Strategies (Go figure. This is going to be the long section.)
As I alluded above, if there was consensus at the Encuentro about any single strategy, it was about the need for a "network of struggles." But a lot has to be done to work out exactly what this would involve. It's a very lofty sounding goal and definitely abstract. It seems to me a good place to start would be to try to identify concretely those forms of organization which we think are network-like. Drawing from previous discussion, these would presumably be non-hierarchic, available for the participation of all vested parties, and to some extent commutative, reciprocal, and distributive. (Remember middle school math?) An example might be horizontally integrated industrial unions (i.e. syndicalist tendency). We could then try to investigate further what networks of struggle already exist, so as to be able to strengthen and inform these, and perhaps draw them into a broader network still.
Unfortunately, a great number of people seem to conflate the "network of struggles" with the Internet--a major obstacle to understanding. I see three main problems with this attitude.
First, and probably most obvious, is the class and sectoral composition of those who have access to the Internet: The majority of people who do are middle or upper class Northerners or members of government agencies and academic institutions (or all of the above). To back up a point Monty made in <http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3849/en2_report_monty.html>his report, the CIA states <http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/nsolo/factbook/uv.htm> that there is less than one telephone (let alone modem or computer) for every 500 persons in Burkino Faso (a country represented at Mesa 1A). Even techno-junky countries like the U.S. and Finland, where the rate of Internet access is between 1 in 5 and 1 in 10, are exceptions among industrialized countries. When I made a similar point at one of the smaller working group meetings, someone actually suggested that the current situation is okay, and we needn't worry, because the technology would trickle down eventually. Even if this is so, is it fair for those of us privileged with "access" to speak and make decisions on everyone else's behalf in the meantime, because we aren't willing to explore other kinds of networks of communication?
Second, suppose we undertook to provide all our comrades around the world with "connectivity." Is it something we can reasonably do? Would it be worth the trouble, if there are already other less technologically intensive means of communication available? I know someone in a Canadian NGO who has spent the last several years wandering from foundation to foundation trying to get money to set up a system of computers for indigenous peoples living in the forests of South America that would use icon-driven software and be connected to the Internet with cell modems, so that these people can understand the ramifications for their traditional resources of recent changes in international intellectual property law. It's a noble cause--but the project's not happening. Perhaps there is a more straightforward way of protecting their resources against the depredations of global capital.
Finally, there is the danger of over-reliance on the Internet. I think too few activists realize how marginal our little piece of the Internet is becoming as the whole grows more and more commercial. During the Gulf "War," I remember the excitement about being able to get news about the conflict instantaneously and coordinate activities across the country. But if there were few of us then, we at least constituted one of the few "channels" available. To extend the analogy: How many people watch the "cable-access" channel these days (our web pages and listservs), when there is so much glitter to see on MicroDisneyNBC.CNN, and when America On Line offers packages with "everything you need"? Futhermore, I'm not going to put all my bets on a telephony backbone owned by a consortium including AT&T, MCI, and Compuserve, nor on a government that's tried once already to censor content.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not disparaging the Internet as a means of communication, nor am I deprecating "alternative" radio and television programs that exploit free bandwidth. And I'm more "wired" than most--and I ain't proud. After all, I originally sent this report by Email. I just still see a tendency among leftists in the U.S., especially in academic circles, to regard the Internet as a communicative panacea that magically includes everyone's voice. But I digress again.
So what am I getting at? Well, to start with, there are other means of sharing information about events and struggles, such as the traditional print media. There are also alternative and pirate radio programs, which are somewhat less technologically intensive, and have the virtue of not being as visually mesmerizing as the cathode tube. The over-reliance on the Internet, mentioned above, resulted in an almost complete lack of information about the preparations for the Second Encuentro in either the left/progressive press or the capitalist media (where it is still possible to insert a news item or two) in the U.S. or, so I've heard, in the U.K. I found the details on the Internet and passed the word on to friends, who were probably doing something more constructive than browsing the web. This leads me to my next point.
We have to be careful not to become obsessed with the concept of networking as simply sharing (textual) information. It is important to be well informed, but it is also crucial to take a bite out of capitalism. (The two should be moments in a process.) I know too many leftists who are absorbed with being "up to speed," even if this means reading in the papers about the imminent demise of all they care about. (But, what the heck, at least they're well informed!) Alternative broadcast media and means of communication don't necessarily change people's passive, consumptive attitudes toward information in general. While the subject was hardly broached at mesas 1A & B, it seems that the mesas on alternative economics and struggles for the land and ecology understood networks more broadly, comprising, among other things, non-market systems for redistributing economic goods, conserving biological resources (such as traditional varieties of crop plants), and, where appropriate, transferring technological, financial, and material capital. Recall that while the capitalist press was ignoring or lying about events in Spain in the 1930s, people from distant countries came to put their bodies on the battle front and to help build a new society. Networks might involve such exchanges too.
My last point on the issue of networks is that I disagree with the argument that the network form of organization (decentralized, participatory, etc.) in itself is not sufficient to overcome capitalism's global reach. On the contrary, I am persuaded to believe that it may be the only form of global organization that can substantially undermine and replace capitalism. I think that a couple of issues are being confused in the argument that some different sort of organization is required at the global scale. First, unity of purpose (defeat of capitalism) does not imply organizational homogeneity, as one ponencia at the work/employment mesa suggested, though it may mean strategic points of contact and alliances. Second, global structures do not necessarily need to be centralized, and decentralized structures are not necessarily "localizing," i.e. introverted. In fact, it seems that decentralized structures are more adaptable and able to focus more on substantive issues, because they suffer least from diminishing marginal returns--a problem capitalism struggles with constantly, despite its built-in tactical flexibility. Of course, we should acknowledge that locally, conditions for industrial production, environmental cultivation, and social reproduction require diverse forms of organization. There is a lot of room for dialectical play here, and I don't believe that there are any easy solutions. Nevertheless, perhaps for that reason it is to the Zapatistas' credit that, when it comes to political organization, they are not "methologically pure."
What concretely do we mean by neo-liberalism? This relates to the point I made about fetishizing neo-liberalism. At mesa 1A there was a lot of nebulous talk about challenging "neo-liberalism," and only toward the end of the four days of discussion did anyone take up the question of confronting the actual institutions that are implementing its dreaded policies. At mesa 1A and others, this amounted to agreeing that a "counter-summit" to the World Trade Organisation meeting would be held in May of 1998 and that it involve some kind of public demonstration. This is good, since it will undoubtedly make more people aware of the role of the WTO in shaping the global economy, just as "EuroMarch" made more people aware of the ramifications of the Maastricht Treaty. But, as that paradoxical postmodern phrase puts it, the WTO is "old news." The 29 industrialized countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development have been negotiating rather quietly since 1995 on the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) that would supercede the provisions of the GATT 1994 (which the WTO implements). This agreement would, among other things, get rid of national laws on domestic content requirement and repatriation of capital and allow private entities to sue governments which violated the agreement. In other words, it would protect the direct or portfolio investments of transnational corporations and allow them to move their capital and profits about the globe virtually unhindered by social and environmental considerations.
This is yet another step toward further dispossessing everyone, and so we must think beyond protest politics. I was worried when the only proposal I heard at mesa 1A for directly confronting global and regional neoliberal institutions (WTO, NAFTA, MAI, TNCs, etc.) was for more marches. We need to put our imaginations to work thinking of how we can protect our resources from blatant robbery. We need to think hard about how we're going to take capital out of cycle of misery, not to mention taking control of the means of production. And how are we going to link these efforts? For instance, networks of local seed banks can protect genetic and specific diversity from the ravages of industrial agri-business; community-sponsored agriculture and needs-based local systems of distribution can put a dent in the irrational overproduction and waste of national and international trade; and land-trusts and homesteading can provide cheap, permanent housing managed by the occupants. Rank-and-file organizing in the labor unions has got to get beyond relying on collective bargaining and a "workerist" ethic, and integrate its struggle across sectors and with communities outside of the site of production. Some substantial work in this direction has been done. Let's keep it going. The unions still have the potential to hit capital where it hurts the most, but their organization is not sufficient grounds for building an alternative to capitalism ... which once again leads me to the next point.
One particular consensus came out of the mesa 1A discussions. This was the call for less work (meaning employment under capitalism) combined with a guaranteed income for all residents (not just citizens) of a country, irrespective of whether they are employed or not. This was seen as a step toward freeing more time for "socially useful work" (including political activism), which is not recognized as such in the capitalist mode of production. It was also considered a measure to counteract the blurring of the line between employment and unemployment under the neo-liberal régime by means of "workfare" programs, "retraining," temporary on-demand work, and even the increasing use of prison labor. Monty and others have addressed the question of whether such a call resonates in the struggles of the poor in countries like Nicaragua, where the official unemployment rate is 20% (in truth, more like 50%). Therefore, I won't pursue this issue, except to say that it is not a surprise that this European Encuentro was attended mainly by Europeans and was dominated by discussion of European social problems and ways of approaching them.
Instead, I'd like to question whether this "call" for less employment and guaranteed income is a demand of those who run the economy or a declaration of principle. The answer was never quite clear in the talk at mesa 1, though some of the ponencias (papers) presented were more explicit on the point.
If it's a demand, at whom is it leveled, and what exactly do we expect to gain? If it's meant merely as an rallying cry, demanding of bosses and bureaucrats what we know they won't deliver, so that they'll be shamed, what is it doing actually to empower the unemployed, the unpaid, the under-paid, and the overexploited? It's the same concern I have with the U.S. Labor Party's campaign for a Constitutional amendment requiring a "living wage." In the fanciful event that the capitalist bosses and their minions in state institutions say, "We're so sorry! Whatever were we thinking...?" and it's successful, is training a relative handful of activists to get signatures on petitions going to help them secure direct control over production for their lives, for making decisions about what to create, how, and for whom? I hope that no one among is so naïve as to regard state political, juridical, and regulatory institutions as neutral forums for "civil society." They are structures of alienation quite well adapted to promoting the capitalist economy ideologically and in mobilizing financial and material capital.
(Sometimes, however, such rallying tactics are used by interventionist political groups precisely because they don't empower working people. These tactics are used because they usually don't threaten the group's authority on the issue, and allow them a privileged position for cutting deals in the event that the institutions they are confronting decide to negotiate reforms. I think this is exactly the kind of politics that many of us are sick of and are trying to get beyond through the Encuentros and other processes.)
However, if it's meant as real demand of the powers that be, what on earth makes anyone think that it can be attained given the present state of political and economic affairs? Are we really calling for a renewal of the welfare state in the name of "radical reformism" (a term I lifted from the French Appel au débat)? Neo-liberal institutions and policies didn't arise by accident or just because some capitalists felt like redecorating. Even though they reproduce the renowned fundamental contradictions of capitalism, they are the result of careful consideration by planning élites of events of the past 20 years or so. They were, in part, an adjustment to crises in the limits of productivity, the saturation of "consumer" markets, the divorce of finance from national economies and eventually from tangible standards, the claims of former colonies to their resources and the economic leverage this afforded them (e.g. the "oil crisis" of the 1970s), and the debt owed by "Third World" countries to the capitalist core. In addition to these global crises, the working class in the U.S. and other industrialized countries had taken advantage of post-war boom to make some significant reformist gains. For example the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was established in the U.S. in 1970 (though it had been nearly 60 years since the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire). The Consumer Product Safety Commission and Environmental Protection Agency came into being around the same time. But the political process hadn't kept up with economic developments, and such reforms were badly timed for big capital. The Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations in the U.S. have been regrouping and fighting back, just as the Thatcher, Major, and Blair governments have in the U.K. (I add this last point because of the emphasis in the mesa 1A discussion put on internal divisions as the cause of the working class's failure to make substantial inroads against global capitalism. Certainly, there are internal problems of racism, patriarchy, hierarchy, and so forth, and the working class may have underestimated the strength of capital and its allies, but we should also consider that the capitalist class has been waging a resolute war of late.)
In other words, capitalism has moved on. If we're even going to keep up, we've got to think of appropriate responses--those that increase our direct control over what we need to live fulfilling and meaningful lives, those that allow us to make decisions about the things that most affect us. How empowering is it in the long run to receive a guaranteed income check? What would we purchase? Who or what what would make it? Under what sort of conditions? I think the dichotomy between the "optimist" and "pessimist" predictions of what would happen in a society with more "free time" and a guaranteed income, posed in another ponencia at mesa 1, seems to fall apart if we look instead toward engaging in projects that strengthen and build the kind of social relations that we want while reclaiming what we need from capitalism: land, housing, tools, factories, gardens, means of communication, amusement parks, discotheques, libraries, whatever you can imagine. There are already a great number of such projects in the works, and networks would presumably sustain all these by serving partly as an "extension service" among them (to borrow a phrase suggested by a good friend of mine). If the "optimists" want a "great development of associative activity," to use the language of the ponencia again, then they should develop associative projects, not ask first for a dole check and hope that's sufficient enticement to socialism. Because if they succeed and then try to foment "associative activity," they may well end up with the "pessimist" prediction of a reinforced "coach potato" society. No doubt, an assured dole check can be important stop-gap measure. I feel a little more secure, if not exactly happy, getting an unemployment insurance check. But, if you'll pardon the metaphor, I don't bank on it.
On the other hand, as a declaration of principles, "less employment for more enjoyable, socially useful work that guarantees us life and the means to sustain and enrich it" is terrific. It encourages us to think beyond work as capitalist exploitation, to use our imaginations, to be visionary.
