Not for quotation or citation without the author’s written permission.
GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Or
SOREL IN SEATTLE
RONALDO MUNCK
Globalisation and Social Exclusion Unit
University of Liverpool
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Introduction
The notion of ‘global social movement’ is now gaining currency across the social sciences
(see, for example, della Porta et al, 1999, Cohen and Rai, 2000 and Hamel et al, 2001) and
hopes for social transformation are being pinned on their development. But is the GSM
simply a Sorelian myth as the ‘general strike’ once was, resonating with meaning but
ultimately an ideological construction? To answer this question we need to review some of
the recent debates on the nature of globalisation and its contestation by various social and
political forces. Has ‘globalisation from below’ emerged as a credible challenge to the World
Trade Organisation (WTO) bid to transform the world according to the tenets of free-market
neo-liberalism? From Seattle 1999 onwards, the prospects for a global social movement
contesting this process have increased. Having reviewed the general terrain of globalisation
and contestation, followed by the movements emerging from Seattle onwards, we can move
to a more theoretical and reflexive consideration of the new universalism embedded in the
notion of GSM as prime mover of the new counter-globalism. Reflections on Sorel in Seattle
follow.
Globalisation and contestation
Much of the literature on globalisation still lacks the degree of complexity necessary for it to
act as an effective guide to action. In becoming the new overarching paradigm for the social
sciences, the term ‘globalisation’ has assumed certain imperialistic characteristics, often overreaching itself in the process. However the globalisation paradigm can also be seen as part of
the way in which the social sciences are accepting notions of complexity as the physical and
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biological sciences had already done about a decade ago. This is argued most clearly by John
Urry for whom “globalisation brings out how there are non-linear interdependencies between
peoples, places, organisations and technological systems across the world, interdependencies
that problematise the notion that global systems can be said to reach any state of equilibrium”
(Urry, 2002: 3). Indeed, after 11 September it is no longer so outrageous to argue that the
world is always on the brink of chaos. The decentered, complex world we are now in is
global, indeed, but it is also characterised by hybridity and an intense inequality.
If the globalisation debates are still somewhat simplistic the same could be said about the
accounts of its contestation by subaltern social forces. More or less at random we can cite
Jeremy Brecher and co authors for whom: “Just as the corporate and political elites are
reaching across national borders to further their agendas, people at the grassroots are
connecting their struggles around the world to impose their needs and interests on the global
economy. Globalisation from above is generating a worldwide movement of resistance:
globalisation from below” (Brecher et al 2000: 10).
This by no means uncommon
perspective gives us a picture of inevitability, what Unger once called ‘false necessity’
(Unger, 1987). The debate on the ‘new labour internationalism’ both in the 1970’s and today
(see Munck, 2000a) shows how wrong it is to expect the subaltern classes to match or mirror
capital’s moves in a linked symmetry. It is not only an elusive search but also, ultimately, a
debilitating politics because it is simply reactive. It also tends to be demobilizing in its
impact if its target goals (anti or counter globalisation) are unrealizable.
To be ‘against’ globalisation is not, I would argue, a fruitful position. For one it subsumes
too many of the ills of society under the one overarching label. It can also become a path
towards a reactionary localism. The sorry fate of the ‘delinking’ strategy in the 1970s should
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be recalled. More specifically, as Cecilia Lynch argues, the ‘discursive demobilization’ of
the GSM ‘vis-à-vis globalisation is compounded by the lack of knowledge or common
articulation of against whom or what any challenge to globalisation is targeted” (Lynch,
1993: 163). This makes anti-globalisation ultimately a disabling political discourse. It is a
discourse and a social movement which has had an undoubted effect over the last three or
four years. It has deligitimised, at least to some extent, the rampant globalisation drive of the
mid-1990’s. However, it is quite unclear what the broad array of movements under the antiglobalisation banner may have in common and how they might be able to articulate a
unifying normative platform and strategy for social transformation.
The non-complex understanding of globalisation and its contestation extends to the issue of
tactics. The slogan ‘Fix it or nix it’ might just be a catch phrase but it has come to symbolise
the political philosophy of the anti-globalisation movement. The very success of Seattle 1999
in actually stopping a World Trade Organisation session encouraged this ‘all or nothing’
perspective. If the anti-move globalisation movement could not ‘fix’ the way the WTO
worked, it would simply ‘nix’ (stop) it. Of course, in practice, there are many more options
than this simple binary opposition and the global social movements have had considerable
success in altering the agenda of some of the multilateral economic organisations (see,
O’Brien et al, 2000). The more successful of the GSM’s such as those of women and the
environmentalists have effectively engaged in a strategy of radical reform to transform
globalisation.
For Unger “reform is radical when it addresses and changes the basic
arrangements of a society: its formative structure of institutions and enacted beliefs” (Unger,
1998: 18-9). Perhaps this has not been achieved by the GSMs but it has probably been more
than mere institutional tinkering.
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Another major simplifying tendency has been to proclaim the wave of anti-globalisation
protests since 1999 as a new ‘anti-capitalism’ movement. Thus a collection edited by Emma
Bircham and John Charlton (2001) lists under the banner of anti-capitalism just about every
conflict in the world, from the Middle East to GM foods, from Argentina to the new
anarchists. But if we accept that globalisation is complex so, inevitably, will be the protest or
reactive movements it generates.
We cannot by simple definitional fiat, as it were,
homogenise these movements and, even more fantastically, subsume then under an anticapitalist banner. We need to understand and explain the diversity of these movements and
what motivates them. It really does not help this task to tell the anti-globalisation protestors,
that “in building movements against the system they are treading the same path that Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels set out on nearly 160 years ago” (Harman, 2000: 56). This is the
type of simplistic politics that once made Marx himself declare that he ‘was not a Marxist’. It
certainly does not benefit the movements to ‘lump’ them in this way and prematurely ‘label’
them politically.
It is possible now and necessary, I believe, to develop a complex understanding of
globalisation and its contestation. We need to move beyond the simple binary oppositions of
‘globalisation from above’ versus ‘globalisation from below’ or the even simpler global=bad,
local=good. Not only do these conceptions entail a geographical or spatial fetishism but they
also imply ‘levels’ in society in a way that is quite disabling. They are based on a zero-sum
conception of power based on mutually exclusive domains. A focus on a specific global
social movement (GSM), that of labour, soon shows how inadequate these perspectives are.
Trade unions operate at local and national levels as well as transnationally, not forgetting the
regional domain that may well become increasingly important. From the lobbying that the
ICFTU (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions) does within the multilateral
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economic institutions through to a local strike, there are a myriad forms of labour
contestation of sensible labour strategists do not seek to prioritise ‘levels’ any more.
There is no simple ‘out there’ of globalisation distinct and separate from the ‘in here’ of the
places where we live. Social processes are spatially and temporally diverse and particular but
they are articulated with each other. As Michael Smith puts it: “the global-local interplay
becomes a matter of ‘locating’ both transnationalism and globalisation on the ground in all of
their untidy contingencies as various projects get constructed, accommodated to, or resisted
in specific times and places” (Smith, 2001: 3). What the globalisation and anti-globalisation
discourses seem to lack in similar measure is precisely attention to ‘untidy contingencies’, to
particular ‘times and places’, not to mention that old-fashioned term, contradictions. They
share this in common in spite of the economism of one and the voluntarism of the other.
Place and space have, indeed, been transformed by globalisation in ways that are still
developing. But the new social relations emerging globally are messy and cannot be reduced
to a unified capitalist process roaming free across space as against a place-bound citizen.
We can now understand more clearly that the making of globalisation is quite inseparable
from its contestation. So, for example, the action of workers worldwide contesting capitalism
in the 1970’s played a considerable role in shaping capital’s global restructuring in the
1990’s. Today, if we examine the dynamic and the dialectic of protest events since Seattle
1999 we can see how ‘globalisation from above’ is really inseparable from ‘globalisation
from below’.
In practice there is an engagement between the ‘enlightened’ drivers of
globalisation and the ‘reasonable’ end of the anti-globalisation spectrum. The era of the postWashington consensus is different from the heyday of neo-liberalism in the early 1990’s.
The market is moderated by a renewed call for some regulatory role by the state and the
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‘social capital’ perspective is not the same as turning a blind eye to the impact of neoliberalism. While the Sorelian myth constructed around the anti-globalisation movement
since Seattle is understandable, it is necessary to distinguish between the simple myth and
complex reality.
Perhaps a good way to illustrate the limitations of counter-globalism is in relation to Chiapas
and the real/discursive story of the Zapatistas.
There has been a very clear Sorelian
mythification of the Zapatista movement especially through the Internet.
For Manuel
Castells: “The success of the Zapatistas was largely due to their communication strategy, to
the point that they can be called the first informational guerilla movement” (Castells, 1997:
79). Of course the diffusion of the Zapatista struggle through the Internet was a notable event
but it is hardly the main characteristic of the movement. We would need to distinguish
between a ‘real’ and a ‘virtual’ Chiapas to introduce some complexity into the rather onesided accounts of the electronic solidarity sites. Judith Hellman argues persuasively that:
“Given the elegant simplicity of these images [of Chiapas, Marcos, etc] in a world normally
filled with ambiguity (or worse, post-modern relativism), it is not surprising that there are
progressive people around the world who would do anything to support the struggle in
Chiapas except learn the confusing details” (Hellman, 1999: 162).
There is now an ample literature analysing Chiapas from a complex materialist perspective
(see Harvey, 1998) yet the virtual GSM seems to prevail. The issues of land and religion are
considerably more complex on the ground. The notions of ‘civil society’ and NGO (NonGovernmental Organization) are often applied in a way that obscures as much as it simplifies.
Chiapas is a more confictual and diverse place than it appears to be in the Internet. Leanne
Reinke goes as far as to argue that: “In addition to the appropriation of the Zapatista struggle
7
by intellectuals in the developed world, many writers have turned the ‘struggle’ into a
romanticised circus” (Reinke, 2002: 82). Cyber-solidarity may well be a good thing but it is
not innocent of political contradictions. Romantic Thirdworldist myths and investment in an
exotic Other are probably not the best way to build a global social movement for democracy.
I am not even sure to what extent the ‘real’ Chiapas is part of a global social movement,
Intergalactic Encuentros against neo-liberalism notwithstanding, other than in a symbolic
way.
Seattle and beyond
The protest movement against the WTO Ministerial held at Seattle in 1999 has, of course,
become a major element in the unfolding myth of the new global social movement. For four
days some 40,000 protestors from the student and environmental movements but also,
significantly, from the trade unions virtually brought the city to a standstill and the WTO
meeting broke up inconclusively. Those familiar with labour history would have known that
in 1919 a general strike had paralysed Seattle for five days. As Levi and Olson write in an
interesting historical retrospective “one of the seeming ironies of the 1999 Battle in Seattle
was the presence of the longshoremen, workers who thrive on international trade, at the
forefront of actions directed at regulating international trade” (Levi and Olson, 2000: 316).
In the event these workers and others in the transport sector did develop an alliance of sorts
with the environmentalists - ‘Teamsters and Turtles” - in pursuit of a common objective. The
point is simply that history counts.
Most of the contemporary accounts of Seattle 1999 lacked a historical perspective or stressed,
perhaps understandably, the novelty of the movement. Thus Danaher and Burbach in their
introduction to ‘Globalize This!’ declare that: “Seattle was the coming out party for a new
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global movement for citizen power that will certainly go on...” (Danaher and Burbach,
2000:5).
Great emphasis was placed on the Internet as a mobilizing tool and on the
originality of some of the protest modalities. The anarchist or libertarian ethics of many
demonstrators and their mode of organizing were highlighted. The fact that the protest could
be classified as a victory - insofar as that particular round of the WTO negotiations could not
be concluded - meant that Seattle 1999 would be etched in popular consciousness. It was
perhaps inevitable that a Sorelian myth would emerge around the events at Seattle at the very
close of the 20th century.
It is still probably too early to settle on a reliable interpretation of the significance of Seattle
1999.
From Mexico, Comandante Null declared that: “The new century was born on
November 30th, 1999 with the revolt of the globalise in Seattle .... The boycott of the
opening of the WTO summit.... is not the last protest of the world’s forgotten, but rather the
grand prémiere in ‘society’ of world resistance to a globalisation model.... [which] unleashed
a peaceful protest against the new Babylon” (Null, 1999). In short, this was the coming out
party for global civil society. It did not express a drive for a reversal of globalisation
(probably a minority strand amongst the protestors) but more a move to democratise or, as
Mary Kaldor (2000) put it, to ‘civilize’ globalisation. It brought out new political cleavages
in the global order that led to a move to co-opt the ‘reasonable’ or ‘compromising’ end of the
counter-globalisation movement. The influential The Economist journal in the wake of
Seattle praised the way the World Bank had sought (and often succeeded) in co-opting
NGO’s after the 1994 ‘Fifty Years in Enough’ campaign (Economist, 1999). Apart from the
macro-interpretations of Seattle there is, of course, the micro-story of how it actually
happened.
Susan George, a leading organiser/intellectual of the counter-globalisation
movement, wrote of how “Anyone could have a front seat, anyone could take part in the
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advance on Seattle. The main rallying point was the Stop WTO Round distribution list”
(George, 2000: 2).
A number of NGO’s became involved including the Third World
Network and then some US trade unions, particularly those that have been involved recently
in disputes. In the event, direct action (in the shape of the Direct Action Network) won the
day on the streets but the ‘Teamster’s and Turtles’ perspective claimed the discursive high
ground.
However, it was not long after Seattle that the mainstream US trade unions
rediscovered their natural protectionist vocation when they began to lobby assiduously to
keep low-wage Chinese workers out of the WTO. We can but conclude that one joint action
a political alliance does not make.
Seattle 1999 was, as everyone knows, just the starting point in a broad international
movement against globalisation. The ‘Seattle effect’ was real and its ripples were felt in
many parts of the world, above all, in North America and in Europe. In the year 2000 there
was a large anti-fascist mobilization in Vienna and a demonstration against a joint
IMF/World Bank meeting in Washington D.C. Prague towards the end of 2000 was the focus
of a pan-European mobilization against another IMF/World Bank meeting. There were other
mobilizations in Millau (France), Okinawa (Japan), Melbourne (Australia) and Seoul
(Korea). In 2001 one of the main event was at Quebec City where some 80,000 people
protested vigorously against the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. The protests in
Genoa 2001 against the G8 meeting ended tragically with the death of a demonstrator. While
many, if not most of these mobilizations had Seattle as their obligatory reference point they
are characterized by considerable diversity in terms of their targets and their objectives.
The managers and organic intellectuals of the new global capitalism had for some time met in
the Swiss retreat of Davos to debate openly the state of the world and ‘what is to be done’.
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By early 2001 the counter-globalisation movement responded ‘from below’ through the
World Social Forum held by the Brazilian left-run city of Porto Alegre. The Forum’s
opening statement was “Together we are building a great alliance to create a new society,
different from the dominant logic wherein the free market and money are considered the only
measure of wealth.
Davos represents the concentration of wealth, the globalisation of
poverty and the destruction of our Earth. Porto Alegre represents the hope that a new world
is possible, where human beings and nature are the centre of our concern”
(www.worldsocialforum.org).
Nearly 5,000 delegates, mainly from Latin
America but also from many other parts of the world met and debated, becoming at the very
least an ‘anti-Davos’ in terms of the debates for and against globalisation.
The second World Social Forum held in 2002 saw some 60,000 people gather in Porto Alegre
from a vast array of GSM’s and from a greater number of countries. Was this global civil
society coming of age? Was this the beginning of a new transnational movement for global
justice that could become a pole of attraction for the myriad forms of counter-globalisation
protest? Much greater mainstream trade union participation in the Forum was certainly a
significant breakthrough. The women’s movement also played an important and clearly
recognised role in the events. Yet the Forum was still dominated in many ways by the
nationally based political parties of the old ‘new left’ such as the PT (Partidos dos
Trabalhadores/ Workers’ Party) in Brazil. Ultimately there is no one World Social Forum
because as Peter Waterman describes “Porto Alegre has to be seen as a terrain disputed
between the PT, the Brazilian NGO’s, the social movements, the international NGOs, and
then the hundreds, if not thousands, of groups and individuals who will be carrying its
message home” (Waterman, 2002: 16). It is a terrain of struggle much as global civil society
is, rather than an entity.
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While the post-Seattle wave of anti-globalisation protests is a clear priority for action
research by transformation oriented social scientists, we should maybe at this stage stand
back to take a cool look at it first. We should perhaps begin by examining what André
Drainville calls the ‘making of transnational subjects’ (Drainville, 2001) because we cannot
just take the GSM’s at face value (i.e. in terms of their own proclaimed objectives). For
Drainville, the NGO’s and the various spokespersons that gathered in Quebec City in 2001
were like ‘cosmopolitan ghosts’ (Drainville, 2001: 2). They can be seen as ‘ghosts’ because
they are not rooted in specific communities of struggles. As would-be representatives of an
ill-defined and self-referential ‘global civil society’ they clearly have their own agendas. The
informal or parallel NGO ‘summits’ around major UN events, be they on gender or
environmental issues, have taken on a life of their own. For Drainville, and I must say I
agree, the actually existing counter-globalisation movement “is closer to a transnational mob
in revolt against the injustices of the new order than to the a priori internationalism of
erstwhile citizens of the world gathering of UN summits” (Drainville, 1997: 51). This
perspective leads us necessarily to a different research strategy than the usually a-historical
and sometimes teleological approach of GSC and GSM proponents.
The second issue we need to consider is that of co-option by the dominant economic powers
and organisations. It could be seen as positive gain of the counter-globalisation movement
(and its predecessors) that the multilateral economic institutions have sought to co-opt them.
The WTO clearly did not enjoy the spectacle at Seattle and it would much rather deal with
‘reasonable’ NGO’s as the World Bank has learnt to for over a decade now. For the critics,
however, participation by civil society organisations in these fora is simply about co-option
and legitimising a carefully choreographed ballet of dissent. For Michel Chossudovsky,
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writing just before the end of 1999, “In Seattle, the big divide will be between those who are
genuinely opposed to the New World Order and those ‘partner’ civil society organisations
which have all the appearances of being ‘progressive’ but which in fact are creatures of the
system” (Chossudovsky, 1999: 3). This tendency has, of course, been accentuated since
Seattle 1999 as the managers of globalisation begin to realize how important it is to ensure
some degree of sustainability for global governance.
Finally, I think we need to stress the question of diversity within the broadly defined counterglobalisation movement.
There are now many categorisations of this movement (see
amongst others Starr, 2000 and Desai and Said, 2001) but essentially we can distinguish
between the reformers, the refuseniks and the alternativists. Amongst the first category are
movements that look towards the United Nations to legitimise their role. Florency Passy
refers (in relation to the indigenous peoples movement) that “Their grievances, which are
local or at best national at the outset, globalise when they enter the UN” (Passy, 1999: 160).
Thus a GSM is deemed to be such when it is institutionalised through the mechanisms of
global governance. The ‘refuseniks’, on the other hand, are isolationists and would include
movements seeking to delink from the new global capitalism in the belief that ‘small is
beautiful’ or that an indigenous development is possible.
The third category of
‘alternativists’ can in turn be divided into a more ‘radical’ current as in the ‘globalisation
from below’ approach, or a more ‘reformist’ one as in the case (for example in the
international labour movement) of those who seek to ‘democratise’ globalisation for the
common social good. My focus will be mainly on this third category.
Universalism and counter-globalism
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In much of the literature on counter-globalism this movement is rather taken as a given, a
natural response to globalisation as it were. Thus we have a statement such as ‘Rapidly
globalising capital obviously calls forth the need for a global labor movement” (Borgers,
1998: 3). Yet the small world ‘obviously’ is not so obvious. What needs to be explained is
actually taken for granted. The alternative to a globalising capitalism is a global social
movement, which constructs a global civil society (on which see Munck, 2002 b). For Peter
Waterman the alternative world order “means a non-capitalist/non-state, or anticompetitive/anti-hierarchical, sphere for democratic efforts, within and without the multiple
existing global terrains” (Waterman, 1998: 277). For Waterman, the new internationalism we
see emerging with the GSM’s should be based on universalism as a conceptual basis for a
global citizenship. Although superficially attractive these arguments pose several problems.
The concept of universality lying behind such cosmopolitan politics is neither simple nor
innocent. As Ernest Laclau puts it: “The universal is an empty place, a void which can be
filled only by the particular... in short, each universal is the battleground on which the
multitude of particular contents fight for hegemony....” (Laclau, 2000: 51-9). Universality is
constructed and universalisms compete with one another.
A concept such as ‘global
citizenship’ is essentially, an empty or a contested signifier. Even at Seattle 1999 there was a
consciousness that this event was predominantly white and Northern in composition. A new
universalism cannot be extrapolated from Seattle (to Porto Alegre) without considerable
mediations and due attention to particularisms. Gayatri Spivak some time ago showed how
behind universalism, and even ‘internationalism’, lurked a very Eurocentric notion of the
subject that led to a politics of rights that for the majority world simply occluded the power of
global capital (Spivak, 1988).
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A related issue is the question of whether the GSM’s are totally new phenomena or simply
‘old wine in new bottles’. For the old sectarian left, the GSM’s are nothing new. Their wish
is to tap the energy of the Seattle generation but within the parameters of the old truths. Thus
Chris Harman’s (Harman, 2000) reviews the theory and practice of the anti-capitalism
movement today and finds much that is encouraging. He sees it dealing with the ‘same’
issues which confronted Marx and Engels and argues, “it is up to all of us [Marxists]... to
help it to learn to deal with these issues” (Harman, 2000: 56). As to the current inspirational
intellectuals of the counter-globalisation movement “Monbiot and many others fail to define
their own alternative to simply relying on symbolic actions” (Harman, 2000: 51). The
alternative is, of course, the traditional workerist socialism one.
As Harman puts is
succinctly: “Workers have a power to challenge the system that street demonstrations do
not... Serious [emphasis added] anti-capitalist activists have to move on from simply
demonstrating in opposition to the system to find ways to tap this power” (Harman, 2000:
49). While there may well be a valid debatable point here, it hardly captures the imagination
or comes close to what is new about the post Seattle GSM’s.
On the other hand, for the authors/spokespersons of the counter globalisation movement such
as Naomi Klein it is the novelty of the post Seattle movements which is most striking. Much
stress is laid on the novel (anarcho-libertarian / networking) modes of organisation of the socalled anti-globalisation protests. Thus, referring to Quebec City 2001, Klein argues that one
of the main organisers “acted only as facilitator - a glorified note - taker” of the autonomous
actions” taking place such as wrapping the security fence in toilet paper or the Harvard grad
students who “planned to read Foucault to the police” (Klein, 2001: 51). For Klein it would
seem that the movement is all and its objectives can be fairly fluid because “If someone
doesn’t feel like they quite fit into one of the 30,000 or so NGO’s or thousands of affinity
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groups out there, they can just start their own and link up” (Klein, 2001: 71). There is
certainly no point giving a Leninist lecture in response to this world-view but we can note
that perhaps the counter-globalisation movement is just one of the new shapes that the everpresent contestation to capitalist rule can take.
If there is a ‘old versus new’ dichotomy in the appraisal of the GSM’s, there is also a ‘good
versus bad’ one that is difficult to bridge conceptually. Apart from the vast celebratory
literature and websites dedicated to the counter-globalisation movement we can turn to Peter
Waterman who has done much to promote the ‘new labour internationalism’ in particular.
For Waterman, writing from Porto Alegre, “in the first dawn of global emancipation”, he can
only echo the words of Wordsworth for whom “Joy was it that first dawn to be alive. To be
young was very heaven” (Waterman, 2002: 18). As against the violent totalising revolutions
of yesteryear the anti-globalisation one is seen as a ‘cultural revolution’ (but don’t mention
China?!) with global ambitions in keeping with the globalised society we live in. For
Waterman, “the conditions for a theory and practice if global solidarity are finally being laid”
(Waterman, 2002: 18). This ‘optimism of the will’ does not really stand up, however, to the
critique of the sceptics I would argue.
A realist analysis of NGO’s for example, would show how closely many work with
governments and even with the intelligence agencies of their respective countries (on which
see Chossudovsky, 1999). Be that as it may, my main point is about the way opposition can
be productive for power in a truly Foucaultian way. Thus Esteva and Prakesh mount an
effective critique of counter-globalisation movements organising “against the WTO or the
World Bank, at their headquarters or their jamborees [which] seems useless or counterproductive” (Esteva and Prakesh, 1998: 31). By recognising the power of these capitalist
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bodies the counter- movement actually helps provide it with legitimacy and thus ‘clothe the
emperor’. Certainly the manner in which the World Bank has utilized its newfound ‘gendersensitive’ image indirectly points to an element of truth in this critique. Resistance to global
capitalist organs leads them to create more defences, more bureaucracy and more moves to
co-opt and defuse the opposition. However, the answer may not be to ‘go local’ as Esteva
and Prakesh argue insofar as that can only result in a new localism which does little to contest
the deleterious social effects of globalisation.
The third dichotomy to consider is that between place and time, or the notion that
globalisation ‘abolishes’ space. Thus for example Castells argues that: “At its core, capital is
global. As a rule labor is local... capital and labor increasingly tend to exist in different
spaces and times: the space of flows and the space of places...” (Castells, 1996: 475). What
this world-view leads to is a conception of globalisation that capitalists and workers ‘live’
differently. While undoubtedly this image does capture something about the present situation
it does also seem to exaggerate the mobility of capital and the immobility of labour. There
seems to be a general tendency to reduce place to space in the globalisation debates. As
Jamie Peck puts it: “Places to live seem increasingly to be reduced to spaces in which to earn
or strive to earn a wage” (Peck, 1996: 233). Yet we all still live, work, think and play in
spaces. So, as Peck puts it: “This does not mean that place - as a theoretical category or as a
political site - somehow matters less, but is rather to insist on an appreciation of the local in
the context of (and in relation to) the global” (Peck, 1996: 233). Globalisation has not
somehow ‘abolished’ space (along with time) rather it has reconfigured it within a new
complex social and spatial matrix.
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The local-global divide is probably the overarching perceived division between the pro and
anti-globalisation intellectuals. The so-called local-global paradox has been at the centre of
much theorising and practical innovation.
The local-global nexus can no longer be
understood in simple territorial terms or as the meeting point of separate social spheres.
Notions of ‘hybridity’ to my mind best capture the complex local-global interconnections.
Globalisation has prompted new identities and new interests in the local social and political
processes. Local politics has not been shut down by globalisation but transformed and
reinvigorated by these multiple new identities. Certainly the local cannot be seen as a refuge
an oasis of tranquillity in the turbulent seas of globalisation.
Michael Smith notes
perceptively that: “The global-local duality in social theory rests on a false opposition that
equates the local with a cultural space of stasis, ontological meaning, and personal identity …
and the global as the site of dynamic change, the decentring of meaning, and the
fragmentation/homogenisation of cultural (i.e. the ‘space’) of global capitalism” (Smith,
2000: 157).
In conclusion, we need to move beyond binary oppositions to adequately theorise the GSM’s.
Globalisation ‘from above’ and globalisation ‘from below’ are two sides of the same coin: it
is their complex and contested interaction that is shaping the world we are moving into.
Labour and other social movements resistance to the impact of globalisation is shaping the
plans being developed at this very moment by the architects of the new global capitalism.
This particular GSM at the same time reflects an ‘old’ social movement but it has ‘new’
characteristics; it has positive potential but also there are negative dangers of co-option or
abstract revolutionism ever-present. Local empowerment and global empowerment depend
on each other and thus we should not counterpose the local to the global. Nor can we
simplistically counterpose ‘revolutionary’ direct action against globalisation to a supposedly
18
‘reformist’ lobbying of the multilateral economic institutions. Rather, we should be seeking
to ‘bridge the gaps’, show the links, and build up a complex picture of this diverse movement
contesting but also an integral part of globalisation.
Bridging the gaps is a central tenet of the new post-Porto Alegre ‘new politics’. As Hilary
Wainwright describes it the new politics is at the same time ‘in and against the state’ and also
‘in and against the market’ (Wainwright, 2002). It is all about ‘making connections’ in the
era of connexity, especially between and within the local and the global (not forgetting the
often neglected regional dimension). At a broader level we need to stress how the rescaling
of the capitalist system over the last decade has revived the ‘Polanyi problem’, that is how the
‘free-market’ can be regulated socially for its own good. Much of the counter-globalisation
movement dynamic can be understood in terms of Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ whereby
market expansion is checked by a social counter-movement (Polanyi, 1957: 130). If there is
something going for this analysis then we could follow Peter Evans and conclude that: “What
is most important is that organisers of counter-hegemonic globalisation have more on their
side than luck and pluck. Elites, no less than the rest of us need to resolve the Polanyi
problem” (Evans, 2000: 239). Better to knock on an open door than a brick wall I would have
thought?
Sorel and Seattle
I have deliberately left Sorel till last so that he would not overwhelm the theoretical context
and the narrative of Seattle and beyond. Yet in the spirit of an afterword it may be useful to
ponder the relevance of Georges Sorel’s political philosophy for an understanding of the era
of Seattle. For Sorel, the revolutionary syndicalist, the proletariat needed a myth of the
19
general strike to create its identity and struggle for a heroic future. For Sorel: ‘the general
strike is….the myth in which socialism is wholly comprised, ie a body of images capable of
evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of
the war undertaken by socialism against modern society” ( Sorel, 1999: 118). The proletariat
can only fight against bourgeois society and create its own identity through ‘war’ as
parliamentary socialism can only sap away its energy according to Sorel. For Sorel- and here
the influence of Neitzsche is clear- action is the driver of politics and will alone can forge our
futures.
The anti-globalisation protests seem to share a similar political philosophy where action and
will are paramount and reflection or compromise takes a back seat. Many strands of the
movement also see themselves engaged in veritable ‘war’ against neo-liberal globalisation
where the very future of humanity is at stake. The very physical nature of the conflict at
Seattle 1999 may well have encouraged such an outlook and the dangerous illusion that
physical force can substitute for politics. The vaguely anarchist sentiment suffusing much of
the movement certainly leads to a prioritising of direct action and the power of will is deemed
paramount. As with Sorel there would be scant regard for what Laclau and Mouffe call ‘ the
quietism of orthodoxy’ ( Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 39). It is only through action that political
identity can be forged for this current and the keyword ‘action’ (think Greenpeace) is the
privileged path for confronting globalisation.
The theory of the myth in Sorel is explained further when he argues that the ‘general strike’
allows us to ‘obtain that intuition of socialism which language cannot give us with perfect
clearness- and we obtain it as a whole, perceive it instantaneously’ ( Sorel, 1999: 118). This
syndicalist myth finds its current counterpart in the movement myth of ‘Seattle’ I would
20
argue as created in myriad discursive mediums including Indymedia and the varied
organising/propaganda networks set up after Seattle 1999. A poster image or a simple slogan
allows us to perceive ‘instantaneously’ as it were the message with clarity that the tortuous
debates of the more orthodox political currents do not. There is little doubt that the antiglobalisation movement has its constitutive and mobilising myths although one may
legitimately ask what is unusual or harmful about that. If a myth of Seattle 99 ( or Genoa or
Porto Alegre) creates a sense of unity and purpose why should that be a problem?
The Sorelian theory and practice of the myth, with its emphasis on ‘will’ and ‘war’ is more
than a harmless mobilising tool I would argue. Sorel became very dismissive of
parliamentary politics and, as Laclau and Mouffe put it ‘ Sorle then becomes a decided
enemy of democracy, seeing it as the main culprit for that dispersion and fragmentation of
subject positions which Marxism had to grapple with at the turn of the century’ ( Laclau and
Mouffe, 1985: 39). It is eventually politics as a whole in this discourse that is superseded by
action and the myth of the general strike. I am not suggesting at all that Sorel’s eventual role
in the creation of a fascist ideology has any present day equivalent. However, the myth of
globalisation and its counter-myths in the movement that have sprung up post –Seattle have
tended to ‘flatten’ political debate. For or against globalisation is hardly the sum total of the
political options open to us today. Sorel and Seattle is a potentially dangerous combination
and we should reject any foreclosing of the political horizon or allow a blind ‘action’
orientation to substitute for critical analysis and political debate.
21
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