Grass-Roots
Globalism
By Tom Mertes
New Left Review 17,
September-October 2002
Reply
to Michael Hardt
Chaotic, dispersive, unknowableMichael
Hardts uncertainty in the face of the multilingual mass of global
oppositionistsa sea of peoplethronging to Porto
Alegre for the World Social Forum last spring is entirely understandable.
[1] There were anywhere between fifty thousand and eighty thousand participants,
and at least ten thousand official delegatesactivists, students,
intellectuals, trade unionists, environmentalists, rural workers, Argentinian
piqueteros, plus the representatives of scores of NGOscrowding
into seminars, round-table sessions and workshops, or marching through
the sweltering streets in celebratory parades or ad-hoc protest demonstrations.
Twenty-seven conferences on broad socio-economic themes were running
simultaneously, together with over a hundred seminars on more specific
questionsfood sovereignty, the illusion of development,
the World Bank and IMF, indigenous peoples and sustainabilityand
more than five hundred specialist workshops; not to mention the music,
the films, the plays.
The first question, in Hardts
view, is how such a widely differentiated mass can begin to work togetherfor
the various movements cannot simply connect to each other as they
are, but must rather be transformed through the encounter by a sort
of mutual adequation . . . not to become the same, or even to unite,
but to link together in an expanding network. The second is to
distinguish the major issues they confront. For Hardt, the opponents
of neoliberal globalization are faced with a choice between two primary
positions: either one can work to reinforce the sovereignty of
nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign
and global capital, or one can strive towards a non-national alternative
to the present form of globalization that is equally global. [2]
Hardt and Negri have already
made a passionate case against the first position in the pages of Empire.
The modern stateborn as a counter-revolutionary, absolutist response
to Renaissance humanism, boosted with the toxic ideology of an exclusionary,
homogenizing nationalismhas always been a tool for repression,
even when posing as the champion of anti-colonial liberation. Over the
past two decades, however, the powers of this reactionary instrument
have been drained away by the flow of global networks of production
and exchange across its borders, while sovereignty is reconstituted
at the higher level of a (still somewhat misty) Empire.
The authors resolutely refuse any nostalgia for the power structures
that preceded the global age. Strategies of local resistancedreams
of liberated zones, outside Empiremisidentify and thus mask
the enemy, just as they obscure the potential for liberation within
it. The national-sovereignty defence against the forces of international
capital, Hardt now suggests, presents an obstacle to global
democracy. [3]
But it was this position,
he claims, that dominated the official platforms and plenary sessions
at Porto Alegre, promoted above all by the officials of the Brazilian
PT and by the chevènementiste leaders of the French ATTAC. The
other sidethe democratic-globalization viewpointwas
represented by the North Atlantic anti-WTO networks, by the more radical
base of ATTAC groups and, emblematically, by the Argentinian neighbourhood
committees that have sprung up in response to their countrys financial
collapse. Hardt describes these lastas antagonistic to all proposals
of national sovereignty, their slogan que se vayan todoscalling
for the abolition of the whole political class. To further illustrate
the gulf between the two positions he suggests that, if a democratic-globalization
solution to the Argentinian crisis exists, it would reject any national
defiance of the IMF in favour of seeking a continuity between
the practical experiments in democracy going on at barrio levelthe
villa miseria in Argentinaand the democratization of the global
system.
Is he right? There were certainly
plenty of memento mori at Porto Alegre in the form of Euro-Socialist
politicians looking for photo opportunities; but most of these are ardent
proponents of the neoliberal cause. Similarly, in the run-up to the
Brazilian elections the PT leadershipwhich certainly hijacked
a number of the sessions at Porto Alegre, but did not succeed in controlling
its agendahas been notable not so much for demanding sovereign
control over capital flows as for its alacrity in complying with IMF
demands on debt repayment. But the experience presented by activists
at Porto Alegreespecially those from Latin America, where the
neoliberal crisis is at its most intenseproposed a more modulated
view of the specific units and gradations of power than Hardts
all or nothing approach. Rather than an intuitive uprising
of the multitude against Empire, they suggested a more differentiated
field.
The nation-state, precisely
because of its role in pushing through the social engineering required
by neoliberalism, remains an essential instrument for global capitaland
hence a key zone of contestation. It is against their own governments
that both South Africans and Latin Americans have been mobilizing to
fight against water and electricity privatizations. Peruvians successfully
resisted an electricity sell-offthis time at local-state level,
in Arequipaearlier this year; Bolivian water wars
rattled Banzers regime in April 2000; Vivendi, go home!
is the cry in Argentina. CONAIE, the national confederation of indigenous
peoples, brought down the Ecuadorian government early in 2000, and after
broken promises from the military and the new regime were back on the
streets a year later to oppose austerity measures, deforestation, privatization
of electricity and oil pipelines. There have been protests along similar
lines in El Salvador, India, Nigeria, Ghana, Papua New Guinea. Last
spring, the shantytowns of Caracas rallied to the defence of Chávez
in order to fight US-backed plans for the privatization of their oil
and the still greater reduction of their living standards.
The first question
of political philosophy today, write Hardt and Negri, is
not if or even why there will be resistance and rebellion, but rather
how to determine the enemy against which to rebel. [4] The Latin
American mobilizations of the past few years display not a faith in
the transcendent power of national sovereignty but, precisely, a grasp
of the immediate enemyand, often, a clear intuition of the forces
that stand behind him. The architecture alone of most Third World US
embassiesthose massive, reinforced blocks that loom more ominously
than any national government buildingsnot to mention the plain
facts of the local USAF military base, is evidence enough. It is a common
enough contradiction today that a willingness to pursue the radiant
horizons of capitalist wealth can sit quite easily with a sour
dose of home-grown cynicism about the uses of Yanqui power.
This is the great ambivalence
at the heart of Empire. What is the rolethe privileged positionof
the US within the coming global sovereign power that Hardt and Negri
depict? The actually existing United States constantly threatens to
emerge from the pages of Empire like the face in a nightmare, and has
to be perpetually repressed. Instructed that Empire exercises its control
by means of the bomb, money and ether, we are warned that
it might appear as though the reins of these mechanisms were held
by the United States . . . as if the US were the new Rome, or a cluster
of new Romes: Washington (the bomb), New York (money), and Los Angeles
(ether). But any such certainty is immediately withdrawn: the
screen goes fuzzyworld power is much too flexible
for us to think of territorializing it in this way. [5] Empire,
we are continually assured, has no Romedespite the
fact that US defence spending is more than that of the next twenty-five
governments combined. It has bases in at least fifty-nine countries.
[6]
The US is, of course, no
transcendant, deterritorialized sovereign force but only a mega-state
within an international state systemas is all too clear to those
who have felt its force. There are real debates to be had around questions
of counter-globalization strategy at national andmore commonly
proposed todayat regional level. Via Campesinas campaign
for food sovereignty, for the right to raise protective
tariffs that will prevent multinational companies wiping out local farmers
by their dumping practices, is one example. [7] It is widely acknowledged
that the ability of the Malaysians and the pre-WTO Chinese to impose
controls on capital flow during the 199798 financial crisis protected
their populations from much of the devastation that ravaged Indonesia.
Focus on the Global South has rightly counselled Vietnam against joining
the WTO, pointing out the social and economic consequences this would
entail. It suggests instead deglobalization to build strong
regional markets within the South that would have some autonomy from
global financial interests. [8] But the traditional Chevènement
position is a straw man, at least at Porto Alegre. The real questions
to be asked are not about the nation-states from which sovereignty is
draining away, but the one it is being sucked into.
Measures of power
For Hardt, the division at
Porto Alegre between the national-sovereignty and the democratic-globalization
positions corresponds not to Third World vs First World outlooks but
to a conflict between two different forms of political organization:
The traditional parties and centralized campaigns generally occupy
the national-sovereignty pole, whereas the new movements organized in
horizontal networks tend to cluster at the non-sovereign pole.
This, he suggests, may explain why an old-style ideological confrontation,
a clear debate between the two positions, did not take place at the
2002 WSF. Whereas the formally constituted organizations have spokespeople
to represent them, the new groups do notPolitical struggle
in the age of network movements no longer works that way:
How do you argue with a network?
The movements organized within them . . . do not proceed by oppositions.
One of the basic characteristics of the network form is that no two
nodes face each other in contradiction; rather, they are always triangulated
by a third, and then a fourth, and then by an indefinite number of others
in the web . . . They displace contradictions and operate instead a
kind of alchemy, or rather a sea change, the flow of the movements transforming
the traditional fixed positions; networks imposing their force through
a kind of irresistible undertow. [9]
One difference Hardt seems
to miss is the question of scale. Many seemingly traditional bodies
at Porto Alegre were actually mass organizations. The Brazilian Sem
Terra is a case in point. It counts in its ranks over a third of a million
landless familiesand this is not a passive, card-carrying membership
but one defined by taking action: risking the wrath of latifundiários
and the state by occupying land. Within this layer there are, again,
around 20,000 activists, the most energetic and committed, who have
helped to organize their neighbours and who continue to attend courses
and participate in regional and state-level meetings that elect the
local leaderships. Over 11,000 delegates attended the MST national congress
in 2000. Spokespeopleaccountable to the membershipbecome
a necessity with numbers of this size. [10]
The North Atlantic networks,
by contrast, are more likely to count their active core as a few dozen
or less. The Ruckus Society, for example, has a full-time staff of four,
and between twenty and thirty volunteers in close orbit around that;
about 120 people will attend an annual camp. Other organizations like
Fifty Years is Enough and United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS)
are run by less than half a dozen full-timers, who call other organizations
into action. Rather than sweeping away and transforming all fixed positions,
these networks often feel more at risk of being dissolved themselves
into the powerful flows of American capitalism. Does size matter? For
the authors of Empire, we are immersed in a system of power so
deep and complex that we can no longer determine specific difference
or measure. [11] To the resounding reply of Sem Terra leader João
Pedro Stedileasked what Northern sympathizers should do to help
the landless farmers of BrazilOverthrow your neoliberal
governments!, their book provides no echo. Yet Stediles
demand surely suggests a scale by which the movements can take stock
of their opponents, and reckon their own strength.
Hardts maritime metaphorthe
sea of networksraises a further question, crucial
to the mutual adequation of the current movements: waves
do not speak. How, if it cannot argue but only sweep away
its opponents, is Hardts networkor multitudeto hold
an internal conversation, to debate and decide its strategy? For the
Sem Terra, the question of how to develop democratically accountable
forms of leadership and coordination, while avoiding the traps of presidentialism
and bureaucratization, has been literally a matter of life and death;
militant farmers leaders in Brazil have traditionally been gunned
down by landowners or the state. The attempt to answer it has led them
to stress the importance of collective, elected bodies at all levels,
from the village occupation committee up. [12] As a result, enormous
efforts are put into gathering together the far-flung activists, most
of them working farmers, for regional, state and national decision-making
meetings.
For North American pressure
groups, radical NGOs and networks, while there is often a strong commitment
to transparency and to rotating leadership, a different sort of process
often prevails. Often these are run by a small group of dedicated individuals
who tend to lead by default, by dint of their accumulated skills. Obviously,
as the director of the Ruckus Society puts it, those closest to
the centre get more input than people who are further away from it.
For example, I took the decision to hold the WTO camp [in Seattle in
1999], and thats how a lot of the decisions have been made since.
[13] USAS also embraces consensus building in decision-making, with
all of its pitfalls; it has only one annual meeting of its university
affiliates. With their relatively small numbers and higher educational
level, the North American groups have focused on the quality of consensus-making
around specific actions. David Graeber has described the patient and
ingenious methodsspokescouncils, affinity groups, facilitation
tools, breakouts, fishbowls, blocking concerns, vibe-watchers and so
onthat have been developed to devise summit-protest tactics, for
instance. [14] But it is not clear how these could be extended to cope
with strategic issues, or projected onto the vast scale of Porto Alegre,
where the star systemas much that of the new movements as of the
traditional partiesposed another set of problems for internal
democracy.
Given these disparities,
should we welcome Hardts project of an ever-expanding network
as the form that the movement of movements should take?
It seems more useful to conceptualize the relation between the various
groups as an ongoing series of alliances and coalitions, whose convergences
remain contingent. Genuine solidarity can only be built up through a
process of testing and questioning, through a real overlap of affinities
and interests. The Turtles and Teamsters will no doubt meet again on
the streets of North America, but this does not mean they are in the
sort of constant communication that a network implies. The WSF provides
a venue in which churches and anarchists, punks and farmers, trade unionists
and greens can explore issues of common concern, without having to create
a new web.
NorthSouth adequation
Focusing on questions of
national sovereignty and organization, Hardt neglects other areas where
there is perhaps a greater need for adequation, in some
form. Ifin the age of Malaysian skyscrapers and New York slumsthe
distinction between North and South has more to do with power and elite
lifestyle than geographical location, it still denotes a significant
split in current experience and historical perception. One obvious difference
for activists is that the repressive nature of capitalist state power
is posed much more starkly in the South. In Argentina at least 30 protestors
have been killed since March 2001. At least fourteen Sem Terra activists
have been murdered and hundreds jailed. Since January 2001 four protestors
have been killed in the Ecuadorian Amazon and at least twenty-five shot
and wounded in the highlands. In El Salvador, the death squads are back
at work. In June 2001 four Papuans were killed by the state during protests
against austerity measures and privatizations. [15] Genoa notwithstanding,
Northerners stand a better chance of getting home safely after a demonstration.
In the end, divergences over
the economy and the environment may prove more crucial than the Lefts
organizational forms. The green production laws for which
North Atlantic groups have campaigned have, in practice, often worked
as a form of protectionism, favouring Northern capitaland labourwhile
increasing poverty and unemployment in the South. Walden Bello and others
have spoken passionately of the need to redress this, calling for a
visionary strategy that would protect the jobs of Northern workers at
the same time as strengthening the rest of the worlds working
classforging a common front against the re-stratification of labour
that global capital is currently trying to push through. In place of
green protectionism, they have called for a positive transfer
of green technology to the South, coupled with support for indigenous
environmental groups. [16] Significantly, few of the big Northern trade
unions were present to hear this case put at Porto Alegre.
Agriculture, of course, remains
far more labour-intensive in the South, where a just redistribution
of land is still the central issue. The threat of GM terminator seeds
menaces the livelihood of hundreds of millions of small farmers across
Africa, Asia and Latin America. Pace Hardts strictures on national-sovereign
solutions, African governments that have refused to accept the poisoned
gift of Monsantos unmilled, self-sterilizing corn have for once
been acting in the interests of their citizens. Via Campesinaitself
a NorthSouth alliance of working farmersheld its own mini-forum
at Porto Alegre, in a park near the city centre; Monsanto and Coca-Cola
logos were ritually burnt at its closing ceremony. First World environmentalists
need to listen attentively to these Third World farmers and indigenous
groups, who unite powerful ecological concerns with a highly critical
perspective on international capital.
A third divisionhere,
no longer on NorthSouth lineswas over the question of global
capitalism itself. While almost all the speakers and participants were
critical of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, there was disagreement over
whether these institutions could be reformed, or whether they were inherently
linked to a system that is fundamentally unequal, corrupt and unsustainable.
For all the attention paid to these general issues, however, there was
far less debate on the current world political situation. When the questions
on which any global opposition might be expected to raise its voice
were discussedthe US war in Afghanistan, the Middle East, the
threat to Iraqit was often away from the central plenaries and
official platforms, though such issues did surface after the initial
presentations.
The debate over the WSF needs
to remember, too, the exhausting logistical problems that global organizing
presents to the dispossessed. Time, money and a daunting sense of distance
present real obstacles to students, activists, trade unionists, the
rural and urban poorin stark contrast to the well-funded global
infrastructures of the ruling class. For all his reservations about
the Brazilian PT, Hardt must acknowledge that, without its municipal
government in Porto Alegre, the WSF would never have taken place. Naturally,
most of the participants were from Latin AmericaBrazil, Argentina
and Uruguay between them fielded over 7,000 delegates, Italy and France
around 1,200. Travel problems precluded many more. The hard-working
interpreterstranslating into Portuguese, the host language, and
English, although Spanish might have been a more natural lingua franca
for most of those presentoften went unpaid for their skills.
Organizing from below is
a fragile process, at threat from numerous different forces. A micro
example: when LA-based activists recently sought to get in touch with
maquiladora workers in Mexico, they first had to negotiate their way
through a series of blocking attempts by the moderate NGOs that controlled
the funds for transport and translators, and wanted to run the agenda
too. When finally the Angelenos met with their Tijuana counterparts,
they found that what the maquiladoristas needed most was computersto
send information out but, above all, to get news in. The US side could
come up with the computers; what they couldnt produce was electricity,
decent phone lines, Spanish-language software and technical help.
Hard as it is, this sort
of grass-roots organizing remains crucial for building up relationships
of mutual support, coalitions of resistance. In these nano-level processes
of forging solidarity the WSFand especially perhaps its informal
side: the youth camp, fiestas, lunches, marchescan play a vital
role. Chaotic, dispersive, unknowable as they may be, these
messy, mass-scale face-to-face encounters are the life-blood of any
movementan element that telecommunications metaphors can never
attain.