males and females, no recreational facilities, everything controlled by a faceless centralized bureaucracy in Paris. It was all straight out of Debord's Society of the Spectacle.

./english/399.txt:119:Dany Cohn-Bendit soon established himself as the principal spokesman; describing himself as 'a megaphone' for the Movement and 'an anarchist by negation'. He said he despised authoritarian Marxist-Leninist hierarchies almost as much as capitalism itself but, "I don't live in Russia, I live here, so I carry on the fight against the French Bourgeoisie." Cohn-Bendit and the situationists wanted a horizontal, federal organization of Workers' Councils, who act together but preserve their autonomy, Direct Democracy. The hard-line Leftist factions did'nt always share this view but the Movement was held together simply by a desire to change society.

./english/399.txt:121:They had no illusions of overthrowing Bourgeois Society in one foul swoop. No Revolution. The plan was to stage a series of revolutionary shocks. Each one setting off a irreversible process of change. The March 22nd Movement acting as detonator but not attempting to control the forces it unleashed. They realized such a revolt could not last, but at least it would provide a glimpse of what was possible. If they failed it was just a matter of time before another situation developed in another place in another way.

./english/399.txt:163:Despite the millions on strike and the hundreds of thousands on the streets, it was always true that the Movement was basically the work of an intellectual elite and at the end of the day the silent majority couldn't be lured away from the capitalist carrot. They did'nt understand the intellectual repression felt by the students and their theories were all so much idle rubbish compared with the day to day reality of earning a crust. But having said that, De Gaulle had been lucky. Maybe not so lucky next time. The students had succeeded in bringing out the discontent in French Society at the ever increasing distance between the bureaucrats and those whose lives they control.

./english/399.txt:167:The legacy of May '68 was to be felt for some time yet. The nights on the barricades and the exhilaration of new ideas had proved to the people there that revolution/ change was possible, not only possible but inevitable, and that capitalist society was in it's death throes. The situationist idea of intervening in a situation, with deliberate and systematic provocation, as put into practice by the 22nd March Movement, had been proven to work very effectively and very dramatically.

./english/399.txt:169:Where Paris had succeeded and the most important lesson of May '68 was final proof that the traditional revolutionary groups were now as outmoded, institutionalized and oppressive as the capitalists in power and were just as much slaves of the Spectacular Society. Final proof, that since the halcyon days of Marx, Bakunin and Lenin, they too had been recouperated and indeed become recouperators in their own right. They lost face to thousands of young people when they came out in their true colours, against the anti-hierarchy, self-management notions of the 22nd March Movement. And especially when it was proved, contrary to communist dogma, that self-management does in fact work. Why not let the people decide?

./english/400.txt:9:The concept of information warfare, along with related ideas such as information operations, netwar and cyberwar, has gained prominence in US strategic and military circles since the early 1990s. The term 'Information warfare' is used in two broad ways. Defined in technological terms, information warfare particularly emphasises vulnerabilities in digital infrastructures to disruption by physical or digital attack (e.g. Boulanger, 1998; Cobb, 1999) and the growing 'information intensity' of battlefield operation (e.g. Libicki, 1998). The term is also used more broadly to analyse emerging types of conflict in an information society through, for example, the use of information in the management of public and adversary perceptions, and the role of information in the organisational aspects of conflict particularly in the nature and organisation of threats from sub- and non-state actors (Rathmell, 1998; Arquila & Ronfeldt, 1998a, 1998b). Many of the concepts associated with information warfare are also now being used in the analysis of conflict in economic, social and personal, as well as military, spheres (Kovacich, 1997; Cronin & Crawford, 1999a;). In corporate settings, for example, use can be found in discussions of competitor intelligence (Cronin & Crawford, 1999b; McCrohan, 1998) and computer security (Boulanger, 1998; Jajodia et al 1999).

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

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

./english/400.txt:99:These cybercampaigns have been conducted as adjuncts to other forms of campaigning: in two cases as a part of moves to globalise more 'traditional' industrial disputes in the US tyre industry; and in the case of the Rio Tinto campaign , the cybercampaign has formed a part of a wider corporate campaign including the initiation of shareholder action and building links with other social movement or civil society activists. The campaigns have not sought primarily to degrade the service of adversaries, though in two cases this appears to have led to minor disruption of service as a by-product of the cybercampaigns. However, the largely symbolic identification of routes in to the company via email addresses and Web sites is one way of taking advantage of companies' growing use of the Web to strengthen links with communities of customers. Each point of openness - request for feedback, contact address or link to related company - provides a possible entry point for protesters.

./english/400.txt:110:Arquilla, J. & Ronfeldt, D. (1998a) Preparing for Information-Age Conflict: Part 1 Conceptual and organizational dimensions, Information, Communication & Society 1(1) pp. 1-22

./english/400.txt:111:Arquilla, J. & Ronfeldt, D. (1998b) Preparing for Information-Age Conflict: Part 2 Doctrinal and strategic dimensions, Information, Communication & Society 1(2) pp. 121-143

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

./english/400.txt:119:Castells, M. (1997) The Power of Identity - The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. 2, Blackwell, Oxford

./english/400.txt:123:Cronin, B. & Crawford, H. (1999a) Information Warfare: Its Application in Military and Civilian Contexts, The Information Society 15 pp. 257-263

./english/400.txt:163:Rathmell, A. (1998) Information Warfare and Sub-State Actors: An organisational approach, Information, Communication and Society 1(4)

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

./english/400.txt:176:Spooner, (1998) Trade Union Telematics for International Collective Bargaining pp. 277-288 in Sussman, G. & Lent, J. (eds) Global Productions: Labor in the Making of the "Information Society", Hampton Press, New Jersey

./english/401.txt:162:In terms of theoretical approach, Romero refers to literature not so much on class and unions as that on citizenship, representation and participation. He is, it seems, primarily interested in the establishment within Urabá, and more widely, of some meaningful kind of civil society, in which a life and death struggle - between traditional landholding and other elites and the insurrectionary left and the poor - is surpassed by social compromise and pacts (from the local to the international level), to the benefit of both sides. He also considers that this kind of settlement provides the necessary base for any emancipatory struggle.

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

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

./english/403.txt:25:Beyond such subterranean channels, social movements have often relied on corporate and state media as a means of communicating with other sections of society, with all the attendant risks that this reliance brings. Such ‘guerrilla tactics’ (Fiske 1989: 19) were again demonstrated as recently as the Melbourne S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum in 2000: for example, with the mock adoption of a John Farnham song as the protest anthem, and the media furore that this provoked. At the same time, this attempt to detourn corporate media also indicates a fundamental weakness of the movement itself:

./english/403.txt:41:Is more media always better, even if it is alternative media? Can there be such a thing as too much information? The problem of information overload in electronic environments has been a topic of periodic discussion over the past two decades or so (Valovic 2000; Hiltz & Turoff 1985). With the West’s embrace of the Internet, David Shenk (1997: 30-1) sees growing ‘data smog’ as the dark reality at the heart of today’s so-called information society. As the volume of information accelerates relentlessly, ‘noise’ overshadows ‘signal’. Communication may be speedier thanks to the Internet, but it is increasingly coupled with ‘bad decision making’ (137) that serves only to strengthen existing relations of power (15). Far from levelling social inequities, Shenk concludes, ‘cyberspace is Republican’ (174). Developing aspects of Shenk’s argument further, Tim Jordan (2000: 118) has identified two kinds of information overload: that which arises from excess volume, and that arising from information so ‘chaotically organised’ as to be useless. Together, he argues, these aspects of information overload fuse together in a ‘spiral’ (128) that constantly reproduces the existing power relations of the Internet.

./english/403.txt:131:Day, R. (2001b) ‘Totality and Representation. A History of Knowledge Management Through European Documentation, Critical Modernity, and Post-Fordism’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 52 (9), June.

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

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

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

./english/408.txt:20:But if this complexity is very Indian, the gap between the left and the most oppressed of this huge society does underline the challenge facing the entire movement of movements: how to expand not simply geographically but socially, how to reach deep into the exploited and excluded and help them to emancipate themselves.

./english/409.txt:47:Atila Roque was one of the people who argued forcefully that the forum should not try to issue a single set of political demands. "We are trying to break the uniformity of thought, and you cant do that by putting forward another uniform way of thinking. Honestly, I dont miss the time when we were all in the Communist Party. We can achieve a higher degree of consolidation of the agendas, but I dont think civil society should be trying to organize itself into a party."

./english/409.txt:65:But other questions were legitimate and have implications that reach far beyond a one-week conference. How are decisions made in this movement of movements? Who, for instance, decides which "civil society representatives" go behind the barbed wire at Davos--while protesters are held back with water cannons outside? If Porto Alegre was the anti-Davos, why were some of the most visible faces of opposition "dialoguing" in Davos?

./english/409.txt:69:But that is not the strategy leading up to the Summit of the Americas in Quebec. Several large labor organizations and NGOs have taken government money to organize a parallel Peoples Summit during the official week of meetings, and have yet to issue clear statements on the FTAA. Not surprisingly, there were tensions about these issues at the forum, with those favoring direct action accusing the Peoples Summit organizers of helping to make the closed FTAA process appear open to "civil society"--perhaps just the public relations gloss Bush needs to secure fast track.

./english/410.txt:4:PORTO ALEGRE: It was founded as the Un-Davos, the Anti-Davos, which would meet simultaneously with the events in Switzerland. And indeed the differences between the settings of the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum could hardly be more striking: an exclusive ski resort on the one side, and a sun-baked Brazilian industrial town on the other. And whereas Davos hosts about 2200 of the global rich and famous in a cordoned-off village, about 150,000 to 200,000 people assembled in an open tent city near the center of Porto Alegre. However, the open space and diversity that make the anti-Davos gathering attractive may also prevent it from rising above the cacophony as an effective voice of a global civil society.

./english/410.txt:6:According to its charter of principles, the World Social Forum is designed to provide an "open meeting space for … groups that are opposed to neo-liberalism and the domination of the world by … any form of imperialism." Furthermore, it aims to contribute to building a "planetary society," which should lead to just and well-balanced forms of globalization. In that manner, the gathering is not opposed to globalization as such, but only to particular incarnations thereof. Generally, the attending groups shared the idea that reducing the public sector and liberalizing trade will not ultimately benefit poor countries and disadvantaged people. Against neo-liberal globalization they advocate alternative globalizations or the new slogan of "alter-globalization."

./english/410.txt:10:A large number of events, in one way or another, related to Latin American Socialist parties. Some – usually smaller gatherings – bore the remnants of ultra-Marixist rhetoric lashing out against the "capitalist pigs" and calling for a revolution by the world's working classes. But most events were more conciliatory in their approaches, calling for reforms over revolution. For example, the Italian NGOs ROBA dell' Autro Mundo and Mani Tese organized a panel discussion on developing international legal frameworks, which would enforce the multinational corporations' social responsibilities. In fact, a public discussion with IMF and World Bank representatives, which drew some protests, in the end amounted to a fruitful exchange of opinions. Responding to his critics from international NGOs, the World Bank representative, John Garrison, maintained that free trade was the key to achieving dignity and justice at a global level. But he also welcomed pressure from civil society to make governments and corporations deliver on their promises.

./english/410.txt:12:During the past four years, this idea of a global civil society mobilizing against "McWorld" has proved to be quite successful in getting public attention. In 2001, the first World Social Forum was organized by grassroots movements such as the French ATTAC and partly sponsored by the Brazilian Workers' Party (PT). Whereas the first event drew a modest number of 12,000 activists, the fourth Forum (in Mumbai, 2004) attracted 80,000 people. This year, the number of participants rose to a staggering 150,000 to 200,000, and featured 2500 events organized by more than 5700 organizations from more than 100 countries. This year, more than 5400 journalists went to Porto Alegre to cover an event that in many countries received more public attention than the parallel meeting in Davos.

./english/410.txt:22:However, if the World Social Forum wants to become a global pressure group, it must narrow down its agenda. Only with a clearly defined program will a much needed dialog between Porto Alegre and Davos be possible. However, formulating such an agenda means excluding a range of alternative options and viewpoints. If the World Social Forum wants to deepen its international impact, it will no longer be able to claim to represent global civil society in toto.

./english/417.txt:176:-> An alternative project for the society needs to be outlined, in which smaller projects can be

./english/417.txt:371:  Each Forum needs to have a goal, a project. Alternative projects for the society needs

./english/418.txt:6:The Algerian Delegation has come to represent all the members of the society and the principal political movements, in order to ratify the unconditional support from Algeria towards the fair cause of the Saharawi people. Delegates from South Africa have taken part in the conference too.

./english/418.txt:14:The Spanish position supports Moroccan’s occupation of Western Sahara. The conference ask the Spanish government to consider its policy as soon as possible, and to give a response to an important sector of the civil society, giving Saharawi people full, clear and active help in order to achieve self determination, through a free and democratic referendum.

./english/418.txt:17:The conference demands the revision of the agreement. Moreover, it asks the EU to adopt a policy in accordance to the international legality and find a fair and lasting solution based on the Saharawi People’s right of self determination, freedom and construction of a legal and fair society for men and women.

./english/420.txt:83:part of our society. But since they are simultaneously not a part of it,

./english/420.txt:84:they pose a challenge to civil society, not the Minister of the Interior.

./english/420.txt:90:the European Union, since every national society must deal with it in its

./english/472.txt:17:Participatory ideology and practice are a common goal. Advocates argue that in a democracy, people should deliberate collectively and should, to the extent possible, determine government decisions directly rather than through elected representatives. This means participation at all levels of government as well as unofficial civil-society-based structures.

./english/472.txt:29:As they conceived it, the meeting would be a starting point for creating proposals that would go beyond the growing protest actions against the neoliberal model whose promoters met in Davos. They drew on two broad currents of activism: the direct action movement that has mounted massive demonstrations against international summit meetings (notably against the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle), and the emergent worldwide civil society, embodied mainly in the nongovernmental organizations that have mushroomed throughout the world since the 1980s. These forces have been dubbed the “antiglobalization movement” by much of the press, but they generally reject the label. They favor a unified world, but one unified around common human values and respect for diversity rather than trade.

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

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

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

./english/474.txt:4:The debate on whether the World Social Forum (WSF) should remain merely a space for reflection and protest or should move on to proposals for concrete action once again emerged at the sixth edition of the annual global civil society meet, taking place in the Venezuelan capital this week.

./english/475.txt:28:These are serious questions. It is not enough just to innocently Ogo and take part¹ in Othe World Social Forum¹ and to then think or feel that you have been sold down the river when you are there (or indeed, even if you do not go, because all this is being done in our name the name of so-called Ocivil society¹, both local and global). In short : Do you agree that the Forum should and can be organised by political parties and by governments, towards their partisan ends ? If Chávez in Venezuela, then why not Musharraf in Pakistan ?

./english/476.txt:10:Porto Alegre in 2001 expected some 1500 participants. Some 10,000 came. The bulk of the participants in 2001 were from Latin America, France, and Italy. The basic principles of the WSF were that it was an "open meeting place" for "groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism." Its theme was "another world is possible." It was a "process," not an organization. It would not take positions as such, or make proposals for action, but it might generate such positions and proposals by some or all of those taking part in the WSF. It was "plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental and non-party" and acted in a "decentralized fashion." In short, there was to be no hierarchy or organizational discipline.

./english/477.txt:6:Porto Alegre in 2001 expected some 1500 participants. Some 10,000 came. The bulk of the participants in 2001 were from Latin America, France, and Italy. The basic principles of the WSF were that it was an "open meeting place" for "groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism." Its theme was "another world is possible." It was a "process," not an organization. It would not take positions as such, or make proposals for action, but it might generate such positions and proposals by some or all of those taking part in the WSF. It was "plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental and non-party" and acted in a "decentralized fashion." In short, there was to be no hierarchy or organizational discipline.

./english/479.txt:4:Criticizes the groups that take part at the WSF, wishing to have more centralization, discipline and action for creating a new society. He stands out the homogeneous character of the event, which should be reinforced in the author’s opinion.

./english/500.txt:12:For many activists in Penang, hub for a string of global, regional, national and local civil society groups, the buzz of excitement surrounding the Karachi Asian-level WSF is a world away. Certainly, it has not infected them the same way that previous global-level WSF events did. An IPS survey of four major non-government organizations (NGOs) here revealed that none of them was sending representatives to Karachi.

./english/510.txt:13:- a forum reserved for civil society, without elected representatives, governments, or political parties (except as outside speakers) tempted to use their participation for political purposes;

./english/510.txt:26:But the great challenge is found elsewhere. This is the taking advantage of an invaluable opportunity, made available through respect of the World Social Forum's Charter of Principles, for strengthening civil society in each of the three countries as a new political actor independent of governments, parties, and political leaders. A Social Forum opens the way for building links between organizations, by overtaking the barriers that generally divide them and by the mutual recognition and the discovery of their autonomous strength, with respect for their diversity.

./english/510.txt:28:The main dynamic that characterizes the Forum, as an open place of exchange, is the invitation to replace quarrels by the power of listening. We can then move towards fertile dialogue that can lead to the discovery of points of convergence and to the establishment of new alliances within this society. That way, we can launch new initiatives of struggle and transformation at the local, regional, or global level.

./english/510.txt:30:The big challenge of the 2006 polycentric WSF is therefore the effect it will have, in each host country and around the world, on the involvement by a growing number of citizen organizations in the fight for overcoming neo-liberalism and the building of a society of fairness and solidarity. If this set of Forums achieves this result, we will have made a great step towards "another world is possible."

./english/512.txt:8:The World Social Forum process can be said to be expanding strongly. More than just expanding, though: that expansion is bringing something new, a qualitative change in the kind of unity that has been forged among those who want to build the “other possible world”, a unity that respects diversity and in which everyone plays a leading role. The Forums do not result from decisions by an international summit that schedules and monitors them: they are always the initiatives and the responsibility of the civil society movements, groups and organisations of the country or region where they are held, with support from an International Council on which those groupings also participate. The Forums’ organizers – or facilitators, as we call them – in turn encourage participants to self-organise their activities at the Forums.

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

./english/512.txt:15:The aim of the political process launched in 2001 by the WSF remains the same: to permit encounters among “groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth” (1).

./english/512.txt:22:- the corruption that is decaying the fabric of society.

./english/512.txt:35:The Forums’ organisers ask something even more difficult of governments that dialogue with the WSF process – because they take a position on the same field of battle against neoliberalism: they ask them to help without interfering. Not all governments are willing to do that. It is hard for them to resist the temptation for self-promotion at the event. This difficulty in respecting the autonomy of civil society is a natural result of the political culture that prevailed throughout the last century.

./english/512.txt:37:That difficulty is also experienced by political parties, which until now have enjoyed a hegemony over political activity, the aim of their activities being to take government power. To their leaders there is no sense in acting outside of them or in intending to do anything without taking power. That difficulty grows to the extent that parties’ hegemony is threatened by civil society as a new, emerging political actor.

./english/512.txt:39:Why should governments and parties not be given the central place they have always enjoyed and their activities be supported through the WSF process? That would risk reducing the whole meaning of the Forums to dust. Of course, governments and parties have a role that is very often decisive in bringing about the changes required to build the “other world”. But why not let civil society reinforce the battle fronts and do so autonomously?

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

./english/512.txt:47:In 2006 (at the two multi-centred Forums held to date), the risk of hijacking by parties seemed smaller. In the case of Venezuela, however, many people pointed to the risk of government interference. Its President is a strong presence in the country and has many resources that can help, but also create dependence. According to observers, however, the Forum’s organisers managed to maintain the autonomy of the activities at the event. In fact what happened there was once again what constitutes the wealth of the Forums: participants were most interested in the free exchange of experiences and in developing new interaction among the movements and organisations of civil society.

./english/512.txt:80:Unlike the challenge posed by intellectuals who position themselves as leaders and guides of the Forums, the challenge from the Assembly of Social Movements comes from below, an option that the Forum is designed to strengthen. In that sense, it represents one of the best results that the Forum is making possible, because it interlinks a growing number of civil society organisations. Among the Forum’s aims is the ideal that many interconnections like this should emerge and grow up with it. And that is indeed happening. The problem is that the Assembly of Social Movements intends to command a hegemony over the Forums, and to become the main grouping to grow out of them. It is as if it wished to hijack the Forum to achieve the aims of the movements of which it is composed.

./english/513.txt:55:The Policy of Equality adopted in 2005 by the Forum’s International Council is an important recognition that changes cannot be generated spontaneously. Given the expansion and interrelatedness of an exclusive, class-based, racist, sexist, homophobic, urban-centrist culture, these changes are needed more than ever. Can’t the Forum recognise that there are social groups that need reparation and to whom society has a social debt that should be indemnified, starting at home? Indigenous peoples, afro-descendants, peasants, women, people discriminated against because of their sexual orientation, and other people who are marginalised for a variety of reasons, won’t find a space as equals in the Forum, without the risk that its self-convocation might limit their participation or restrict their autonomy.

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

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

./english/522.txt:67:The evolution of the world of NGOs poses a problem? Effectively. Some, in the name of global civil society, weaken the local or national activist fabrics. In the name of a citizen-based discourse, they stifle social radicalism. In the name of democracy, they monopolise visibility to the detriment of otherwise more representative organisations. But the world of the NGOs is not homogeneous; and it is not alone in creating a problem. The same is true of the trade union bureaucracies, intolerant “rank and file” movements, authoritarian political leaderships, of naïfs and cynics and (oh how many!) egotistical personalities and manipulative individuals. In short, it is not enough to denounce the NGOs (many of whom have their place in the forums) to ensure the popular dynamic of the process.

./english/522.txt:69:The poor are, in society, invisible. On the contrary, the forums should ensure the visibility of the most exploited and oppressed. Since the very beginning in Porto Alegre this has not been self-evident. The gap can be large, inside the forum, between the “street” and the platforms. Since 2001, some progress has been accomplished, but the process is not one-way - there are also regressions.

./english/524.txt:23:This voice is perhaps not so far removed from the remarkable plea of the Chair of the Netherlands Employers’ Organization, Bernard Wientjes, for an open, internationally oriented, tolerant and progressive society. If the drive really is for an open, equitable and tolerant globalization, Davos might learn from Bamako.

./english/527.txt:24:François Houtart clearly outlined one of the major dividing lines in the ‘movement of movements’. On the one hand, there are neokeynesianists who do not condemn the neoliberal system as such but want to socially correct it. They want a globalisation that benefits all. They want real free trade and want to fight poverty. On the other hand, post-capitalists want to go further. They fight the neoliberal system. They call themselves post- and not anti-capitalists because they no longer believe in the possibility or the desirability of a revolution. They have become reformists and can therefore accept to work with the neokeynesianists, even if their objective is quite different. Social corrections are certainly necessary, even for post-capitalists, but they want to fundamentally change the capitalist economic system. The economy has to be embedded in society and therefore reforms will not stop before capitalism has been defeated.

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

./english/527.txt:42:Again, many contradictions have to be outlined. The Brazilian president Lula surely was as present in Porto Alegre as Chavez was in Caracas. One could even argue that the two first WSF have contributed to have him elected. And why is money from Chavez a problem, when no questions have been put on funding by Petrobras (Brazilian petroleum corporation) and money has been accepted from the Ford Foundation? Where should the autonomous civil society find the millions of Dollars that the organisation of a world event inevitably costs?

./english/527.txt:48:The argument that movements should only talk with governments and parties of the left is not always acceptable, since governments, necessarily, are holding power. It is ‘power over’, as Jai Sen observes, and not ‘power to’, the power that civil society wants to have. The Forum has to try to dismantle power relations and offer alternatives. In this context the example of the European Social Forum in London is mentioned, where one political party of the left apparently dominated.

./english/527.txt:50:These differences between the advocates of civil society and the politically minded participants would be easier to understand if there were no power relations within the forum. The WSF has created its own elite, people who decide were and when to meet, that are part of the secretariat or the international council, people that do not have to queue and wait two hours in order to register for the forum, people that live in expensive hotels and know what is good for the ordinary activist. One might suspect some horizontalists to just defend their own interests and power. Those who want to avoid any hierarchy and are against any political influence, often just try to perpetuate existing and informal power relations.

./english/527.txt:58:One point seems to be beyond controversy. The objectives of the many participants of the forum are not equal and some seem to be defenders of a more consistent neoliberalism instead of being against it. It remains an open question whether all are really for radical democracy. Some participants seem to think that all problems can be solved by giving a more important role to civil society. Sometimes, one even starts to wonder whether all are really for ‘another world’. Just think of all the movements that joined Lula – and six months later the World Bank – to defend the millennium goals against poverty. These NGOs now accept an air ticket tax, a consumption tax without any structural impact on redistribution or on ecology. These measures cannot even be called neokeynesian. Or think of the NGOs that march against the WTO. Some of them are not against free trade but want ‘real free trade’ and are marching against the interests of poor countries.

./english/527.txt:98:The discussion on the future of the movement has now started and that is a very positive result. However, binary dichotomies can better be avoided, like civil society vs the state, local vs global action, etc. The main challenge consists in finding the right way of linking different levels and different agents. There are no political levels or agents that can be neglected. A political dialogue does not conflict with the autonomy of movements. We should not fall into the trap that neoliberal discourses are setting for us. WSF could usefully consult the feminist movement that has some experience with the re-invention of democracy. For the WSF, gender is a transversal issue, though women, their experiences and their issues are under-represented. Concerning issues as pluralism and diversity, their contribution could be very useful.

./english/529.txt:6:The Polycentric World Social Forum was planned to be held simultaneously in Karachi, Pakistan, Caracas, Venezuela and Bamako, Mali, but Karachi had to be postponed following the disastrous October earthquake in northern Pakistan, while the other two went ahead. I’ve just returned home from this momentous gathering and my experience at the WSF Karachi is now melding together into a big blur, from which I can extract some overall impressions. The big blurry picture is of course, interspersed with a clearer myriad of details, many of which warm the heart and inspire. With a theme slogan of "Another World is Possible," energetic, exuberant, flamboyant, and celebratory are the predominant adjectives which come to mind to describe the event. It was a very joyous meeting. There was an overall impression of gender balance, and although there’s no doubt that the event attracted the most progressive women in Pakistani society, there was also wide representation from rural and tribal women. Women spoke out freely and worked together with men. Men participated in women’s forums, women and men marched together, and there was gender balance in the facilitation of meetings.

./english/532.txt:29:The chief purpose of this article is not to answer these questions by examining the ‘self-evident’ truths of open source production. Such studies are already being carried out in forums like Oekunux [http://www.oekonux.de]; indeed, in this issue of Mute, Gilberto Camara, Director for Earth Observation at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, publishes research that challenges some key tenets of the FLOSS model. His research exposes the possibility that, in many cases, FLOSS does not innovate significantly original software, or sustain projects outside of corporate or large scale academic involvement. Instead this article seeks to address the intense political expectation around open organisation among diverse elements of the diffuse activist organisations which, post-Seattle, have been loosely referred to as ‘the social movement’ or ‘social movements’. In referring to the social movement, this article concerns itself primarily with groups such as People’s Global Action, Indymedia, Euraction Hub and other such non-hierarchised collectives; it does not have in mind more traditionally structured organisations like the Social Forums, Globalise Resistance or so-called ‘civil society’ NGOs.

./english/532.txt:126:[13] Massimo De Angelis, ‘From Movement to Society’, in The Commoner, August 2001, [http://www.commoner.org.uk/01-3groundzero.htm]

./english/534.txt:6:As has happened every year for the last six years, at the end of January people from around the world gather in the World Social Forum (WSF) under the slogan "Another World is Possible." The goal of the forum is to provide a space for social movements and civil society to reflect and strategize on ways to confront neoliberalism and militarism.

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

./english/534.txt:22:For Venezuela, having the forum in their country was an excellent opportunity to both exchange experiences with others, as well as, build international understanding and solidarity for the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela does not historically have a strong civil society, but the Chavez's government appears to have provided political space for its significant growth. One fourth of the 2000 panels in Caracas were organized by Venezuelan organizations.

./english/534.txt:36:Although an expression of civil society, the forum could not succeed without external support. While the forum also received state and municipal funding in Porto Alegre, due to the polarizing nature of the Chavez government this collaboration became even more overtly apparent and controversial in Caracas. Some argued that the forum should return to its original vision of providing non-governmental alternatives, while others maintained that governments are not inherently good, nor evil, but value neutral, and that Chavez demonstrates how state structures can be used to advance goals of social justice. Who should be responsible for organising and administering an enormous event continues to be a pressing issue.

./english/534.txt:44:Civil society has become empowered and revitalized with new ideas. Local and thematic forums are popping up all over the world. Even in the United States, the fundamentally subversive notion of organizing a social forum has taken hold and led activists to rethink, fundamentally, how to organize civil society. As Chavez noted, the goals of social justice expressed at the WSF are well on their way to being the dominant discourse in the world, and those who advocate putting capital before people will soon be seen as the dissidents.

./english/535.txt:18:But, representatives at the WSF from NGO’s working within Haiti see things differently. According to a report from one workshop, anti-Aristide participants disrupted a question and answer period by refusing to give up the microphone as they attacked the Aristide government as being illegitimate. Some of these NGO’s receive funding from conservative US interests (with ties to the CIA) and are seen as undermining legitimate solidarity efforts both in Haiti and at the WSF. There is a clear conflict of interest between the NGO participants who attempt to foster good relations with the (illegitimate) Haitian government and those from grassroots organizations who oppose the coup and are struggling to build a more just society.

./english/535.txt:20:The organizers of the WSF provided some statistical information from last year’s forum in Porto Alegre to help us better understand who participates in the forum and why. They found that 49.8% of the people at the WSF said the reason they attended was for the exchange of experience among the participants. 47.9% attended because they wanted to contribute towards a fairer society. 42.4% came for the democratic debate of ideas and 20.6% came to contribute towards the formulation of alternative proposals to the neoliberal model.

./english/535.txt:22:A large percentage of participants (88.1%) agreed that organized civil society should take part in formulating governmental policies (but 3.4% of participants disagreed and a surprising 8.5% were indifferent). 87.4% of participants believe that organized civil society should criticize and pressure government to change policies. But, who are the 4.2% of the participants who disagree with that statement?

./english/535.txt:28:When asked about what process should be used for building “the other possible world” the WSF talks about, 90.4% said the road should include strengthening the mobilization of civil society on the global, continental, national, and local level. 72.3% said the path to building “the other possible world” should include the democratization of governments, 59.3% said it should include direct action, 59.2% said it should include the democratization of the multilateral organizations (the UN, WTO, World Bank, IMF), and 13.5% believe the road should include direct action with the use of force.

./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/548.txt:8:From these humble beginnings, this alternative annual meeting called the World Social Forum (WSF) has grown into the world’s largest meeting of civil society. Stretching for several kilometers along the open spaces of Porto Alegre’s Guaiba riverfront, from January 26-31 of this year 155,000 participants from 135 countries joined together in 2500 activities in 11 Thematic Terrains under the southern hemisphere’s summer sun.

./english/548.txt:15:Activists who have been involved in the organization of social forums in North America gathered to share their experiences and to chart directions for future action. Bringing a model of mobilizing civil society from the south to the heart of the empire is a fundamentally subversive and profoundly radical activity. It is precisely this attempt to smash capitalism, one organizer noted, that makes it so hard to organize a social forum in the United States. Nevertheless, activists hope to hold a United States Social Forum during the summer of 2006.

./english/548.txt:24:Placing elected political officials at the middle of WSF discourse is rather ironic given that the forum began explicitly as a gathering of civil society that discarded state-centered solutions to social problems. Many activists, however, are rethinking the relationship between social movements and political parties. This has led back to an emphasis on the importance of the state in achieving fundamental social changes.

./english/548.txt:26:Next year the World Social Forum moves to a decentralized model with regional meetings planned for Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. A hemispheric Americas Social Forum is scheduled to take place the last week of January in Venezuela. In 2007, plans call for another global meeting of civil society–this time in Africa.

./english/549.txt:4:Do you remember that some time ago the New York Times named global civil society 'the World's Second Superpower'?

./english/549.txt:6:Many are those of us who have played roles in the successful processes such as the Ottawa mine ban convention, setting a stop to the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) and in the process leading to the ratification of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2003. Most recently, the Nobel Prize Committee renewed their recognition of civil society by awarding Wangari Maathai the Nobel Peace Prize (2004).

./english/549.txt:8:But nominations, power and awards bring with them expectations and responsibility. When speaking of the abstract concept of 'global civil society' a very concrete space within the 'global civil society' comes to mind: I think of course of the World Social Forum process, a process that has emerged into the largest self-formed, autonomous and spontaneous gathering of civil society to date.

./english/549.txt:21:One way is to listen to the issues raised within the WSF process. The Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis (Ibase) in Rio de Janeiro have collected some statistics on events organised at the WSF III and they list over 80 events organised on the issue of water alone. In an IPS interview with Joseph Stiglitz the three most visible issues raised at WSF IV were listed as a call for a solution to the debt problem, an implementation of a tax on currency transactions and concern about the privatisation process in the world and notably those concerning water. During the WSF IV, Ibase carried out a survey inquiring about the WSF participats' priorities in 'building another world', which resulted in the listing of education and water as two prime issues of civil society organisations.

./english/549.txt:23:So, what if global civil society started to operate and organise according to a commonly agreed framework? Could we repeat the successes of the campaigns against an MAI and for the ratification of the convention of ban of land mines and the International Criminal Court?

./english/549.txt:45:Earlier on, I mentioned 'responsibility' and 'expectations', adjectives accompanying success. Doesn't global civil society, the world's second superpower, owe to itself to launch concrete action around these themes?

./english/549.txt:52:Maybe the persons at the meeting sketched in the International Herald Tribune do not know what to do, how to get from words to action. Maybe it is up to us, as participants of global civil society, and as nominated second superpower in the world, to take action?

./english/553.txt:13:A wake-up call to civil society and trade unions

./english/553.txt:120:While the Commission uses REACH as a positive example, NGOs argue that, on the contrary, REACH demonstrates how the lobbying activities of the chemical industry have undermined legislation that was designed to protect people and the environment.[4] It was the European business lobby that called on non-European companies to intervene as well. Interestingly, the European Parliament found that large TNCs exporting a few bulk chemicals would mostly bear the costs.[5] But clearly the pressure of the giant corporate lobby industry is not sufficient for the Commission; in future the Commission will call in non-EU corporate interests to take part in the decision-making process. The Commission wants to be more transparent (to foreign business, not to its own civil society) and wants to listen to foreign corporate grievances before making decisions “affecting the market” – decisions such as those on environment, health or social regulations. This will make the EU even more undemocratic. Finally, the Commission also wants to equip people for change. The Commission is aware that if it wants ambitious agreements serving EU corporate interests, then it will also have to offer something in return. The Commission is prepared to open up sensitive sectors of the EU economy while admitting this will bring about “transformations which are disruptive to some in the EU”.

./english/553.txt:181:3. Challenges for civil society and trade unions in Europe

./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/565.txt:179:Can one believe a society to implement equality, when it relies on such

./english/565.txt:241:society. Squatting the empties is a form of direct-action against

./english/565.txt:283:society, free software focusing on public empowerment through

./english/565.txt:581:sphere, by far. We still live in a patriarchal society, where power and

./english/565.txt:650:society.

./english/571.txt:15:The World Social Forum is a space that, according to its Charter of Principles, “brings together and interlinks only organizations and movements of civil society from all the countries in the world” (3). The Charter was drafted by the Brazilian Organizing Committee soon after the first WSF meeting and approved with modifications by the WSF International Council in June 2001 in São Paulo. It has achieved a quasi-constitutional status within the WSF process, even if its authority has occasionally been challenged.

./english/571.txt:41:Whose Civil Society?

./english/571.txt:43:The World Social Forum has been defined as a civil society event, but there exists a considereable debate on how the limits of this civil society should be defined. Who gets in, and who stays out? If the World Social Forum is a counter-event to the World Economic Forum, in 2004 Mumbai Resistance was the counter-event’s counter-event. Mumbai Resistance was conceived as a “truly anti-imperialist” parallel event that took place next to the World Social Forum venue in Mumbai. One of the concerns of the originators of Mumbai Resistance was that the WSF is not open to “all forms of struggle”, referring to the rule, expressed in Article 9 of the Charter of Principles, that military organizations cannot participate in the WSF (9).

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

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

./english/571.txt:65:It is clear that the WSF forms a loosely defined party of opinion. “We oppose neoliberalism, imperialism and violence in all their forms.” “Another world is possible.” The idea of the WSF is clearly not, however, to create a well-defined political programme, compete in elections, or take over states. The question is, is it possible to do anything else than merely organise a pluralist space for meetings, discussions and festivities? Can transnational civil society organisations and movements accomplish anything efficacious to bring about “another world”? This question may also be detached from the abstract possibility of constructing a global party in some unspecified sense. For now, at least, the focus could perhaps be on how different kinds of transnational political actors and alliances could be empowered to contribute to democratic transformations of our world.

./english/571.txt:67:We believe it is important that concrete strategies of change will emerge from within the space (or movement) of the WSF. Global democratic changes are not possible without transformist global political movements, which must consist of not only civic actors but at least in some point also of states. Any transformation requires regulation also in the form of international – and later perhaps global – law. Currently, only states can create and change international law. Whatever form global civil society will assume, including the possibility of replacing the term “civil society” with something much more accurate and imaginative, it can only achieve transformations by making interventions in more traditional-sounding processes, with the aim of creating new forums of deliberation, agenda-setting and decision-making. To the extent that the empowerment of global movements will be based on well-articulated programmatic visions, they may also constitute steps toward world political parties.

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

./english/571.txt:103:Patomäki, Heikki and Teivo Teivainen: (2004b) ‘The World Social Forum: An Open Space or a Movement of Movements?”, Theory, Culture & SocietyVol. 21, No. 5, pp. 145-154.

./english/574.txt:13:The organisational methods of the Fifth World Forum itself - the way in which the activities of the forum were decided, the spatial and political relationship between the different seminars, workshops and debates during the five days of the Forum, the way the food, the waste and the architecture of the Forum was organised according to the principles of the society we are trying to create, the 35,000 strong Youth Camp at the centre of the Forum’s riverside encampment – all provided glimpses of an answer. These innovations showed that the organisers of the WSF are trying to create a closer, more directly supportive and catalytic relationship with the campaigning movements and initiatives which are the source of the Forums extraordinary energy.

./english/576.txt:29:"Maybe if I were younger," a veteran activist commented to me, "I could deal with the heat." The late-January summer in Porto Alegre was unrelenting. Brazilians wandering the sweltering expanse of tented workshop areas sported bare chests, Bermuda shorts, and skirts, treating the Forum like a beach. For those less acclimated, a new morning might bring a fresh willingness to believe that the seeds of a new society were being planted in the manifold meetings of the day. But an afternoon of solar radiation had a way of intensifying one's ambivalence about whether it was all worthwhile.

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

./english/579.txt:40:The coming elections can prove to be a turning point not because the BJP makes a qualitative leap forward in its individual tally but because the Congress may collapse as a national party. Programmatically, it is in all key respects a softer version of the BJP but without its powerful cadre base (courtesy of the RSS), or its aggressive policy of transforming (through major personnel changes) all governing institutions and structures it can lay its hands on whether in civil society or in the state apparatuses at Central and provincial levels, or its determination to eventually bring about a Hindu Rashtra. Socially, the Congress, as evidenced by the recent assembly elections, is losing its last, hitherto stable base – the tribals in central India – to the BJP. For a full five decades after independence, every single breakaway from the Congress, even when led by leaders whose national stature had been forged in the great freedom struggle before 1947, quickly faded into total oblivion. Since 1997, two such breakaways, the Trinamul Congress of West Bengal and then the National Congress Party of Maharashtra, have stabilized as major regional parties not in the least afraid to hobnob with the BJP.

./english/579.txt:48:One of the central purposes of the Indian organizers of the WSF was that it should stimulate the further development of an ‘anti-fascist front’ nationally against the Sangh/BJP. The intent here is not an electoral bloc but the formation of a long term alliance of left parties and their mass fronts with the big social movements and a range of progressive NGOs to collectively mobilise in civil society. Has the Asian Social Forum at Hyderabad in December 2002 and WSF 2004 helped bring these forces together? Mutual suspicions and tensions remain within the social movements and parties as well as between them. There has been the constant jockeying for public representation in the ‘star system’ that is a seemingly unavoidable aspect of the Social Forum process. There are the inevitable fears about manipulation and doubts about ulterior motives. One of the important issues thrown up by the WSFs is whether it might not be better for parties to participate openly as such instead of informally exercising behind-the-scenes their substantial influence as they now do whether it is the PT in Brazil or the CPM and CPI in India.

./english/579.txt:56:Rather than maintain the hectic pace of a WSF every year which drains the time and energy of too many activists away from their basic areas of implantation and concern, it would be much better after the 5th WSF in Porto Alegre next year to schedule WSFs for every second or even third year. This would allow for holding more forums at intermediate (city, provincial, national and regional) levels. The time has surely also come to take a breather and synthesise the experiences and lessons of the major local, national, continental and global forums that have so far been held.(10) The one great lacuna in the Social Forum project is the failure to extend it to North America, particularly the US. Even at the WSFs, American participation has always been disproportionately much smaller than the size and importance of the progressive sectors of American society has warranted. This insularity must be broken.

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

./english/579.txt:67:4. A fuller treatment of the Indian economy’s basic character is to be found in my “India’s New Right”, May/June 2001 issue of the New Left Review. A booming stock market provides further reassurances to an Indian elite that includes the misnamed ‘middle class’, which far from being a median category comprises the top 10 to 15 percent of Indian society. Of the Rs.100,000 crores that went into the secondary market in 2003, only Rs. 2000 crores was new investment in new ventures.

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

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

./english/594.txt:18:DEPRESSION VS HOPE: Even within the WSF there were those who talked of another world, but could not imagine such a world. The speaker from the European Green party, who spoke at the large meeting on parties and social movements, could not imagine any other form of political party other than one which “had to compromise” inside parliament. But at the smaller meeting on “Life after capitalism” speakers discussed how we could organise society in a completely different manner from today.

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

./english/598.txt:42:In this way the social forums, whether internationally or locally, are experimenting (not always successfully, it must be said) with new ways of integrating the particular - ie, demands and campaigns on single issues - with the universal - the wider effort to bring about a radical transformation of the whole of society. Historically, this was exclusively the function of the political party.

./english/605.txt:10:This Forum has definitely joined the agenda of struggle against neoliberalism with the struggle against militarization and the empire: to the delegates present in Mumbai, the struggle against poverty and exclusion resulting from capitalist globalization is inseparable from the struggle against war and imperialism. But this Forum also included issues before ignored or put aside in the global movement´s agenda, such as the struggle against cast discrimination, which keeps 200 million Indians in the edge of society and claims a rethink about the problem of racism, and the struggle against the combined effects of communalism, patriarchalism and religious fundamentalism – increased by the present path of the imperial power and the fundamentalist hindu government in New Delhi.

./english/605.txt:19:The rural population, which represents 75% of the 1,027 billion Indians registered in 2001, flow massively to Mumbai. The environment is totally spoiled and the air has lots of dust and pollution just a few hundred meters away from the sea. If one doesn´t take the full trains, chaotic traffic makes a journey from center to the city´s edge take two hours. But, at the same time, Mumbai is the only global metropolis in India. As puts Mila Kahlon, “it is doubtlessly the most prosperous city in India, the capital for finances and managers. More than half of the national income tax come from there. It is also the most corrupted city in the country: most of the dirty money in circulation meet the sources there. Bombay has more millionaires than every great Indian cities together. 90% of Indian bank transactions are made in Mumbai as well as 80% of the pension funds in the country are invested in the city; a fancy apartment may cost 2 million dollars. The city has adhered to speculation, lottery, horse race and cricket. The advertising experts earn more than the doctors in the city where “society of spectacle” is not far away from the United States. It attracts the best of the world talents, multinational giants, investors, artist and intellectuals. The Bollywood fireworks are therefore irresistible. Bombay owns the biggest cinematographic industry in the world and every Indian who wants to make a career settles there”. (Une obsession nommée Bombay, Le Monde diplomatique, January 2004).

./english/605.txt:21:Mumbai is a microcosmos from India, surely the mos diverse society in the world. A society spread in population of every color, who speak 18 official languages, and 1 600 languages and dialects. The Forum had to adopt English as a language in the great events (with translation into five other Indian languages and also the foreign languages). That was so because the indo-european-speaking population (hindi, spoken by only 20% of the Indians, marathi, dominant in Mumbai region, and Bengali) is not understood by ones who speak Dravidian languages and vice-versa.

./english/605.txt:30:The most visible conflicts in Indian society come from the complex system of casts associated to Hinduism – put very plainly, it is believed that if an individual follows the duties of his cast, that increases the chances of rebirthing in a superior cast and in better circumstances. The situation is particularly unsustainable for more than 200 million dalits (formerly known as “untouchable”) who integrate the inferior cast. They are discriminated in every circuit of the society and are spread in dozens of different movements.

./english/605.txt:32:Patriarchy strongly influences situation of the women. From dowry to abortion of female fetus , from widow-burning to double work journey, the oppression of women affects half population. In a society where the majority of weddings are arranged by families, autonomy conquer is still a difficult perspective for most of the women.

./english/605.txt:104:But the consolidation regional forums must still overcome several obstacles. It is not enough that a group of entities from a certain area have good will or even material resources for making viable and stable a Regional Forum process. The real processes flow through central countries in each region, in which the structure of civil society is more solid and the political situation is more cozy. The search of alternative ways may here be a disaster. Besides, the regions (almost) never are continents in the geographic sense – for example, if there is a more stable identity of the Europe (Western) or even America (Latin), there are lots of Asias, far beyond the Indian subcontinent, regions which must find their own tracks. We must find a difficult balance between resisting to substitutivism (which could take us to passivity) and effectively support the most fruitful initiatives.

./english/611.txt:16:At last years WSF, Arundhati Roy worried that to have the events in India would enable Indias fundamentalist Hindu elites to put a pretty face on the society, aiding their attempts to rise to horrific domination. After WSF 4, I havent heard any comment on this possibility. But I fear that Roy may have been right.

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

./english/625.txt:4:Overall, it was a people’s forum; that is how the World Social Forum 2004, in India, could best be described. Over 30,000 of the participants were dalits, the poorest of an impoverished society, the untouchables excluded even from India’s rigid caste system. Meanwhile, Mumbai, the city of 14 million inhabitants that hosted the activities, is the most developed in India, and yet poverty is everywhere: on the streets, in the people, and in their homes.

./english/634.txt:4:The World Social Forum (WSF) Charter of Principles emphasizes that the WSF offers a space for anti-neoliberal capitalist globalization forces to assemble and discuss, that the WSF ‘does not constitute a locus of power to be disputed by the participants in its meetings’ nor ‘a body representing the world civil society.’ My overall impression of the third WSF annual meeting (World Social Forum website: www.worldsocialforum.org ) in Brazil this past January 2003 is that it fulfilled very well its role of offering such a space and marked a distinct but small advance over the previous two such assemblies, with several important “triumphs.”

./english/634.txt:14:Aside from numbers and mega-male events (which were not as prevalent as Klein makes out, although the general impression is that women were less well represented than the previous year—an ominous sign!), the atmosphere at Porto Alegre III was electrifying – 5 days of multi-ethnic, multi-racial, internationalism in a country bubbling over with hope after the overwhelming electoral victory of a veritable “working-class hero” to Brazil’s presidency (Lula). Social analyst Peter Waterman has given the flavor of Porto Alegre III in this personal commentary: “[I was inspired by the] energetic and innovative social protest, and original analyses of the local-national-global dialectic in Argentina…by the Kidz in the Kamp who were discussing under a tree, and with informal translation, how to ensure that the emancipatory and critical forces have more impact on the Forum process…by the increasing number of compañer@s, of various ages, identities, movements and sexual orientations, who believe that, in the construction of a meaningfully civil global society, transparency is not only the best policy but the only one” (Waterman, “First

./english/634.txt:31:First, a growing trend in the discussion of alternatives has been whether all of capitalism should be jettisoned and a new type of economy and society introduced—participatory, transparent, pluralist, socialist in the anti-Stalinist humanist sense—or whether capitalism should be radically reformed (a kind of resurrection of the social democrats in Europe and “liberals” in North America, who have until now been lining up with neoliberalism). In Porto Alegre III the participatory socialist position seemed stronger, much stronger, according to my informants, than at Porto Alegre II. People simply can’t find examples of capitalism reforming itself in any lasting way. In other words, reforms come and go, but capitalism storms ahead. In most parts of the world reforms are crushed by capitalism or its military forces, as Latin Americans have noticed for decades. Argentina’s historic Mothers of the May Plaza have concluded: “Another world is possible, only with revolution and socialism.”

./english/636.txt:22:"I was not elected by the financial markets, and I was not elected by the powerful economic interests . . . I was elected through the high level of consciousness of Brazilian society," Lula told the crowd in Porto Alegre.

./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/643.txt:10:The "older" and "younger" generations would not have met and combined to form a global civil society if it werent for Porto Alegre.

./english/644.txt:6:As politicians and corporate executives met at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a very different meeting took place in the city of Porto Alegre under the slogan "Another World is Possible." The third World Social Forum (WSF) brought over 100,000 people to Brazil. Participants from all sectors of civil society--trade unions, community organizations, womens groups, indigenous peoples, students, and environmentalists--discussed and debated proposals for how build and mobilize an effective movement to fight corporate globalization.

./english/645.txt:45:Porto Alegre witnessed a new kind of socialism, which has come to mean society first. The bad guys were the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the multinationals that put markets first.

./english/646.txt:10:Earlier attempts to democratise global power, such as the NIEO project, tended to see the problem more in terms of inter-state relations. But now, instead of asking that a particular ‘third world’ state be given more decision-making power in global affairs, today’s activists are beginning to seek more power in civil society groups that confront both governmental and corporate power all over the world. This trend holds many promising aspects. But we may need political structures that ‘civil society’, as it is generally conceived, is unlikely to deliver.

./english/646.txt:14:Since the late 1980s, many of the most visible civil society gatherings have been explicitly, and often antagonistically, related to events of the global elite: meetings of the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation (WTO), including the latter’s predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The battle in Seattle during the WTO meeting in December 1999 boosted local, transnational and global protest against undemocratic sites of global power; spectacular demonstrations from Okinawa to Goteborg and Genoa have become prominent models of critical civil society organising. In most, the main focus has been against something. However, concrete initiatives for transformation are more likely to emerge from proactive meetings.

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

./english/646.txt:24:Calls for a worldwide civil society event emerged in early 2000. A few individuals played a key role. First formulations of the idea are generally attributed to Oded Grajew, coordinator of the Brazilian Business Association for Citizenship (CIVES).

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

./english/646.txt:34:Events conceived in transnational contexts often have relatively weak roots in their own locality. This was never the case in the WSF of Porto Alegre. Porto Alegre, the capital of the Rio Grande do Sul state in southern Brazil, is one of the most important strongholds of the Workers Party. Already during Brazil’s military rule, the city was a centre of resistance, with energetic neighbourhood associations. Founded in 1980, the PT has deep roots in these associations, trade unions, Catholic organisations, women’s movements and other parts of a vibrant Brazilian civil society.

./english/646.txt:44:Naomi Klein has characterised the structure of he first World Social Forum as “so opaque that it was nearly impossible to figure out how decisions were made”. Similar critical remarks have been raised by many others in every annual edition of the WSF event. According to the WSF Charter of Principles the forum “does not constitute a locus of power to be disputed by the participants”. Nevertheless, disputes of power do exist. Formal decision-making power has been mainly in the hands of the Organising Committee (OC), consisting of the Central Trade Union Confederation CUT (Central Única dos Trabalhadores), the MST and six smaller Brazilian civil society organisations. In terms of sheer numbers of affiliates, there is a huge difference between the two big ones and the others.

./english/646.txt:106:George Monbiot has suggested that the WSF process could contribute to the building of a “world parliament in exile”. Some others who locate the WSF more explicitly in the historical traditions of socialist movements have envisaged it as an “opposition party” or “radical international”. From this perspective, it is particularly important to modify its organisational design and the way its decision-making structure functions. The fear of many is that the politicisation involved in such a process could destroy the forum as a relatively neutral space that facilitates encounters between different kinds of civil society actors.

./english/646.txt:126:Limits of a pure civil society

./english/646.txt:128:According to its Charter of Principles, the WSF is “a plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental and non-party context”. Even if the Brazilian media often portrays its events as almost directly organised by the PT, the party does not formally belong to the Organising Committee. Its importance stems from the fact that many of the key civil society organisations involved are somehow related to or sympathetic towards it, and that it controls the hosting municipal government. After the elections of 2002 it now controls the federal government.

./english/651.txt:10:Concrete proposals are being demanded of this movement that contests the reigning world (dis)order. It first and most fundamental response is to build a new outlook, a new agenda. This will deny legitimacy to the economist priorities imposed by the logic of economic and financial globalization by making proposals that simply correct its social evils. We are committed to building a social, democratic and sustainable approach to the economy and to globalization which will serve to foster human freedom and dignity. No to the absolute primacy of trade and the market! The need we face is to radicalize the call for human rights for all as the fundamental priority capable of conveying the new consciousness of mankind. Breaking down the separation between economy and society, between economy and nature, between nature and society, these are tasks central to building a global agenda capable of promoting planetary citizenship.

./english/651.txt:12:The World Social Forum, as one of the pillars in the construction of a new global agenda, is beginning to make its contribution. The ample participation in WSFII - upwards of 15,000 delegates from more than 5,000 civil society organizations in over 130 countries, in addition to 35,000-plus spectator-participants - is indicative of its potential. We have embarked on an extensive mapping of issues, analyses and proposals, and of the collective subjects who embrace them, in the most diverse domains of human activity. We are starting to recognize who we are, what we do and how we act.

./english/654.txt:9:But this increase is even more meaningful if we consider the increase in the number of delegates, that is to say, the number of people registered in the Forum as representatives of entities and movements of the civil society: they went from 4,000 in 2001 to 15,000 in 2002, representing 4,909 organizations from 131 countries. In fact, what attracted so many delegates were the innovative characteristics of the Forum: its pluralistic and non-directive character, which unifies while respecting diversity; its openness to all those who want to participate - except representatives of governments, political parties and military organizations; and the fact of being an initiative of the civil society for the civil society, that created a new meeting place - the first and may be the only one of this kind in a worldwide level - without the control of any governments, movements, parties or national or international institutions which dispute political power.

./english/658.txt:19:But it is not just a question of numbers and prices (although they do, after all, reflect a certain reality). It is true that this year, the participation of North Americans was significant (more than 400 delegates), but the participation of civil-society actors, grassroots movements, and people from other regions and of different cultures was still very limited.

./english/671.txt:4:Rather than opposing the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre to the World Economic Forum in New York, it is more revealing to imagine it as the distant offspring of the historic Bandung Conference that took place in Indonesia in 1955. Both were conceived as attempts to counter the dominant world order: colonialism and the oppressive Cold War binary in the case of Bandung, and the rule of capitalist globalization in that of Porto Alegre. The differences, however, are immediately apparent. On one hand the Bandung Conference, which brought together leaders primarily from Asia and Africa, revealed in a dramatic way the racial dimension of the colonial and Cold War world order, which Richard Wright famously described as being divided by the colour curtain. Porto Alegre, in contrast, was a predominantly white event. There were relatively few participants from Asia and Africa, and the racial differences of the Americas were dramatically underrepresented. This points toward a continuing task facing those gathered at Porto Alegre: to globalize further the movements, both within each society and across the worlda project in which the Forum is merely one step. On the other hand, whereas Bandung was conducted by a small group of national political leaders and representatives, Porto Alegre was populated by a swarming multitude and a network of movements. This multitude of protagonists is the great novelty of the World Social Forum, and central to the hope it offers for the future.