./english/42.txt:28:The other detainees went to the join the demonstration and shouted paroles. Other press statements were given and after another half an hour we made a short rally to the busses to go back to the ESF venue.
./english/42.txt:55:Outside of the prison the visitors gave statements to the media. The second biggest Greek newspaper reported the next day under the title "Representatives of the movements visited the accused" and "The Europe of support awoke".
./english/44.txt:1:REPORTS, STATEMENTS AND CALLS FOR COMMON ACTION
./english/44.txt:101:In this ESF, more than 40 organisations shared their struggles against the commodification of common goods and the privatisation of public services, against the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) and the Bolkestein Directive and against the neoliberal policies of the EU, national and local governments. From here with the “Athens statement” we launch the European Network for Public Services. We will meet on 27th October 2006 in Geneva in order to launch a European Day of mobilization to defend and relaunch Public Services in Europe aiming at building the first European Forum of Social movements for Public Services in 2007.
./english/45.txt:135:All this scenario is taking place in a "new" form of psychiatry which claims to have evolved to a bio-psycho-social level of analysis. This is an absurd statement which is a clever manoeuvre. Psychiatry was bio-psycho-social in the past, and the Holocaust is the proof of this: homosexual, Jews, and all the "unfits" who were killed by psychiatrist
./english/54.txt:236:suggested was a vague general statement of principles and a calendar of
./english/197.txt:21:My postulate about forums is that travelling somewhere for three or four days ought to be intellectually and politically profitable both to the person making the investment and to the movement itself. If this statement is valid, then it should logically follow that our time would be best spent in seminars and workshops genuinely oriented towards gaining the closest possible knowledge of our adversaries and to defining the collective strategies and actions most likely to make their lives miserable. As an out of fashion 19th century political philosopher might have said, `We have identified and interpreted the targets: the point, however, is to hit them.
./english/197.txt:29:One of the most effective actions in decades was the worldwide protest on 15 February 2003 against the American war in Iraq. Possibly because we weren't actually able to stop the war (no one could have done that), people may have classed the day as a `failure' and not reflected enough on its huge significance-15 February was in fact a historic first. During the Vietnam War, thanks to arduous months of planning and expensive transatlantic phone calls, it was occasionally possible to stage simultaneous demos in Europe and the US, but never anything on the scale of 15 February. In 2003 it wasn't just Europeans and North Americans, but Latin Americans, Africans, Asians, Australians, citizens of many Muslim countries-every continent was involved, including Antarctica, where a scientific mission took part. This unified, organised outpouring of protest caused a reluctant New York Times to refer to the peace movement as `the second superpower', even if that statement (like much else of what one can read in the New York Times) turned out to be not quite true. We must now try to mobilise the same kind of strength and unity in the name of global justice and put them on the front page.
./english/199.txt:7:The third ESF has officially ended, but the barrage of attacks and counter-attacks around the autonomous actions and arrests continues to rage. The simmering conflict between the horizonal and verticals became fully visible when a group of activists from Beyond ESF, including the Wombles and many others, rushed the stage during an anti-Racism plenary Saturday night to denounce Ken Livingstone and the lack of democracy within the forum. Tensions grew after several activists were arrested on the way out, and resurfaced yet again when a highly respected Indymedia activist, who happened to have also played a key role in NOMAD and the broader ESF process, was dragged away by police after trying to make a statement following the march on Sunday afternoon. Things have since come to a boil as SWP members, the mayor's allies, and others dismiss such direct actions as violent, anti-democratic, and even racist, while their critics continue to defend the right to take direct action to publicly voice their concerns. Debates once pitting activists against mainstream politicians and bureaucrats in the WTO, World Bank, and IMF now rage within the very heart of the Global Justice Movement itself.
./english/199.txt:33:Unfortunately, rather than accept the basic legitimacy of direct action to make publicly visible contradictions and disagreements within the forum process, some ESF organizers have chosen instead to denounce the recent actions as undemocratic and, even more alarming, racist. Their discourse sounds eerily like past statements from James Wolfensohn, George Bush, or Tony Blair. Why do they support direct action only when directed against others? On the other hand, it is unfortunate that activists chose an anti-Racist workshop to make their demands heard on Saturday night, although this has more to do with the fact that Ken Livingstone was speaking than anything else. There is simply no justification for the arrests on Saturday night or Sunday, and even less for the subsequent campaign of delegitimation. Yet all is not lost. There is still plenty of time for ESF organizers to react more constructively, and begin to incorporate the lessons learned leading up the next forum in Athens . On the other side, before the inevitable calls for abandoning the forum come again, we might wait and see, recognizing that the politics of autonomous space allow us to remain true to our own values, forms, and practices, while tactically intervening within the official forum to move out from our radical ghettos and simultaneously spark constructive change.
./english/201.txt:39:Timms is not alone. Leading NGOs in Britain and many European activist groups involved in the process of organising the 2004 ESF have made similar complaints. In June, the Italian mobilising committee for the ESF published a statement about how the SWP had behaved at a European meeting: “They … were constantly unwilling to enter into real dialogue, tried to impose their own way and were often arrogant or used blackmail, repeatedly refusing to accept decisions and titles which had already been decided hours before. The result was that many of the other delegations were exasperated and were frequently compelled to raise their voices or in turn threaten to leave.”
./english/205.txt:34:The accumulated tensions would surface on the Saturday, when a group of around 300 people occupied the plenary session where Ken Livingstone and Lee Jasper were supposed to speak (the former, possibly warned by the police, had cancelled shortly before); carried out by groups such as the Wombles, the North-European Anticapitalist Network, Xarxa de Mobilitzacio Global, Reseau Intergalactique, Indymedia UK and Babels, the action stormed the platform, hung banners saying ‘Another World is for Sale', criticized the GLA's control over the event, and read statements from Babels and Indymedia UK, the latter on the seizing of its servers by the FBI.
./english/219.txt:25:The Assembly of the Social Movements supports the Indymedia global solidarity statement and condemns the seizure of the indymedia servers as an attack on free speech, press freedom, privacy and the right to communicate, and calls for a full investigation in the seizure of the Indymedia Servers.
./english/224.txt:19:These statements bring us to submit the following propositions for debate:
./english/226.txt:26:Many participants of the latest European meeting in London are in their statements now criticizing the dominance of certain political groups the ESF. At the same time the choice of Athens for the next location for the ESF is being criticised. The decision for Athens was a difficult one. But it confirmed at the same time the agreement which had already been reached in Bobigny to continue the movement of the ESF with the Forum in Greece. The debate in London on this issue expressed the following objection: the preparation of the ESF in Athens could be dominated by a quarrelling political coalition which would exclude the participation of a number of unions and peace- and student organisations. In this way the confirmation for Athens as a location is connected with the request to the Greek groups to find consensus and to broaden the basis of supporting organisations significantly.
./english/228.txt:3:A Statement on the 4th ESF
./english/238.txt:71:Because of this, and a number of serious problems over accommodation and reimbursement for volunteers, Babels issued a number of critical public statements and nearly pulled out of the London ESF on several occasions. That fact that Babels stepped back from the brink each time was partly due to the fact that reaching a consensus to walk away is far harder than agreeing to get involved, especially in a a network bringing together people from different backgrounds and perspectives. Moreover, the UK coordinators of Babels who agreed to participate in this year's ESF did so with their political eyes wide open. The reality is that the Social Forums – and especially the ESF – are not politically ‘pure' spaces where everyone works together in mutual respect and harmony. They are instead political battlegrounds where self-interested factions fight for leadership and control and are met with resistance from those opposed to vanguardism. Babels thus currently accepts that the innovations and alternatives being generated by projects like itself and and Nomad come not only through the annual process of organising the ESF and WSF, but also in struggle against those within them. And whatever the shortcomings of the organisation of this year's ESF, we still managed to gain an enormous amount of knowledge and experience that we will now share with future processes, particularly through adding value to the Lexicon and Sitprep projects. Most importantly, pulling out would have stopped the ESF from taking place – this was not a decision that Babels alone should have the power or right to make.
./english/241.txt:82:Statement document:
./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:13:Having taken part for two years of the culture working groups of both the Youth Camp and the WSF, and also following the discussion in relation to the Brazilian Social Forum , I have come to be annoyed by this: too many grand statements on the ‘whats’ and ‘whys’ (some of which I have co-written myself!), and very little to be said on the ‘hows’. It is to the achievements and shortcomings of some of the ‘hows’ employed in 2003 that we shall turn, after shortly presenting the organisational structure behind them.
./english/248.txt:9:Bringing the European Social Forum (ESF) to London was never going to be an easy option. The Thatcher legacy, continued by Tony Blair, has made London one of the most thoroughly marketised, privatised and expensive cities in Europe . But when the ESF itself started to mirror these tendencies, many activists suspected something was up. Babels ( www.babels.org ), the international network of volunteer interpreters, used the occasion of a meeting where Ken Livingstone was scheduled to speak (he did not turn up) to deliver a statement accusing the Greater London Authority (GLA) of following “classical neo-liberal practices of organisation, management and service delivery… with the result that the Forum has been entirely dependent on the state.” Others, such as Anne Scargill and the network of women in mining or ex-mining areas in the UK , didn't even get that far: “No way could we afford the fees, transport and accommodation.”
./english/251.txt:54:2. The first interventions to be taken after the proposal is read should be points of clarification. Any questions people have about the proposal take priority over people who are offering their opinion about the proposal. After this, people who have problems with the proposal are first asked to explain their reservations before any further interventions are made in favour of the proposal. If it seems that the majority of the people are opposed, the proposal needs to be re-written entirely and a small group (made up of a few people who are opposed to the proposal and one of the original authors of the proposal) should leave the meeting to do this. The large meeting then carries on discussing another issue until the revised proposal can be put forward. If the majority of the people are for the proposal, those who have reservations need to state their positions to the entire meeting and if these changes are minor they can be made in a small group (again outside the large meeting, with all those who have reservations or amendments and some of the original authors of the proposal). If agreement cannot be reached, and the objections are not objections with fundamental moral implications, disagreement must be noted and the meeting proceeds to another issue. Every time a new proposal is reached, it must be re-presented to the large meeting for approval and/or further adjustments. Again, the adjustments themselves can be made outside the large meeting. There is usually no need for more than a few statements in favour of the given proposal except in as far as they clarify the proposal or are in direct response to the suggested amendments and reservations voiced. If it becomes apparent that there is enough opposition to the proposal for it to require extensive defence, a new proposal needs to be written. In this way a situation is avoided where long queues of people speak for and against a proposal that is not satisfactory to anyone or for a proposal to which no one is opposed.
./english/259.txt:13:In my last contribution to the CSGR Newsletter (issue 10, September 2003), I closed with reference to Henry David Thoreau’s statement that ‘[t]he thoughtful [wo]man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace’. The implication was that one dimension of a glocal radical politics that contests the moralities of capitalism, neoliberalism and militarism is that it is opening spaces for intellectual endeavours to contribute to, and be part of, activist praxis.
./english/266.txt:38:Check Form 10-K, for a comprehensive annual business and financial overview; Form 10-Q, for quarterly financial statements; Form 8-K, for reports on "material events or corporate changes," and Proxy Statements (Schedule 14A), which include executive compensation data.
./english/267.txt:21:Miltant research, as we understand it, lacks an object. We are aware of the paradoxical nature of this statement – if one does researchs, one performs research on something; if there is nothing to do research on, how can we talk about research?- and, at the same time, we are convinced that it is exactly this nature what gives [militant research] its power [potency; It. potenza]. To investgate without objectifying, implies to abandon the conventional image of the researcher. And that’s what the militant researcher aspires to.
./english/267.txt:39:We do not believe so. Political activism is also a practice with an object. As such, it has remained tied to a mode of instrumentality: one that connects itself to other experiences from a subjectivity always already constituted, with prior knowledge –the knowledges of strategy-, charged with universally valid, purely ideological statements. Its way of being in relation to others is utilitarianism: there is never affinity, always "agreement;" never encounter, always "tactics." Political activism –above all the party variety– can hardly constitute itself into an experience of authencity. From the very beginning it gets stuck in transitivity. What interests it of an experience is always "another thing" than the experience in itself. From this point of view, political militancy –and we are no excepting the militants of the Left– is as exterior, judgemental and objectifying as university research.
./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/277.txt:133:This is not, I think, so much a question of vocabulary and training as it is of content. When presented with documents written in jargon, we tend to look for the point, as we conceive it; if we find none, we give up on comprehension. To engage in dialogue with movement participants, then, researchers would need to have something to say to them that participants would recognise as a pointful statement. In other words, to solve the subsidiary problem we need to tackle the main one: to find ways of communicating that are not superfluous to what participants are engaged in, thus to produce research whose politics are of interest to the participants. Obviously the scope for this is immense, from actively taking sides in movement politics to writing for the alternative press. This engagement, however, also needs to be valuable to the researcher within the terms of their own research activity.
./english/277.txt:144:I want to conclude this paper with a brief analysis of my own PhD process as an example of some of the issues I have covered in this second half of the paper. The danger in “reflexivity” of this kind, of course, is that it can easily become self-indulgent, if the claim that our own situation as researchers is an important point of analysis is not taken seriously. To take it seriously, of course, is to subject such analysis to the same kinds of theoretical and political criticism as any other statements, rather than to shield them with claims to personal authenticity, identity, and so on.
./english/277.txt:156:That this latter concern was justified is shown by the fact that on most accounts one of the most abiding features of interest in copies of papers I have given them is identifying the pseudonymous authors of particular statements. Participants, then, are fully capable of locating the activity of intellectuals and using it for their own purposes. This does not, of course, mean that participants have no interest in the issues they are themselves working on or in the possibility of social change. Rather, they formulate these possibilities in ways which are so different from those preferred in academia and political parties that they tend to see activity in these fields as largely irrelevant, and find what they see as more practical ways of resolving the problems in question.
./english/278.txt:23:But perhaps the most influential non-Marxist approach to studying class consciousness is one that uses cross-cultural data to answer the question, "Why no socialism in the U.S.?" In this case, what workers think is deduced from what they have achieved, especially politically, and what American workers have achieved in this regard is considerably less impressive than the powerful socialist and communist parties and trade unions thrown up by the European working class. By concentrating on what there is in European history and conditions that contributed to these developments (such as a feudal past), and what there is in the U.S that restricted them (such as greater social mobility), this comparative approach tries to show not only that class consciousness does not exist here, but that it could not have come about and—by implication—will never come about. For the classic statement of this position, see Sombart (1976; first published 1906).
./english/278.txt:41:In the labor theory of value and the materialist conception of history, the major theories through which Marx interprets capitalism, capitalists, and workers generally make their appearance as embodiments of capital and wage-labor. When describing the broad lines of capitalist development, the origins of different social pressures and constraints, the opening and closing of options, and especially what happens in the majority of cases over time, Marx did not think it necessary to move much beyond this essentially functional approach to classes. This same approach lies behind his oft-quoted statement that, "The question is not what this or that man or even the whole of the proletariat at the moment considers its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do" (Marx and Engels, 1956, 53). What real flesh and blood capitalists and workers did and said and thought and wanted was either deducible from the way the system works and has developed (or else it would not work or have developed like that) or irrelevant (since even without the contribution of these individuals the system works and has developed as it has). Both necessary and sufficient conditions are easy to decipher after the fact. For example, that the French Revolution occurred indicates that the conditions for it happening at that time were not only necessary but sufficient. Consequently, where the acts and words of particular individuals are cited in Marx's more general historical and economic writings, it is to illustrate a point or to otherwise facilitate exposition rather than as evidence or as part of an argument for his conclusions.
./english/282.txt:95:As to how people become movement intellectuals, acquire the necessary skills and confidence, present themselves, and become accepted in the role, we can only offer some scattered suggestions. Gaining the 'right to speak' may derive from a claim to represent a specific 'community' or organization, from demonstrated commitment to a cause, from being accredited by the media or from authorship of a well-known book, etc. Nancy Naples (1998a) discusses the mentoring of potential leaders, with 'old hands' proposing them as speakers, encouraging them to put themselves forward for particular positions, introducing them to informal networks of activists, apprenticing them, giving them 'the real story' behind given conflicts, interpreting statements for them and so forth. The birth of new movement organizations may provide opportunities for individuals who were excluded from leadership in older ones: Ella Baker played foundational role in SNCC after battling against the practical sexism of the Baptist ministers who headed the SCLC; militant shop stewards may play powerful roles in 'unofficial' union movements in opposition to existing union bureaucracies.
./english/284.txt:40:Foucault and Deleuze call for the end of theory as a signifier, theory is reclaimed as action and not as representation: “A theory is like a box of tools (…) there is no more representation; there is nothing but action” (in Spivak1988: 70). Behind these attractive manifesto-like statements, “a post-representationalist vocabulary hides an essentialist agenda” (1989:80) that portrays subalterns as monolithic collectivities. Spivak argues that these “first-world radical intellectuals” are separating the two constitutive meanings of representation. By focusing on the political meaning, they are attacking the “speaking for” in a superficial way since they are forgetting the economic meaning. Without developing her analysis further, I just want to present Spivak as a reference point in bringing political economy into the debate of representation. The micropolitics are not separated from the macropolitics, so “theories of ideologies” based on interests are necessary to complement notions of power based on desire (1989: 74). The international division of labor has to be acknowledged, recognizing its impact in the current epistemological world order. In this sense, Spivak is performing an uneasy –yet relevant and exciting- marriage between Marxism and Deconstruction.
./english/299.txt:259:All the questions derived from this global readjustment are interesting to us. Not as a conflict between women or from a perspective of blame (the liberation of some at the price of oppression of others), a vision which can be perceived in some feminist statements: those which have interpreted postcolonial criticism as an intonation of mea culpa, appealing in the end to individual goodwill. Nor, in the opposite direction, do we see this readjustment as an engine driving the anxiety and the vengeance of real legitimate caretakers against sadistic foreigners: see the recent scandal which the press made about the abuse by an Ecuadorian live-in of the blond twins of an absent white mother. Rather we are interested in these questions as a dynamic which contributes to the reconfiguration of households, families, the sense of intimacy and of the private, the ways of loving, of caring and of managing affect. They interest us also in their connection with sexuality, with an affective continuum which has always been present and which distributes functions as wife, lover, caretaker, sexual servant, companion, mother, contracted wife, etc. They interest us, finally, because the capacity to make alliances and the capacity of the most vulnerable sectors of women to demand negotiation and introduce conflict is what will assure better conditions for all. It is a question of rooting out, once and for all, the idea of loyal or disloyal competition, the clauses of national priority as an excuse to nurture precarization and ethnification, and sexual difference as an argument for ≥specialization≤ in the lowest ranks. Capital fragments the social in order to subtract value, we aggregate to elevate it and to move it into other places. Without a doubt, we find ourselves in a force field, a field in which the symbolic is being created and life practices determined. Its time to intervene. In the end, in one way or another, we are talking about the daily life of each and every one of us.
./english/303.txt:41:At the same time, the overwhelming campaign of low-level state terror unleashed by the Italian state also points to some of the potential limitations of the “diversity of tactics” logic. If rather than dividing and conquering, the state pursues and indiscriminate strategy of physical repression it becomes impossible to safely divide up the urban terrain. In particular contexts, such as the upcoming RNC protests in New York, for example, it might make sense to actively dissuade other activists from using militant black block styles and tactics. However, blanked condemnations of protests “violence,” including the widely circulated statements by Susan George after Gothenburg and Genoa, are not likely to produce the desired effect largely because they violate the basic networking logic at the heart of contemporary anti-corporate globalization movements. Rather, it I sonly through dialogue and immanent critique based on solidarity and respect that such contentious issues can be resolved. At its best, militant ethnography can thus provide a mechanism for shedding light on contemporary networking logics and politics, while also making effective interventions into ongoing activist debates.
./english/313.txt:168:Statement document
./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/334.txt:1:Statement on North Korea's Nuclear Test: A call for an Anti-war,
./english/334.txt:6:Statement on North Korea's Nuclear Test: A call for an Anti-war,
./english/359.txt:50:The real WSF leadership, I think, makes many key decisions. Will the event have Lula present, and in what capacity? What about Castro, or Chavez? Will there be exclusions, and if so on what grounds? The Zapatistas? Will being in a party, advocating violent tactics, or even just being from some group that the inner circle finds too radical or otherwise dislikes (such as the Disobedienti from Italy, or the international People's Global Action) preclude prominent participation? What content will be part of the core of the events (more on this below) and what content will be left as periphery? Who will have their way paid--and who will not? Will there be a march, and who will be the key speakers? Will there be a collective statement, with what content? What efforts will or won’t be made to achieve gender balance, race balance, geographic balance? How will class differences be addressed, if at all, within the process and more broadly? How will press be handled, both mainstream and alternative? Will the WSF start to discuss facilitating an international movement of movements, or will it persist only as a forum? What will be the accommodation between advocating reform of capitalism and advocating a new system entirely?
./english/360.txt:50:The real WSF leadership, I think, makes many key decisions. Will the event have Lula present, and in what capacity? What about Castro, or Chavez? Will there be exclusions, and if so on what grounds? The Zapatistas? Will being in a party, advocating violent tactics, or even just being from some group that the inner circle finds too radical or otherwise dislikes (such as the Disobedienti from Italy, or the international People's Global Action) preclude prominent participation? What content will be part of the core of the events (more on this below) and what content will be left as periphery? Who will have their way paid--and who will not? Will there be a march, and who will be the key speakers? Will there be a collective statement, with what content? What efforts will or wont be made to achieve gender balance, race balance, geographic balance? How will class differences be addressed, if at all, within the process and more broadly? How will press be handled, both mainstream and alternative? Will the WSF start to discuss facilitating an international movement of movements, or will it persist only as a forum? What will be the accommodation between advocating reform of capitalism and advocating a new system entirely?
./english/365.txt:79:Because easy Internet linkages can open organizations to unpredictable traffic patterns, obscure nodes can become more central hubs in networks. As discussed above, the Netaction organization in the Microsoft campaign became such a rich archive of reports and research information about the corporation and the campaign that it became a central hub in the campaign network (as measured, among other things by overlapping board of director members). The early mission and identity of the organization were synonymous with Microsoft, even though the mission statement promised engagement with a wide range of electronic policy issues. As noted in the next section, Netaction reclaimed its broader policy agenda only by breaking with the Microsoft campaign and “moving on” to hub positions in other campaign networks.
./english/365.txt:105:While many activist issue campaigns have secured remarkably favorable media coverage, disruptive public demonstrations -- the other major power lever of protest politics -- have generally received fairly negative coverage. The interesting exception is the Battle in Seattle, which produced fairly extensive coverage of activist messages about globalization (Rojecki, 2001). The relatively more favorable coverage of Seattle was due, in my estimation, to a combination of factors: its size and consequence took journalists by surprise, President Clinton made a public statement admitting the protesters had some
./english/367.txt:155:But there is a point in the criticisms of RUPE, or of the Gujarat-based members of the Inquilabi Communist Sangathan (ICS). The latter issued a statement, falsely in the name of the entire Indian Section of the Fourth International, though they had not discussed it with anyone from outside Baroda, and not even with all their Baroda comrades. This intervention was simply one that stressed the undemocratic character of keeping political parties at arm’s length. There are real problems here. The RUPE essay similarly takes on the WSF because it excludes forces that use individual terrorism (in a somewhat different formulation). This does rule out some forces on the radical left. At the same time, some of the arguments are disingenuous. Forces like the Communist Party of the Philippines, or the PW or MCC in India, have used violence indiscriminately. They have murdered other left activists in their turf wars. Unless they show a real willingness to have dialogues with other types of radicals, unless they are serious about pluralism and wider democracy, it is difficult to see how others on the left can provide them with much space.
./english/368.txt:72:As journalistic, humanitarian, religious and indigenous observers have visited the conflict zone in Chiapas and written up what they have found, their reports --often embarrassing to the Mexican government and its supporters because confirming Zapatista statements-- have been circulated through the same computer networks providing vital material for the growing network of solidarity organizations. When grassroots groups came together at the behest of the Zapatistas in early August 1994 at the new Aguacalientes carved out of the jungle to form the Convencion Nacional Democratica, and then again later at San Cristobal, Chiapas (October 11-13, 1994), Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas (November 4-6, 1994) and Queretaro (February 1-5, 1995) speeches, reports and convention documents were circulated on The Net. Much of this material certainly deserves being labeled with the term used by Italian militants: "contro-informazione" (counter-information) opposed to the official reports of governments and commercial mass media.
./english/368.txt:132:These pages are dominated, naturally, by the usual government propaganda (statements by Zedillo and press releases by various agencies) and public relations material designed to draw tourists and lure investors (pretty pictures, travel information, recipes for Mexican dishes, pointers to business web sites). The information offered about the situation in Chiapas is minimal. As of November 1st, the UK page has four issues of a newsletter, one of which contains an 11 line "report" on the 3rd round of negotiations (June 1995), one which has an 8 line "report" on the 4th round (July 1995) --half of which is devoted to listing all the supposed efforts of the state to meet the needs of the poor in Chiapas and a third, with 21 lines on the negotiations in San Andres Larrainzar (October 1995) --with a reference to the EZLN Plebiscite that gives the impression that it originated with the Allianza Civica. In September the New York page had only two references to Chiapas, one being the "Dialog Law" and the other a press statement from the Secretariat de Gobernacion. When I returned to check it in early November, the "Dialog Law" had been removed.
./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
./english/378.txt:27:General statements were delivered from the podiums. Successive speakers voiced delight at how many of us there were, and how young and good-looking we all were. Initiating serious debate in the halls full of thousands of people, warmed up by mass-meeting rhetoric, was impossible.
./english/378.txt:39:The authorities are reacting less and less to the protests. In the very heat of the forum, the United Nations Security Council unanimously supported the American resolution on Iraq. Not only Russia, but even Syria sided with the US. For the peace movement this was unquestionably a huge defeat - if, of course, we take seriously the statements to the effect that we do not merely want to criticise the war, but also to stop it. This development, however, simply went unnoticed at the forum, and did not darken the mood of the pacifists at all.
./english/383.txt:47:Statement on behalf of the Group of 77, delivered prior to the 1992 Earth
./english/388.txt:79:TP: This has come out in the International Council. There is a debate on whether the International Council should make a statement about the war on Iraq. One group argues that the forum should be a political agent, while another says no, the forum should be a pedagogical space. These are two different visions. It is a good debate to have.
./english/388.txt:81:Personally, I would hope that it remains a pedagogical space out of which new politics can emerge. That is to say, the WSF provides a space in which movements from all over the world can network together and make statements about the war, but not in the name of the forum.
./english/389.txt:4:A STATEMENT ON WSIS CONTENT AND THEMES,
./english/394.txt:57:could certainly prepare and adopt its own statement, it should not be called a ‘WSF Charter of
./english/394.txt:59:titled the ‘WSF India Policy Statement : Charter of Principles - World Social Forum India’.7
./english/394.txt:114:organisations that formed the Forum) has been replaced by a statement that the document was
./english/394.txt:153:Policy Statement.15 The irony also goes further : Because – since the WSF India Policy Statement is
./english/394.txt:228:graphically shows the changes that have taken place; and also the WSF India Policy Statement based
./english/394.txt:275:7 World Social Forum India, July 2002 – ‘WSF India Policy Statement : Charter of Principles - World Social
./english/395.txt:319:‘WSF India Policy Statement’ that was generated in India during 2002, modifying the Charter of
./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:188:The results of the media strategy is that the NGOs received coverage in the media, women in the region were informed throughout, and point “J” gathered visibility and was included in the final statement by governments, known as the “Peru Consensus”.
./english/400.txt:63:The fourth cybercampaign had particular similarities with the first, in supporting 'permanently replaced' workers in the US tyre industry. In September 1998, workers at the Continental General Tires plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, voted to support industrial action in response to a deteriorating industrial relations situation following the plant's takeover by Germany-based multinational Continental AG. In the following month, the company elected to 'permanently replace' the striking USWA members (see Schulten, 1999 for a fuller account of the background to the dispute). In June 1999, ICEM launched a global cybercampaign in support of the replaced workers (ICEM, 1999) as one of a number moves to globalise the campaign and demonstrate support in other Continental-owned plants. The campaign ended in October 1999 following agreement of a contract between USWA and Continental General Tires and the reinstatement of replaced workers (ICEM, 1999c)
./english/400.txt:90:In the three industrial campaigns, the companies' use of the Internet also appear to have developed. In Campaign A, the company made no online response. In Campaign C, the company, which has also been the target of environmental and other criticism, contains general statements on environment, community relations and human rights (e.g. Rio Tinto, 2000) but does not acknowledge or respond to specific claims. In Campaign D, the parent company established web pages to counter the ICEM/USWA case directly. These pages included a chronology of the dispute, a point by point response to the USWA allegations, press releases and links to press coverage. As well as hyperlinks to Continental sites in the USA and Germany, these pages included links directly to the ICEM campaign pages and to the North Carolina Department of Labor. The company informed ICEM of the link to the cybercampaign, and asked for a reciprocal link to the company's pages about the dispute. Continental AG, in effect, elected to respond in kind to the cybercampaign engaging the unions directly in the information netwar. As others have suggested (e.g. Bray, 1998) this may indicate an increasingly sophisticated response to such cybercampaigns by companies.
./english/405.txt:6:"Much is expected from those in whom we trust a great deal", Jesus Christ said once. It is possible that the same statement applies to projects that generate collective hope, like the World Social Forum (WSF). Just before its sixth edition, two articles that were published in journals of enormous visibility in the alterglobalisation galaxy, argued that the big world meeting of alternative movements is about to be over.
./english/409.txt:49:In the end, the conference did not speak in one voice; there was no single official statement (though there were dozens of unofficial ones). Instead of sweeping blueprints for political change, there were glimpses of local democratic alternatives. The Landless Peasants Movement took delegates on day trips to reappropriated farmland used for sustainable agriculture. And then there was the living alternative of Porto Alegre itself. The city has become a showcase of participatory democracy studied around the world. In Porto Alegre, democracy isnt a polite matter of casting ballots; its a contact sport, carried out in sprawling town hall meetings. The centerpiece of the Workers Partys platform is something called "the participatory budget," an initiative that gives residents, through a network of neighborhood councils and a shadow city council, a direct say in such decisions as how much of the municipal budget should go to sanitation versus transportation.
./english/409.txt: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/417.txt:154:Sofi, French ESF committee (statement from that committee)
./english/470.txt:41:The real WSF leadership, I think, makes many key decisions. Will the event have Lula present, and in what capacity? What about Castro, or Chavez? Will there be exclusions, and if so on what grounds? The Zapatistas? Will being in a party, advocating violent tactics, or even just being from some group that the inner circle finds too radical or otherwise dislikes (such as the Disobedienti from Italy, or the international People's Global Action) preclude prominent participation? What content will be part of the core of the events (more on this below) and what content will be left as periphery? Who will have their way paid--and who will not? Will there be a march, and who will be the key speakers? Will there be a collective statement, with what content? What efforts will or won’t be made to achieve gender balance, race balance, geographic balance? How will class differences be addressed, if at all, within the process and more broadly? How will press be handled, both mainstream and alternative? Will the WSF start to discuss facilitating an international movement of movements, or will it persist only as a forum? What will be the accommodation between advocating reform of capitalism and advocating a new system entirely?
./english/473.txt:16:Whitaker insists the primary purpose of the forum is to create a space for free dialogue between social movements, and that its openness should not be compromised by confining participants to any narrow statement of intent. More importantly, he says it would be "impossible" to represent the views of such a diverse gathering in one statement. "The forum would be finished," said Whitaker. "Those who disagreed would stop coming - I would stop coming." (This year, Whitaker was in Recife, Brazil planning a national Brazilian Social Forum.)
./english/473.txt:20:It doesn't take much imagination to foresee a situation where the global social-justice movement spends all its time arguing about how to phrase joint statements. As if the world needed yet another arena for internal power struggles and empty words in place of direct action. Consensus language could also easily provoke more wrath of the type offered by Fred Halliday in the Observer in the aftermath of the 2005 forum.
./english/500.txt:44:''There should be more debates on issues and some level of calls or statements that people can sign on after such forums,'' she said, adding that there could be a need for some kind of structure.
./english/502.txt:6:"Much is expected from those in whom we trust a great deal", Jesus Christ said once. It is possible that the same statement applies to projects that generate collective hope, like the World Social Forum (WSF). Just before its sixth edition, two articles that were published in journals of enormous visibility in the alterglobalisation galaxy, argued that the big world meeting of alternative movements is about to be over.
./english/522.txt:30:Third element of success, the demand of solidarity was also forcefully affirmed on the most burning questions. Since the partition of 1947, Pakistan and India have lived in a situation of open war or armed truce. Despite administrative difficulties, an Indian delegation was able to get to Karachi, as a Pakistani delegation had attended the WSF in Mumbai (Bombay), two years ago. The situation in Kashmir was the theme of seminars and an important plenary where the combatant movements from the two sides of the “line of control” met for the first time thus in public. [3] Even if dialogue has not really been installed between them (that’s an understatement), the event was striking.
./english/532.txt:95:This soft control by crypto-hierarchies is tacit knowledge for many who have had first hand experience with ‘open’ organisations. Statements such as the following by a political activist introduced to what he calls ‘the chaos of open community’ at a Washington State forest blockade camp in 1994 and then later the Carters Road Community, are typical:
./english/532.txt:128:[15] Indymedia collective statement [http://www.indymedia.org/fish.php3?file=www.indymedia.newswire]
./english/532.txt:130:[17] Statement taken from: [http://wiki.uniteddiversity.com/open_organisations]
./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/544.txt:28:This consultation rightly perceived the WSF as a long-term process of engaging forces of anti-war and anti-neo-liberalism under one banner. “Realizing the need to diffuse the process in Pakistan the group committed itself to a continued struggle and efforts to take it further to all corners of the country. The group also pledged to continue its struggle to unite all progressive, rights-based and democratic forces in Pakistan against the common threats to the world and marginalised groups,” the press statement released on the occasion had said.
./english/553.txt:234:[5] ‘WWF Response to “EU Trading Partners” statement’, 9 June 2006, Brussels
./english/571.txt:35:There exists no clear dividing line between the “social movements” and the “non-governmental organizations”. NGOs are founded and often small, while popular movements emerge out of heterogeneous influences and actions, including those of NGOs. However, sometimes a clear-cut dichotomy between them emerges in the debates within the WSF governance bodies. In this dichotomy, the organizations recognized as “movements” are more willing to issue statements and formulate common political goals, whereas members of the constructed “NGO community” tend to be more cautious. This division has been reflected, for example in the debates on the periodicity of the main WSF events. In the meeting of the WSF International Council on 4-7 April 2004 in Passignano, Italy, the original proposal of the Brazilian Organizing Committee was that centralized world meetings of the WSF should no longer be organized on an annual basis but every two years. This position got support from some of the key social movements, and the representative of the influential Via Campesina coalition of peasants even advocated for organizing the main WSF every three years.
./english/571.txt:39:It was not possible to conclude in the Passignano meeting anything definitive on the periodicity of the main WSF events. The WSF International Council decided that the main annual WSF of 2007 will take place somewhere in Africa and it had already earlier been decided that in 2005 the event would return to Porto Alegre. It was, however, not possible to reach consensus on what should be done in 2006. This issue was finally settled in the International Council meeting in January 2005, when it was decided that the WSF 2006 will be held in a decentralized format. One of the decentralized events was fixed by the IC hemispheric council of the Americas to be held in Venezuela. Even if the decision on Venezuela was reached through an apparent consensus, some doubts have been voiced about the limits to the WSF “autonomy” in the context where the government of Hugo Chavez, who also participated in the WSF 2005 in Porto Alegre, has given statements that point to a heavy government involvement in the event.
./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/576.txt:34:During an event subtitled "Utopia and Politics," Nobel Laureate José Saramago and famed Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano (sitting on a typically all-male panel) held a contentious exchange about the relevance of Don Quixote for activists today. With listeners clogging the aisles of a large auditorium, Galeano celebrated the paradoxes of a world in which a novel cherished for centuries began its life in prison, "because Cervantes was in debt, as are we in Latin America." He defended the utopian impulse as a force for social change, citing Che's statement in his last letter to his parents: "Once again I feel under my heels the ribs of Rocinante," Quixote's horse.
./english/576.txt:38:The ethos of the Forum would seem to favor Galeano's view. The event's charter indicates that it is not a deliberative body; it does not take official positions on behalf of the assembly. Yet Saramago's defense of short-term demands received a standing ovation. And at the end of the week, a group of nineteen high-profile participants, including both of the writers, released a statement dubbed "The Porto Alegre Manifesto." Among its planks, the twelve-point platform called for cancellation of debts, a Tobin tax on international financial transfers, local control of the food supply, and the democratization of international financial institutions. "We're confident that the great majority of the people of the Forum will agree with this proposal," Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, told reporters.
./english/582.txt:53:Arundathi´s answer has two tones: “ To preserve its diversity, the World Social Forum can´t move back to the practice of final statements, that eliminate diversity. And it was very good to have done it, until now, exactly in the way we did it “ she says. Immediately, she changes the tuning . “ It’s necessary to change, as the times change. Nobody can stay stuck. The Forum needs to flee from this great risk. It absorbs our best energies, mobilizes the most generous minds only for us to start thinking, after four days, about the next meeting. In that case, it wont bother our enemies. It will keep being our own music, but it will ever reach to be our struggle”
./english/589.txt:146:Following this report the Chief Minister of Kerala issued a statement to take stringent action against the company but we have to await the action to be taken and which is yet to be defined. I am very happy that Vikas Case Study has been partly instrumental in getting the adverse verdict against the Coca Cola Company”.
./english/646.txt:98:Among the organisers and participants there have been different ways to approach these different identities. For some they are by no means incompatible: it is possible to be an arena and an actor simultaneously: a “movement of movements”. However, my impression is that there are increasing pressures to overcome the current reluctance to issue political statements.
./english/646.txt:102:Increased pressures for more explicit political will-formation are also expressed by and through the media. The press has tended to look at the WSF as a (potential) political actor in itself, while many of the organisers have wanted to downplay this role, emphasising the facilitating function in simply providing a space for different groups to interact. These different conceptions of the event have clashed when the press has asked for “final statements”, considering the lack of such documents as a patent proof of weakness.
./english/646.txt:104:In at least two meetings of the WSF International Council there have been angry demands by some groups to issue a declaration on a particular topic, whether it be crises in Argentina, Palestine or Venezuela. In the Bangkok meeting in August 2002, Walden Bello and others argued that the council should produce a public statement encouraging movements around the world to take part in protests in Cancún in 2003. In the Porto Alegre meeting of the council in January 2003, various delegates argued strongly in favour of making a public statement against the imminent war in Iraq. In both cases, the apparently consensual decision of the council was not to issue any such statements. It is, however, likely that there will be more intense debates on this in the near future.
./english/646.txt:152:Being anti-something can be politically useful, but only up to a point. Protesters in Seattle and at similar events have been very effective in exposing the authoritarianism of the capitalist world-system. But even if the various groups participating do have programmatic statements for alternative futures, the way these events have been staged has not been very conducive to bringing these futures to public attention. Not being able to show a credible alternative, or any alternative at all, has become a problem for the legitimacy of the protest movements.
./english/654.txt:5:Even if we only consider the numbers, the Forum was an unquestionable success. Boaventura and Tarsos statements are based on such verifications, but they also refer to the reasons for the success of the Forum.
./english/654.txt:11:In fact, for those delegates the Forum was really what its organizers intended it to be: a horizontal space in which the delegates could freely put forward their proposals and struggles - without considering any of these issues to be more important than others and without anyone imposing their ideas or their pace on the others -, to exchange experiences, to learn and to develop themselves through knowing about the struggles, hopes and proposals of others, to deepen their analysis about the issues that arise in their fields of action, to articulate themselves at national level and especially at the worldwide level . That is to say, to gain effectiveness and to move forward in their work of social transformation. There would not be so much interest in participating in this event if it were only about taking orders, or being having each ones options controlled, or being pushed to disciplined actions and mobilizations, or having to approve statements and motions or collective positions - which does not imply the lack of commitment to action. This is why the organizers of the Forum wrote in its Principles Charter that the Forum should not take positions as the Forum itself, that no one should speak on behalf of the Forum and that in none of its meetings should time be invested in discussing and passing "final documents".