Harry Cleaver:"Computer-linked Social Movements and the GlobalThreat to

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-----Original Message-----
From: Erik Wesselius <erik225@knoware.nl>
To: StopWTORound@onelist.com <StopWTORound@onelist.com>
Date: Tuesday, December 14, 1999 3:23 PM


>From: Erik Wesselius <erik225@knoware.nl>
>
>Surfing on the ideas put forward in the Economist article I
>stumbled upon this interesting article:
>
>Harry Cleaver, "Computer-linked Social Movements and the
>Global Threat to Capitalism", Austin, Texas, July 1999
><http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/polnet.html>


Computer-linked Social Movements
and the Global Threat to Capitalism

Abstract: Of all the emerging roles of computer communications in social
conflict, this paper argues that the most serious challenge to the basic
institutional structures of modern society flow from the emergence of
computer-linked global social movements that are, increasingly, challenging
both nationa and supranational policy-making institutions. The suggestion is
that we are currently witnessing an accelerating circulation of social
conflicts whose participants recognize a common enemy: contemporary
capitalism. In their increasingly common rejection of business priorities
their struggles cannot but recall Marxist notions of "class warfare." Yet
the common opposition to capitalism is not accompanied by the old notion of
a unified alternative project of socialism. On the contrary, such a vision
has been displaced by a proliferation of diverse projects and the notion
that there is no need for universal rules. In response to these struggles,
the threatened institutions are responding in various ways, sometimes by
military and paramilitary force, sometimes by co-optation aimed at
reintegrating the antagonistic forcs. The problem for us is finding ever new
ways to defeat these responses and continue to build new worlds.

Recent writings on the spread of widespread, computer communications have
found them playing new roles in all kinds of social conflict: in the
activities of terrorists, drug cartels, illegal arms merchants,
nation-states, advocacy groups and social movements. The content of these
roles differ --from hacker break-ins and extortion demands, to the
circulation of information on the Internet-- but they all involve the use of
modern computer technologies as weapons of criminal acts or political
struggle.

Clarifying the importance of communications in such conflict areas depends
on the examination of case studies. Case studies, in turn require us to
narrow our focus and select a specific area of conflict for closer scrutiny.
How to choose? In general this question is being answered by individuals
according to their own interests and by funding agencies according to their
priority of worries. Everyone, I assume, wonders "in which area of conflict
are the effects of these new behaviors and organizational forms likely to be
the most profound?"

Of all the areas mentioned above, I argue that the area developing in ways
most likely to produce profound effects is that of broad-based social
movements. The reasons for this view are simple.

On the one hand, no innovation in the organization of terrorism, criminal
cartels, military operations or any other inter-state interaction threatens
the socio-economic and political order of contemporary global capitalism.(1)
Small groups wield terrorism as a political weapon in the struggle for
conventional power. For governments terrorism is just another way of
repressing the opposition or, at an international level, of putting pressure
on other nation-states. Current efforts to reorganize the military are
merely designed to make it more effective within the current system ­which
includes, and is not threatened by, modifications in nation-state
relationships. Similarly, the restructuring of criminal organizations (drug
cartels, arms merchants) is no more mysterious than parallel efforts among
their more legal corporate counterparts. In all of these conflict areas we
may well expect innovation and changes in the forms of conflicts that
citizens will need to take into account, but none of them threatens any
fundamental change in the current system.

On the other hand, there is accumulating evidence that current trends in
large-scale social movements do pose such a threat and hold the possibility
of coalescing into a deepening and broadening of that threat. Many past
studies of large-scale social movements have not seen them as dangers to the
current social system but rather as narrowly focused, largely reformist
movements aimed at achieving particular changes, but not general ones. In
contrast, this paper suggests that current struggles for particular changes
are linking up into a collaboration whose impact may wind up being much
larger than the sum of the individual influences. One of the most important
dimensions of the movement toward collaboration is its increasingly global
or transnational character. Local and national movements, which have fought
local and national battles, are quite consciously seeking and finding ways
to make their efforts complement those of others organized around similar
issues elsewhere.

Transnational rhizomes, networks or social netwars?
These tendencies in the emergence and evolution of social movements have
attracted the attention of independent critical intellectuals, mainstream
social scientists and national security analysts. Among the former, the
theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari has been particularly
fruitful. In the process of transcending traditional Left notions of
structuralism, dialectics and a preoccupation with large-scale forces, they
elaborated a number of new concepts to illuminate the micro-dynamics of both
individual psychology and social movements. For my purposes here, the most
salient of their ideas are the ones based on the metaphor of the rhizome: a
subterranean plant growth process involving propagation through the
horizontal development of the plant stem.(2) Deleuze and Guattari juxtaposed
this horizontal elaboration of a multiplicity of underground roots and above
ground stems to more familiar arboreal processes associated with the
vertical, centralized growth of trees. Through the metaphor of the rhizome
they explored the characteristics one finds, or might expect to find, in
horizontally linked human interactions --whether of small-scale social
groups or large-scale social movements. This work has been taken up by
activists in such movements and used for thinking about their own activity,
both locally and internationally.(3)

In the mainstream, first sociologists and then political scientists have
taken over from mathematical graph theory the concept of networks to analyse
a wide variety of social relationships.(4) These have included individual
behavior, small group interactions, organizational behavior and social
movements --most recently transnational movements.(5) Of these, the last two
would seem to have the most salience here. Organizational theorists and
observers have traced the emergence within businesses and to some degree the
state sector, of network forms of organization that appear distinct from
more traditional hierarchies and market systems.(6) Recent applications of
network analysis to transnational social movements have drawn on past
sociological studies of local networks, on organizational studies and on
empirical work on particular network-based campaigns to knit together a
synthetic view of "those relevant actors working internationally on an
issue, who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse and dense
exchanges of information and services." (7)

Among national security analysts, the most perceptive work has been done by
RAND's David Ronfeldt and his co-authors who have examined the implications
of the emergence of network forms of organization for the Defense
Department. Drawing on studies of the changing organization of business and
the state, such as that of Walter Powell, they have taken over the
juxtaposition of networks to markets and hierarchies and argued that
contemporary social movements have been evolving into networked
organizations capable of unleashing "transnational social netwars." They see
emerging transnational networks of "information ­ age activism" based on
associations among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with
modern and postmodern issues such as the environment, human rights,
immigration, indigenous peoples and freedom in cyberspace.(8)

The Zapatista Movement
In much of this recent work, a primary reference point for the study of
transnational rhizomes or social netwars has been the rebellion waged by
Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico and the activities of its
supporters around the world since the beginning of 1994.

The first activist analysis of communicational dimension of the conflict
noted that the "most striking thing about the sequence of events set in
motion on January 1, 1994 has been the speed with which news of the struggle
circulated and the rapidity of the mobilization of support which resulted."
(9) Modern computer communications, through the Internet and the Association
for Progressive Communications networks, made it possible for the Zapatistas
to get their message out despite governmental spin control and censorship.
Mailing lists and conferences also facilitated discussions and debate among
concerned observers that led to the organization of protest and support
activities in over forty countries around the world. The Zapatista rebellion
was weaving, the analysis concluded, a global "electronic fabric of
struggle."

In July 1995 a Defense Department "strategic assessment" of the Internet
written for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and
Low-Intensity Conflict, quoted an earlier (and erroneous) Army report that:

Subcommandante Marco [sic] of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN)
in Mexico utilizes a portable laptop computer to issue orders to other EZLN
units via a modem, and to foreign media contacts in order to maintain a
favorable international propaganda image." (10)

Two years latter, in a general essay on "netwar," defense analysts David
Ronfeldt and John Arquilla wrote:

"In Mexico, a mix of subnational and transnational actors have mounted a
social netwar against a state lagging at democratization. The netwar appears
in the decentralized collaboration among the numerous, diverse Mexican and
transnational (mostly U.S. and Canadian) activists who side with the
Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), and who aim to affect government
policies, on human rights, democracy and other major reform issues. Mexico .
. . is now the scene of a prototype for social netwar in the 21st century."
(11)

In 1998, as part of their study of the development of transnational human
rights networks, Keck and Sikkink reported that:

During the peasant uprisings in Chiapas in 1994 it became clear that the
government could no longer control information as it had in 1968. . . . The
press and domestic and international NGOs monitored the conflict closely,
and electronic mail became one of the main mechanisms through which the EZLN
communicated with the world. (12)

Such analyses, across the political spectrum, have sought to understand the
characteristics of what appears to be a new capacity for this and other
social movements to communicate across borders and to operate at a
transnational level. The rapidity and thoroughness with which almost every
aspect of modern computer communications have been used by pro-Zapatista
forces has been central to this particular movement becoming "a prototype."
>From the use of mailing lists and conferences for the dissemination of
information, the sharing of experience and the facilitation of discussion
and organizing through the elaboration of multimedia web sites for the
amplification and archiving of the developing history of the struggle to the
use of electronic voting technology to make possible global participation in
plebiscites on their political positions, the Zapatistas and their
supporters have been on the cutting edge of the political use of computer
communications.

These analyses of this movement have also recognized how the content of
these rhizomatic or networking forms of social mobilization has differed
from traditional Leninist notions of revolution. Instead of a dedication to
the seizure of power, the Zapatista rebellion, including its international
dimensions, has involved a mobilization with the essentially political
objectives of 1) pulling together grassroots movements against the current
political and economic order in Mexico and the world and of 2) facilitating
the elaboration and circulation of alternative approaches to social
organization.

Such recognition differs markedly from that of the Mexican government whose
primary responses have included police, military and paramilitary terrorism
(backed by economic and military aid from the US).(13) The insistence on the
fundamentally political nature of the conflict also stands in stark contrast
to the thinking of some U.S. policymakers who often have difficulty
distinguishing between types of struggles and wind up defining most of them
as national security threats.(14)

At the same time, however, that activist analyses have sought ways to deepen
the effectiveness of these grassroots efforts, "national security" research
has emphasized how governments should learn to counter such social
movements. "To ensure that netwars do not adversely affect Mexico's
stability or transformability," Ronfeldt and Martinez wrote, "the government
will have to improve its ability to wage counter-netwar . . ." (15)

Military "Counter-netwar" responses
A recent attempt to assess evidence of any Mexican Army shift toward
networked forms has focused on signs of decentralization in operations, more
inter-agency cooperation and "increased attention to public affairs,
psychological operations, relations with NGOs, and human-rights issues".(16)
Unfortunately, from the point of view of the local inhabitants, the
dispersion of small units in a so-called "blanketing strategy" has primarily
involved widespread Army intimidation and terror in Zapatista
communities.(17) Inter-agency cooperation and "increased attention" to NGOs
and human-rights issues has revealed itself as an increased government
willingness and ability to persecute NGOs and foment human rights
violations.

For one thing, the Mexican government has come to understand the important
role of international observers in outflanking its attempts to cover up its
terrorism and murder in Chiapas. Over the last year or so the Mexican
immigration service has been used increasingly to harass and confine the
activities of foreign observers. In an obvious attempt to avoid embarrassing
international reports by human rights observers, the government has
undertaken a blatantly xenophobic campaign accusing foreign observers of
"political" interference in Mexican internal affairs. Hundreds have been
expelled from Mexico, many banned from returning.(18)

For another, the major institutional change in the Mexican army in this
period that looks like an adaptation to "netwar" appears to me to have been
its insertion into domestic police functions (e.g., anti-drug and urban
police operations) and their intimate relation with state-supported
paramilitary terror networks.(19) Indeed, the most "networked" new aspect of
army organization may be this linkage. This kind of mailed-fist response,
however, is totally inappropriate to the political character of the social
conflict. Vicious repression has only generated increased support from human
rights groups and other sympathizers. By failing to respond politically to
political challenges, the government has been losing the real "war."

Political "Counter-netwar" responses
An alternative approach to the antagonisms between social movements and the
state suggests their reduction to the negotiations of pluralism. In the case
of Chiapas, there have been recurrent efforts to convince or pressure the
EZLN into laying down its arms and becoming an officially recognized player
in the formal political sphere. More broadly: "Interests and needs continue
to grow for all manner of civil ­ society NGOs and other nongovernmental
actors to develop new ways to work with government actors all across North
America."(20) The formulation that it is the non-state actors who need to
work with governments assumes an at least potential complementarity of
interests.

Grassroots movements, in contrast, desire real changes in government
policies, or even alternative forms of collectively managing the social
commons. Even among those who think reform possible, many believe that
without considerable external pressure governments will never change in the
directions they desire. There is also a perception, based on past
experience, that to "work with governments" is to risk having one's
challenges to the current order neutralized through co-optation.
Collaboration with the state, in other words, can lead directly to the
subsumption of "civil society" within the state and an end to whatever
autonomy it has managed to assert.(21)

The use of consultation-co-optation is currently in vogue at the World Bank.
This supranational state institution traditionally is not directly
accountable to the citizens of its member states. But in recent years, the
Bank has been besieged by environmentalists and indigenous rights groups.
Faced with multiplying objections to its approach to development, the World
Bank has invited its critics to contribute to the reform of its
policies --with some success, given that a certain number of NGOs have
accepted to engage in such consultation. Of course, such discussions about
reforming Bank policy must take place within the framework of contemporary
global capitalism. Listening to critics has the triple advantage for the
Bank of 1) getting them off the streets and into less visible conference
rooms, 2) adding to its stock of ideas about how to foster capitalist
development while, 3) bleeding time, energy and creativity away from any
consideration of more radical alternatives.

In other examples of institutional responses to growing grassroots
opposition to their practices, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have begun to
accept the idea of "a dialogue with civil society." The surprising
willingness in early January 1998 of IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus
to meet with workers in South Korea who were opposing the government-IMF
program to deal with the "Asia Crisis" broke with all previous practice.(22)
His promise to set up a "permanent" dialogue between the IMF mission to
South Korea and the labor movement is very much in the spirit of World Bank
consultations with its critics.(23)

The OECD's opening to such dialogue came only after the defeat of its
initiative to negotiate and pass a Multilateral Agreement on Investment
(MAI) behind the backs of most of the world's peoples. That initiative --to
define a global set of rights of corporate investors (paralleling the trade
rules of the GATT)-- was begun in 1995 but not made public until February
1997 when a draft of the proposal was leaked. The temporary defeat of this
initiative has been credited, in part, to the utilization of e-mail and web
sites to circulate information about the MAI, including critiques of both
the content of the agreement and the undemocratic process of drafting
it.(24) As a result of the outrage that this information generated, the
Internet also became a vehicle for circulating and organizing a mobilization
campaign against the MAI in dozens of countries. Such mobilization put
pressure both on the negotiators at the OECD and on member country
governments. In April 1998, under intense fire, the OECD halted the
negotiations for six months. In October 1998, France pulled out of the
negotiations, substantially undermining them.

In an analysis of this conflict, Wharton School management professor Stephen
Kobrin suggested that because the Internet makes it difficult to maintain
the secrecy of such elite negotiations it will be necessary to invest in
generating "public support for treaties such as the MAI" --no matter how
difficult or costly.(25)

Stunned by the success of grassroots opposition, the OECD invited NGOs to a
seminar-consultation on December 2, 1998. Only three NGOs participated in
this seminar while the vast majority of those who are active in the anti-MAI
movement stayed away, refusing to provide the OECD with the legitimization
of their presence.(26) This refusal was expressed in a scathing public
letter to the OECD, the draft of which was circulated on the Internet for
modification:

"No additional time is needed. We know perfectly well where we stand on the
MAI and on any text inspired by the same principles. We have already
declared on many occasions that we shall continue to oppose it under any
guise and wherever it may resurface."

Although we can understand your desire to re-establish the OECD's
credibility, badly, perhaps terminally, damaged by the MAI process, we do
not intend to lend ourselves to this enterprise.(27)

European Commission documents recently leaked and posted on the Internet, as
well as other public reports, suggest that rather than abandoning the effort
to create a MAI, or of undertaking any serious opening to "civil society,"
there is currently underway an attempt to shift negotiations from the OECD
to the WTO, which has been even less inclined to talk with its critics.

In contrast to the IMF and the OECD, the World Trade Organization still
largely operates behind a wall of obfuscation and state repression, as was
seen in its response to the confrontations that took place in Geneva during
its May 1998 meetings. As early as February of that year, an international
coalition of grassroots movements formed a "People's Global Action" (PGA) to
build a global coalition from the bottom against what they perceived as a
global alliance at the top. Organized in part through the Internet, and
dedicated to direct action as well as to non-violent civil disobedience, the
PGA prepared huge demonstrations for the WTO meetings. When the time came,
somewhere between ten and twenty thousand activists converged in several
days of demonstrations. A Swiss police crackdown turned the city into a
battleground tinged with the smell of tear-gas. There was no dialogue here,
just traditional aloofness and antagonism.

The WTO's account of the situation is quite different. Because it has
allowed some NGOs to attend its ministerial meetings since 1996, it presents
itself as quite open to "external" feedback from "civil society:"

"Throughout the three-day-event NGOs were briefed regularly by the WTO
Secretariat on the progress of the informal working sessions -- a feature
which was welcomed by NGOs as a genuine sign of commitment to ensure
transparency and the recognition of civil society as an entity which
deserves attention in its own right."

A study of the list of NGO participants at this meeting (as well as at
others), however, reveals that the WTO's notion of "civil society" is not
one shared by most grassroots groups. The vast majority of the participants
turned out to be business organizations and other organizations that work in
their behalf. For the WTO, it seems, "civil society" refers to everyone
outside the state. For the grassroots movements organizing against it,
"civil society" --when they use that term-- generally refers to that part of
society which falls outside both the state and business sectors. By that
criteria there were very few participants indeed and the appropriateness of
their "non-business" status is debatable, e.g., trade union organizations
that work as the labor relations arm of business, environmental groups that
accept capitalism as a framework within which to work.

Nevertheless, since the massive confrontation in May 1998, the WTO has
intensified its efforts to give at least the appearance of listening to its
critics. It has adopted a few measures to improve the transparency of its
activities and is talking about making its documents available to the public
a little sooner. It will provide regular briefings for NGOs, invite NGOs to
more meetings and distribute NGO papers to member countries. It is even
engaging in a bit of "netwar" by creating a special NGO page at its web
site. All these measures WTO Director General Renato Ruggiero calls "a
genuine sign of commitment . . . to the recognition of civil society as an
entity which deserves attention in its own right." However, given the
character of the NGOs the WTO has seen fit to engage to date, it seems
unlikely that this rhetoric signals a real opening to those opposed to its
policies. One thing is clear: willingness to enter into dialogue with one's
critics in civil society is by no means a hegemonic tactic and is often
tentative at best, except in the case of the World Bank's effort to lead the
way.

There are two things about his new "offensive of smiles" on the part of
major supranational capitalist institutions that I want to discuss further.
First, while serious invitations to a dialogue between grassroots activists
and supranational institutions are certainly a measure of the growing power
of grassroots opposition we must also ask ourselves about the nature and
sources of that power. Second, while in every case those being invited to
dialogue are representatives of NGOs, "civil society" --defined as the mass
of society outside the state and the business sector-- encompasses a much
more comprehensive set of actors. The concept itself, moreover, has
important limitations.

Dialogue and Power
The power to provoke invitations to dialogue with supranational capitalist
institutions was not always there. Before social movements demonstrated
their ability to organize an embarrassing amount of public pressure, they
were ignored. To build such a level of pressure opposition movements
organized themselves internationally, or globally, in ways that bypassed all
the layers of mediation that previously protected these institutions. In
this way the movements were able to confront the institutions at their own
supranational level.(28) In the case of the OECD (or the WTO) the
international character of mobilization is obvious. But even cases that
appear purely local, such as the IMF talks with the South Korean labor
movement, turn out at least partially to be a response to international
struggle. Beginning with the general strike in December 1996, South Korean
workers reached out to the rest of the world through various means,
especially the Internet, and succeeded in mobilizing considerable
support --in a manner similar to the Zapatista effort in Mexico.

At the heart of such efforts was the mobilization of power against Power.
That is to say, the elaborate pattern of connections and linkages within
social movements bring vast numbers of imaginative people into a collective
endeavor where their joint creativity challenges that of a Power often
organized in a more rigid and less-flexible manner.(29) Against a Power-ful
rule-making and enforcing institution, grassroots power pits a rhizomatic
constituent force, more capable of innovating and elaborating new lines of
flight in struggle. The problem for Power is to divide and to harness power
for its own purposes, to give itself life.(30) The constitution of a
multitude of alternative, linked nodes of antagonistic power by-passing
mediations, undermines that division and makes the harnessing more
difficult.

Although the bypassing of mediation by grassroots opposition has been
achieved through similar organizational forms, history and policy shifts
have dictated that the pattern of confrontation would vary from institution
to institution. Ever since the 1960s the World Bank, for example, had come
under attack from Nationalist and Left-wing intellectuals for its role in
American imperialism and/or capitalist exploitation in the Third World. But
such critiques failed to stir any widespread movement against the
institution.(31) It was not until environmentalists and indigenous rights
groups widely disseminated horror stories about the suffering caused by
particular projects along with appealing information about the peoples and
cultures being destroyed, that Bank activities were brought to critical
public awareness and challenge. The power of their protests was also
augmented in the 1980s by attacks on the closely related role of the World
Bank in the structural adjustment approach to the international debt
crisis.(32)

The International Monetary Fund had also been long critiqued for the
deflationary adjustment it sometimes demanded of its member states. The
Right critiqued the assault on national sovereignty and the Left critiqued
the imposition of unemployment, falling wages and poverty on the working
class. But it only became widely known, and truly hated, in the 1980s for
its central role in the international debt crisis.(33) Totally devoted to
the interest of international banks in achieving complete repayment for all
loans, the Fund demanded the repeated imposition of killing austerity and
neoliberal structural adjustments in exchange for its official sanction of
debt roll-over loans. That austerity was imposed against people who were not
responsible for having borrowed outstanding debt or for the difficulties of
repayment.(34) As a major agent of the spread of neoliberal policies, i.e.,
pro-market, pro-business, anti-regulation, anti-worker, the IMF has
promulgated increased unemployment, falling wages and increased suffering
around the world. In its wake a legion of antagonists have been active in
crafting international linkages and developing new forms of opposition.

Opposition to the World Trade Organization emerged out of a history of
grassroots perceptions that a primary goal of trade agreements has been to
hammer down trade barriers in ways that facilitate corporate circumvention
of local controls. The recent creation of the WTO and its use by
corporations to attack local constraints has hastened the extension of local
struggles to the international level. For grassroots environmental movements
that have fought and gained some local protections for nature from corporate
rapaciousness, the dangers of an MAI or a WTO being used to undercut their
successes became quickly apparent. For human rights activists who have
fought for local laws against public contracts with corporations that
support repressive regimes, the WTO is now seen as a primary vehicle for
corporations to attack such constraints.(35) For workers who have seen
falling trade barriers lead to runaway shops, there has been a shift from a
struggle for protection to one for global organization.(36) The WTO has not
only increased the centralization of global economic policymaking, but has
also provided a central object of protest as well.

Finally, the Organization for Economic and Cultural Development was long,
for most people, merely a quasi-governmental institution that periodically
issued country and topical reports. For the Third World it was the Rich
Country's Club, for the Right a part of the conspiracy for a world
government and for the Left it was one more gathering place of capitalist
policymakers. But the discovery of obscure negotiations to craft a
Multilateral Agreement on Investment that would, like some trade agreements,
undercut local and even national victories by grassroots movements focused
the attention and anger of thousands of activists all over the world. Myriad
individuals and groups with little previous interest in the OECD gathered
information, linked up and shared ideas and methods for a campaign of global
proportions.

This transition, however, from the local to the global has not always been
direct. Sometimes it has passed through a regional phase. This can be
illustrated with two examples.

In North America an important phase of this transition from local to the
global organizing was the battle over the negotiation and passage of the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As with the later case of the
MAI, negotiations for NAFTA were carried on in secret. But the discovery of
this behind-closed-doors deal making led to the formation of tri-national
collaborative networks of opposition in Canada, the United States and
Mexico. This anti-NAFTA movement, operating through direct meetings and the
Internet, forced the negotiations into public view and almost defeated this
top-down trade agreement. The subsequent formation of the World Trade
Organization caught the attention of these grassroots trade activists and
made them realize that a purely regional approach was not enough. Many of
them have since formed the North American backbone of the anti-WTO movement.

In Western Europe we find another progression from the local through the
regional to the global. The recent, increasingly tight interlinking of
economic and social policy --from the Maastricht treaty and Schengen
Agreement, to the monetary union-- has met with growing challenge by
grassroots movements. Those movements, one after another, have become
convinced that these regional arrangements are aimed at a fundamental
augmentation in the power of business and a parallel decrease in that of
rank and file labor, immigrants, peasants, the Green movement and other
grassroots self-organization. But the mobilization against these regional
arrangements has come in a period where others have already been intensely
involved in confrontations with supranational state institutions. Thus
European activists have been quick to join a more global organization of
grassroots opposition. The European response was particularly strong in
response to the Zapatista program that attacks globalisation while
supporting the elaboration of globally interlinked local and regional
alternatives to capitalism.

These new global conflicts have involved cross-fertilization and the
combination of energies generated by local roots. In general we can say that
local conflicts between citizen groups and governments have expanded into
global efforts in response to two things: first, to a spreading uniformity
of policies and international agreements among governments to implement
world-wide sets of rules and second, to the resultant perception of common
interests in challenging not only those rules but any set of uniform
mandates unrelated to local situations.

The spreading uniformity of economic and social policies has been re-crafted
over the last twenty years from the top down in ways more and more in line
with "neoliberalism". The increasingly homogeneous character of policy
across the face of the earth has created a situation where more and more
people, over wider and wider areas, despite geographic, linguistic and
cultural differences, have come to formulate a common opposition to these
policies and to take more and more widely linked action against them.

In earlier years, abstract theories confronted an abstract system. The very
existence of "a system" was sometimes hard to recognize in its diverse
manifestations and policies. As a result critical theories had little
capacity to galvanize widespread oppositional action. Today, the reduction
of that diversity into a common array of policies has given new life to such
theories, which, in turn, have informed the emergence of a common resistance
on a scale never before known. As the central roles of institutions such as
the World Bank, the OECD, the WTO and the IMF in the crafting and
implementation of these policies have become clear, they have also offered
focal points for protest.(37) In turn, the power of this mobilization has
been forcing supranational institutions such as the World Bank and the OECD
reluctantly to open their doors to "civil society."

Civil Society: Networks, Rhizomes and Currents
The development and deployment of this power has not gone unnoticed by
national security analysts. Nor have the participants in its elaboration
failed to articulate visions of what they were crafting. There has, however,
been a tendency among many on all sides to reduce the meaning of "civil
society" to formal NGOs.(38) This reduction has been more or less severe,
largely depending on the interests of those using the words. For the WTO, as
we have seen, the term NGO is used so broadly as to include the private
business sector, while for most in the grassroots movements, the term refers
only to non-governmental and non-business organizations. Nevertheless, in
both cases references to "civil society" become concrete only in the form of
NGOs. Such reductionism is not surprising in a society where political Power
is usually vested in formal institutions. It is not, however, satisfactory.

Within the development of the kinds of grassroots movements I been
describing, NGOs should be seen as only particular organizational
crystallizations of a much more general and fluid "civil society." Indeed,
partly in reaction to the growth and behavior of some transnational NGOs,
various critiques emerged along with a quite conscious search for
alternative ways of organizing. One such critique has been of an observed
tendency for NGOs to become bureaucratic and self-preserving institutions,
increasingly operating above and independently from their supporters. This
critique parallels similar ones that have been directed at traditional labor
unions and political parties by the Zapatistas who have been unusually
successful in articulating this critique in ways that have resonated widely
through their networks. A second critique has been that such NGOs have cut
deals with the state and with business in ways that have betrayed the
purposes for which the organizations were formed. Here again, parallels can
be drawn with the behavior of "business" unions and political parties.

These critiques have effectively reformulated the notion of "civil society"
in a broader new sense. "Civil society" becomes a term applied to all those
moments and movements within society that resist, intentionally or not,
subordination to capitalist institutions and, in many cases, fight for
alternative ways of organizing society.(39)

The conceptualization of networking used by the theoreticians of "netwar" do
not quite grasp the reality being evoked here. A "net" is a woven fabric
made up interlinked knots --which in social terms means interlinked groups.
This is applicable enough where there are easily identifiable, cooperating
groups, such as NGOs. What is missing, however, is the sense of ceaseless,
fluid motion within "civil society" in which "organizing" may not take the
form of "organizations" but of an ebb and flow of contact at myriad points.

The same critique can be made of the concept of "rhizome." Despite its power
of evocation the rhizome evokes a fixed form, albeit growing horizontally in
various directions. The cattail rhizome in ponds, for instance, elaborates
itself and sends up shoots from old and new nodes, year after year. The
shoots, however, with their long sharp leaves and heavy head of pollen, are
always the same. So here too restlessness exists only at the margins.

As a metaphor for thinking about the ceaseless movement that forms the
political life and historical trajectory of those resisting and sometimes
escaping the institutions of capitalism, I have come to prefer that of
water, of the hydrosphere, especially of oceans with their ever restless
currents and eddies, now moving faster, now slower, now warmer, now colder,
now deeper, now on the surface. At some points water does freeze,
crystallizing into rigidity, but mostly it melts again, undoing one
molecular form to return to a process of dynamic self-organizing that
refuses crystallization yet whose directions and power can be observed and
tracked. Thus too with "civil society." It is fluid, changing constantly and
only momentarily forming those solidified moments we call "organizations."
Such moments are constantly eroded by the shifting currents surrounding them
so that they are repeatedly melted back into the flow itself.

Such phenomena, so characteristic of the history of social movements, have
been a source of endless frustration to those who would harness the power of
those flows, whether the institutions of capitalism or the Leninist party.
Power would harness power, but power lies in the flow itself, in the broad
and deep currents that transverse society. Indeed, in its more genial
moments capitalism has understood something of this and sought to harness
the flows (class struggle) without trying to freeze them.(40) Marx captured
this in his application of the metaphor of circulation to sketch the
"circuits of capital." The metaphor returned in mainstream macroeconomics'
portrayal of the circular character of economic relationships and its sharp
distinction between flows and stocks. But in both cases the flows in
question are harnessed flows, like rivers or ocean tides diverted into
hydroelectric plants to drive turbines. And this harnessing, this
constraint, is endlessly resisted by the restlessness of a humanity that has
so many, many different ideas about interesting forms of self-organization.
This resistance and this proliferation of ideas have characterized precisely
those social movements described above.

In line with this metaphor we can think about the conflicts described above
not so much in terms of wars between set pieces (chess, go, military
confrontations) or wars between classes for Power (Leninist revolution
versus the capitalist state), but rather in terms of the vast imagination
and capability of self-organization of society straining against the
capitalist rules that bind, limit and distort.(41) There is a kind of class
war here that involves increasingly resistance to the unity of global
capitalism. But the resistance flows not from a unified class seeking a new
unified hegemony, but rather from myriad currents seeking the freedom of the
open seas where they can re-craft their own movement and their interactions
free of a single set of constraining capitalist rules.

Technology, conflict & politics
Increasingly the self-organization of social movements risen in opposition
to neoliberalism has used a mixture of traditional and modern forms of
communication to connect their diverse moments. Traditional forms have
included face-to-face encounters in village assemblies and transnational
meetings. Of the modern forms of communication that have been used, the
computer-based Internet has emerged as a favored space. In conflict after
conflict, e-mail and web pages have been cited by protagonists on both sides
as playing key roles.

But what, exactly are those roles and what do they tell us about the nature
of the conflicts? While the roles have been diverse and changing, I would
argue that the most important ones have been the sharing of otherwise hard
to obtain information and the self-organizing of resistance and innovation
that information has made possible.

1. Given well-documented constraints of flows of information designed to
keep people in the dark, and decisions in the undemocratic hands of
policy-making elites, the first task in virtually all these social conflicts
has been to obtain accurate information on a given situation and then
circulate it widely. This requires bypassing the elite-controlled mass media
in terms of both obtaining information and getting it out. The preferred
vehicles for such circulation have been, precisely, electronic mail and the
web.

2. Information, however, is often of limited value until it has been placed
within context and interpreted. Therefore, the circulation of information
has always involved the circulation of interpretation and evaluation. This
in turn has led to discussion and debate among those with different
interpretations. Carried out through web pages, the presentation of
interpretations can become quite one-sided --each position has its own
page.(42) But in electronic mail, especially in the usual form of mailing
lists and conferences, access is free and all sides have the possibility of
articulating their own position. Unlike newspapers, radio and television
media where feedback is slow or non-existence, these electronic forums
insure quick interaction among varying interpretations. These lists then,
with their ongoing flows of conversation (which are often archived on web
pages) constitute a kind of alternative, oppositional community of
discussion and debate outside of and operating much more democratically than
traditional policymaking institutions.(43)

3. What precipitates out of this community are various kinds of off-line
activities, sometimes of protest and objection, sometimes of the positive
elaboration of alternatives. This precipitation takes place as discussion
and debate about what is going on passes over into questions of what is to
be done. So, for example, knowledge about the Zapatista uprising led to
mobilization to prevent its extermination. Similarly, examination of and
debate about the drafts of NAFTA and the MAI led to discussion and debate
about how to block them. Such discussion has ranged from general questions
of strategy and tactics to the crafting of particular efforts. In the case
of NAFTA, for example, there was a debate over whether opposition should be
mobilized against agreement itself or against its fast-track negotiation and
implementation. (The latter was chosen and the battle was lost.) In the case
of the MAI there was a similar debate over whether to fight for its
abandonment or to participate in its reform. The former was chosen and the
battle was won --at least temporarily.) In the case of the NAFTA, there was
considerable discussion of possible alternative principles for "fair" trade.
In the case of the MAI what discussion there has been about alternative
approaches to corporate rights have concerned their limitation rather than
their extension.

But the medium is also the message and throughout the electronic fabric of
these computer communications we find discussion and debate about best uses
and possible abuses of the medium itself. Partly this has emerged directly
from the interactions -- as in recurrent discussions of netiquette. Partly
it has come in reaction to outside attempts to limit or censure the content
of the interactions as in efforts to outlaw pornography (U.S, Europe), to
forbid political use (Singapore, Burma, China) or to interfere with
political use (Germany, Italy). The debate over proper use has also emerged
at the interface between these new movements and older forms of struggle.

As social conflicts have moved into cyberspace, not surprisingly, many
tactics, well known in other areas, have been adapted to electronic
environment. For instance, protest letter-writing campaigns to politicians,
governments or corporations have been reproduced in the form of e-mail
protest campaigns where decision-makers' e-mail boxes have been deluged with
messages objecting to some particular policy. Or computer fax capability has
facilitated similar campaigns via that media. Another example has been the
adaptation of the tactics of graffiti and billboard art-modification
protests to the World Wide Web. Those who have combined, either in an
individual or a group or a movement, both political sensibility and
technical skills have hacked into various web sites --usually those of
institutions whose actions are being contested and whose web pages could be
altered to make a political point. The CIA website was hacked and
modifications imposed, much to the embarrassment of the agency.(44) In
Mexico, someone unconnected with the Zapatistas but critical of the
government broke into an official government web page and modified it.(45)
While seen by most people as primarily humorous, such acts have been taken
by governments as attacks on their competence and security --quite
independently of the content of the hacks.(46)

More recently, there has been an adaptation of the strategy of civil
disobedience to cyberspace. In quite conscious imitation of 1950s-style
civil rights sit-ins,1960s-style draft board blockades, or 1990s-style
indigenous blockades of logging on claimed lands, a handful of self-styled
"hactivists" have created a web engine that others can use to launch "ping"
attacks against web sites they wish to "blockade" by overtaxing its server's
"reload" function. The engine sends "load" signals over and over again in
ways that block the site's intended role, e.g., state or corporate
propaganda.(47)

The responses to such actions on the part of various social activist
movements have often been highly critical. One criticism has been that the
hacktivists have choosen bad targets and have done so because they are
neither connected to, nor did they consult with, the particular movement
their actions were aimed at supporting. A second criticism has been that the
use of such tactics could open movements to the charge of violating their
own rules of free speech and set them up for being attacked in the same
way.(48) A third objection has revolved around the difficulty in
demonstrating that such actions are not the rogue actions of a few
individuals but do indeed involve thousands of people and are thus
politically significant. Although the ping engines can generate information
about the numbers and addresses of those who logged into a site and used it,
there remain the questions of circulating that information, making it
believable and gaining legitimacy for such actions.(49)

When this tactic was used by U.S. activists to attack Mexican government and
financial websites, there was protest from within Mexico by activists who
had not been consulted and who felt placed at risk by these actions. When it
was used within the U.S. to attack newspapers about coverage of the Mumia
case, it was severely attacked by lawyers defending Mumia as
counterproductive. As a result of such criticisms, no social movement that I
know of has generalized the use of this tactic.(50)

Such cases of discussion and debate over general principles, or even over
the application of a specific tactic, are key elements in the democratic and
transparent character of organizing in cyberspace. Projects as small as the
writing of a single letter of protest often circulate for collective
critique and rewriting before ever being sent out.(51) Moreover, because the
phenomena being discussed here are social "movements," on-going currents in
the social sea, they take place over such time and such spaces as to
generate diverse experiences of struggle. The Internet has proved a quick
and efficient means to share those experiences and to evaluate, for example,
the effectiveness of particular tactics in various situations. It has been
such evaluation that seems to have limited the adoption of "electronic civil
disobedience."

What we see in the above sketch of computer-linked social conflicts is the
emergence of closely connected communities of struggle working out new forms
of political interaction and self-organization. As the contents of these
struggles have become more and more global, so have the communities and
their politics. To some degree these communities and their interaction
constitute a counterpart to the usual institutional structures of
contemporary capitalism. But they also, obviously, are not only in
opposition to it but seek to go beyond it to alternative and more democratic
forms of social organization.

The fundamental character of these social movements and their struggles, it
seems to me, cannot but recall the ideological dimension of the Cold War.
Although many have argued that the US - USSR bipolarity was one of form and
not content, there was rightly or wrongly, a sense of opposition of two
alternatives, two possible ways of organizing society.(52) In that Cold War,
understood by many in the West as a fight for the survival of capitalism,
weapons were wielded of both guns and rhetoric, bullets and words. Weapons
were built, armies were assembled, think tanks were funded and journalists
were bought (or rewarded) in a combined war of ideas and arms. In the end,
words had the most effect through the ideologies of capitalist freedom, of
national liberation or of freedom from capitalism. In the end the Communist
Bloc collapsed primarily from pressures within rather than from without.
However, those struggles had fed, in part, on words from without (rather
than guns), even though their opposition and desires were primarily
articulated in local terms.

Today there is no bipolarity. There is no international communist movement
of Leninist bands out to overthrow violently the capitalist state and
therefore no singular target for guns and bullets. But there is certainly an
opposition between the current hegemonic capitalist order and its critics
and their alternatives. Instead of a facing off of Eagle and Bear, we have,
perhaps, a shark surrounded by increasingly powerful and increasingly
cooperative little fishes.(53) The shark may flay about with sharp teeth and
kill quite a few fish in the process --say as the Mexican government has
been doing in Chiapas-- but as the fish multiply, coordinate and threaten to
clog the shark's gills, the futility of such desperate and wanton
destruction becomes clear.

So, today the real battle for the future is one of "words and the Internet,"
one of conflicting visions of social organization. (54) The defenders of
capitalism may strike at their opponents with violence but in the end their
only real defense, as the more sophisticated among them realize, is finding
ways to re-internalize and harness the opposition. This has always been
capitalism's strength, the way it has absorbed human energy and imagination.
Can it do it again? Current restructuring within capitalist industry,
combined with a general shift to information and communication that involves
the conversion of ideas and imagination into commodities, is one approach.
The steps taken to listen to and incorporate criticism into programs of
action on the part of the World Bank, the OECD and the IMF have a similar
logic. But this logic is being more and more widely understood and refused.
Will co-optation and instrumentalization outrun and absorb the opposition,
or will the opposition out think and out flank such absorption through the
creation and defense of proliferating attractive alternatives. The survival
or transcendence of capitalism will be determined through these struggles
and the responses to them.

Harry Cleaver
Austin, Texas
July 1999

1. Even reversals in the widespread opening of financial markets and the
rapid movement of "hot money" among them caused by the imposition of
currency and capital controls are unlikely to have any long run
effects --despite the fears of George Soros and others to the contrary.
George Soros, "Capitalism's Last Chance?" Foreign Policy, Winter 1998-99,
pp. 55-65.

2."Rhizome" in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism & Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987, pp. 3-25

3. See, for example, Rolando Perez, On An(archy) and Schizoanalysis,
Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1990.

4. In Mexico there has been objection to the use of "network" because it
evokes "nets" and the "capturing" one does with nets. Instead, some use the
term "hammock" which has the structure of a net but which is designed to
support not capture, and adapts itself to the body of each user. See Gustavo
Esteva, "Regenerating People's Space," Alternatives, XII, 1987, pp. 125-152.

5. A useful overview of the development of network theory, from mathematics
to sociology, can be found in the introduction to J. Clyde Mitchell, Social
Networks in Urban Situations: Analyses of Personal Relationships in Central
African Towns, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969, pp. 1-50. An
adaptation of this approach to the understanding of social struggles was
made in Italy by the Marxist sociologist Romano Alquati in his studies of
workers conflicts with the Italian auto giant FIAT. Alquati meshed the
Marxist analysis of class composition with the sociological one of networks,
at factory, national and international levels. See: Romano Alquati, Sulla
FIAT, Milano: Feltrineli, 1975.

6. An influential moment of this literature is Walter W. Powell, "Neither
Market nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization," Research in
Organizational Behavior, 12 (1990), pp. 295-336.

7. Of particular relevance here is Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink,
Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. See also the earlier work by Cathryn
Thorup, "The Politics of Free Trade and the Dynamics of Cross-border
Coalitions in U.S.-Mexican Relations," Columbia Journal Of World Business,
Vol. XXVI, No. 11, Summer 1991, pp. 12-26.

8. The RAND researchers are by no means alone in being concerned about the
growing power of such networks. Reviewing the Keck and Sikkink book on
transnational advocacy networks for the elite journal Foreign Affairs,
Francis Fukuyama warned: "Like Stalin, one might ask 'how many divisions do
transnational networks have?' The answer is that they have information,
greatly abetted by modem communications technology, and thus the ability to
set agendas for nation-states and transnational organizations like the World
Bank, Shell Oil Corporation, or Nestle." Francis Fukuyama, Review of
Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, in
Foreign Affairs, Vol. 77, no. 4, July-August 1998, p. 123.

9. Harry Cleaver, "The Chiapas Uprising and the Future of Class Struggle in
the New World Order," ", Riff-Raff: attraverso la produzione sociale
(Padova, Italy), marzo 1994, pp. 133-145. This early essay has been followed
by a series of others most of which are available on the web at URL:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/hmchtmlpapers.html

10. Charles Swett, "Strategic Assessment: The Internet", July 17, 1995.
(Available on-line at the Federation of American Scientists webpage.

11. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, The Advent of Netwar, Santa Monica:
RAND, 1996, p. 73. The Zapatista struggle was also dealt with in David
Ronfeldt and Armando Martínez, "A Comment on the Zapatista 'Netwar'" which
appeared in John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, In Athena's Camp: Preparing
for Conflict in the Information Age, Santa Monica: RAND, 1997, p. 371.
Finally, the Zapatista movement and its international ramifications became a
full-blown case study in David Ronfeldt, John Arquilla, Graham Fuller and
Melissa Fuller, The Zapatista "Social Netwar" in Mexico, RAND Publication
MR-994-A, 1998, available in hardcopy or on the web (henceforth referred to
as Ronfeldt et al.). John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt had already published
an article that analysed "netwar" prior to the Zapatista uprising, but that
analysis was little noticed in activist circles until the uprising in
Chiapas. When it was circulated on the Net, it provoked considerable
discussion. See Arquilla & Ronfeldt, "Cyberwar is Coming!"
(http://gopher.well.sf.ca.us:70/0/Military/cyberwar) Originally published in
Comparative Strategy, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1993, pp. 141-165.

12. Keck and Sikkink, op. Cit., p. 115.

13. "Terrorism," might seem a harsh word to apply to Mexican government
actions, but as a word that evokes the spreading of fear, of terror, for
political purposes, it seems quite appropriate in Chiapas. Not only have the
police and army been involved in the harassment of communities, rape,
torture, and arbitrary arrest, but the paramilitaries that we now know to be
an integral part of the state's counter-insurgency strategy have engaged in
all of these plus mass murder (Acteal) and the forcing of tens of thousands
of people from their homes and communities. When soldiers gang-rape peasant
girls with impunity, or the police take away living prisoners and later
return mutilated, rotten corpses to a community, as has happened, what other
word is appropriate than "terrorism"? When paramilitaries slash open the
womb of their victim to savage the unborn child, what other word can we use?

14. See the article by an ex-CIA chief John Deutch, "Terrorism," Foreign
Policy, No. 108, Fall 1997, p.14. Ronfeldt and co-workers' perceptions that
transnational social netwars might have a positive role in pushing forward
declared US foreign policy interests (e.g., expansion of democracy) is
reminiscent of William O. Douglas's cry, back in the 1950s "Revolution is
Our Business!" by which he meant that the US should support revolution if
that was what was required to stabilize a country. Unfortunately, his voice
was alone in the wilderness and John Foster Douglas' views prevailed,
producing a generation of counterinsurgency and massive bloodletting. One
can only hope Ronfeldt et al will not have the same fate.

15. Op cit. p. 383. These words are repeated, almost verbatim, in Ronfeldt
et al, The Zapatistas "Social Netwar" in Mexico, RAND 1998, p. 80.

16. Ronfeldt et al., p. 78.

17. The supposed flip side of such terrorism has been the distribution of
food and medical supplies by the Army under the rubric of social work (what
the US counterinsurgency experts used to call "civic action.") The heavy
hand of the state has remained visible, however, as relief has been
distributed primarily to reward PRIista communities and withheld from those
viewed as sympathetic with the Zapatistas. Or, where aid has been offered to
such communities, it has been aimed at either splitting the community or
simple intimidation by the Army's presence.

18. Detailed accounts on the Chiapas lists have followed many of these
expulsions and the court cases that have been fought in response. As might
be expected, no such actions have been taken against foreigners supporting
the Mexican government repression of its political opponents --such as US
military advisors.

19. Not only are there repeated reports of paramilitary bands operating with
the tolerance or active support of the police and the Army, but evidence has
surfaced of state government financial aid to such groups and of Army
planning for such operations as early as 1994.

20. Ronfeldt and Martinez, op.cit., p. 386.

21. One view that sees "civil society" as having already been subsumed
within the private-state nexus that constitutes capitalism is that of
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. See chapter 6 on "Postmodern Law and the
Withering of Civil Society, " in their book Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of
the State Form, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, pp.
217-260.

22. The labor leaders who took the lead in demanding a meeting with
Camdessus were those of the radical Korean Confederation of Trade Unions
(KCTU) that had organized the first General Strike in Korea (against the IMF
agreement) during the winter of 1996-1997. The exchange between the KCTU and
the IMF was documented and reported on their web sites almost as they
occurred.

23. The proposal replicates a local Korean initiative to re-internalize a
rebellious moment of "civil society" into capitalist planning: a Tripartite
Commission that brought together government, labor and business to discuss
policy options. The Tripartite Commission, however, was rejected by a
substantial portion of rank and file workers who subsequently threw out both
the agreement reached by union leaders and then the leaders themselves.

24. Typical of the stories about the Internet and the anti-MAI movement were
Madelaine, Drohan, "How the Net Killed the MAI," Globe & Mail, April 29,
1998 and "Network Guerrillas," Financial Times, April 30, 1998. Serious
discussion by activists on the relevant lists, in contrast, has tried to
access the real effectiveness of their efforts versus other influences such
as OECD member country disagreements.

25. Stephen J. Kobrin, "The MAI and the Clash of Globalizations," Foreign
Policy, No. 109, Fall 1998, pp. 97-109. Kobrin's argument that globalization
is inevitable and that the anti-MAI coalitions are themselves an expression
of it just as much as the MAI itself is a fine example of fetishization and
normalization. Globalization is not just a phenomenon, inevitable or not, it
is a strategy to achieve a fundamental shift of power, income and wealth in
favor of capital. Resistance to such a strategy certainly is inevitable
given the antagonisms inherent in the strategy. Recognizing this
antagonistic conflict means to also recognize that the degree to which
globalization will be realized will be determined by the development of the
conflict.

26. The three NGOs that participated were the World Wildlife Federation
International, Oxfam Great Britain and (as observer) Friends of the Earth.
All three of these oft-critiqued mainstream environmental groups have also
attended meetings of the WTO (see below).

27. From a letter drafted by Susan George in mid-November 1998. It can be
found in the MAI-not list archives on the web. Susan George has been a
well-published critic of the role of institutions such as the IMF in the
international debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. See her book A Fate Worse
than Debt: The World Financial Crisis and the Poor, New York: Grove Press,
1988.

28. When local activists are able to mobilize transnational movements
against individual nation-state policies, as in the Zapatista case, they
push the conflict into the international arena and undermine local
governments' efforts to obfuscate or hide the nature of the conflict.

29. The distinction in metaphysics between Power (potestas, pouvoir, potere,
poder) and power (potentia, puissance, potenza, potencia) was Spinoza's and
has recently been given a class interpretation by Antonio Negri, The Savage
Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

30. Thus Karl Marx's repeated use of the metaphor "vampire" for capital and
its domination of society.

31. Two books that are expressions of that era are Teresa Hayter, Aid as
Imperialism, Harmonswort: Penguin, 1971 and Cheryl Payer, The World Bank: A
Critical Analysis, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982.

32. World Bank projects supporting export strategies were quickly seen as
contributing factors to ecological devastations as forests were destroyed to
increase supplies of exportable wood to earn the foreign exchange necessary
to repay debts. See for example: Bade Onimode (ed.) The IMF, the World Bank
and the African Debt: the Economic Impact, Volumes I and II, London: Zed
Books, 1989.

33. See Harry Cleaver, "Close the IMF, abolish debt and end development: a
class analysis of the international debt crisis," Capital & Class, No. 39,
Winter 1989. One result was The Debt Crisis Network which linked opposition
to Fund activities from all over. Also see: John Walton & David Seddon, Free
Markets & Food Riots: the Politics of Global Adjustment, Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1994.

34. The massive accumulation of debt in Latin America was often the work of
undemocratic governments and private or state enterprises that borrowed the
money for purposes of repression or exploitation. The difficulties of
repayment were due to the new tight money policies enacted in the US at the
beginning of the decade. That tight money drove floating interest rates
through the ceiling while throwing the world economy into such a global
depression that export possibilities shriveled --and with them the ability
to earn the foreign exchange necessary for debt repayment. In Latin America
"FMI" (the Spanish language acronym) became, for millions, the initials of
poverty and suffering and an object of derision and anger. In South Korea,
in the wake of the recent program signed by the Korean government and the
Fund, the initials "IMF" and attacks against it can be seen emblazoned all
over the capital city, from store windows to packages of cigarettes
(observed in recent visit).

35. In the previously mentioned article by Kobrin on the anti-MAI movement,
he derides such fears as being based on "barely credible worst-case
scenarios." Yet, very real cases are at hand, including the current battle
over the Massachusetts Burma Law that bans contracts with corporations
operating in Burma --currently governed by a highly repressive military
junta renown for human rights violations. Business interests in the US
attacked this law in federal court, while European and Japanese business has
done so in the WTO. For more on this and similar conflicts see:
http://www.burma.net/selective-purchasing/

36. See Ronalde Munch and Peter Waterman, Globalization, Social Movements
and the New Internationalisms, Washington: Cassel, 1998 as well as
Waterman's other writings on this theme at http://www.antenna.nl/~waterman/

37. One of the great weakness of the Soviet-style socialist state was that
it provided a single central object of resentment and anger, and thus a
common enemy for a wide assortment of discontents and ultimately a focal
point for the mobilization of opposition. In the West, on the other hand,
the diversity of nation-states, corporate and industrial structures, and so
on, present a multiplicity of targets for angry workers or citizens and thus
increase the difficulty of opposition to the whole. The current movement
toward uniformity on the part of a triumphant neo-liberalism anxious to
complete its hegemony would seem to undermine both the diversity and the
capacity to diffuse opposition.

38. See, for example, Howard Frederick, "Computer Networks and the
"Emergence of Global Civil Society," in Linda M. Harasim (ed.) Global
Networks: Computers And International Communication, Cambridge: MIT Press,
1993.

39. The concept of the "working class" has come to approximate this meaning
in some Marxist theory where the label has been applied to all those, waged
or unwaged, whose activity contributes to the expanded reproduction of
capitalism and whose struggles undermine it.

40. An example of such harnessing can be found in the Keynesian period when
workers' wage struggles were used to stimulate capitalist investment and
productivity growth.

41. In one line of contemporary Marxist thought this imagination and
capability is thought of in terms of "a general intellect" and is manifest
not only in the increasingly central role of mental labor, but in its
autonomy. See, for example, Paolo Vierno, "Notes on the General Intellect,"
in S.Makdisi, C. Casarino and R. E., Karl, Marxism Beyond Marxism, New York:
Routledge, 1996.

42. This is akin to more traditional "position papers" or "party programs"
where an individual or small group has sifted through information and come
up with an argument presenting some of that information in a highly mediated
manner.

43. One important feature of these lists is the way widespread networks of
people can quickly check out, verify or falsify reports. Such corrections
are common on lists and while sometimes concerned with minor details, are
also very important in moments of crises. In one now infamous case, during a
Mexican military offensive a report went out on the Internet that many
people were being killed and the hospitals were filling up. This story was
quickly checked, recognized as wrong and contradicted on the Chiapas lists.
Critics of the use of the Internet by grassroots movements have often cited
this example to illustrate the contention that such lists circulate
misinformation just like governments. See for example, Charles Swett, op.
cit., who uncritically quotes Todd Robberson, "Mexican Rebels Using a
High-Tech Weapon; Internet Helps Rally Support," Washington Post, February
20, 1995. But uniformly such accounts have refused to recognize how quickly
the report was corrected --far more quickly and far more thoroughly than
most erroneous news propagated by governments and the mass media.

44. The hack occurred on September 18, 1996 and has been preserved on many
web pages, e.g., http://www.2600.com/cia/

45. The hack occurred in February 4, 1998 by a group independent of but
sympathetic to the Zapatista rebellion.

46. Corporations have sometimes been more flexible in response to such
efforts. When the movie "Hackers" was released, a corresponding web page was
hacked by real hackers and modified. The corporation replaced the original
page but kept it on-line to amuse fans of the movie.

47. The intellectual background for this tactic was contained in two books
by the Critical Art Ensemble: Electronic Disturbance and Electronic Civil
Disobedience, both published by Autonomedia in Brooklyn.

48. The September 1998 counterattack by the Pentagon's Defense Information
Systems Agency has demonstrated precisely the kind of dangers feared. See
report by computer security writer Winn Schwartau, "Cyber-civil
disobedience," Network World, January 11, 1999. For more on the debate see
the archives of the Chiapas95 listserv beginning in May 1998
(http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html) and Stephan
Wray's webpage on electronic civil disobedience
(http://www.nyu.edu/prodjects/wray/ecd.html).

49. See my intervention into the debate on the net in the Chiapas95
archives: "H. Cleaver, A Contribution to the Discussion of ECD," May 1
(1998).

50. Such methods have been used from time to time, especially in Italy where
"netstrikes" have been called in support of local struggles and
international ones, e.g. against Turkish government and business sites in
support of Kurdish Rebels in Turkey whose leader had recently been seized.

51. This was true of Susan George's letter to the OECD rejecting
participation in discussions about the MAI (see above).

52. Viewed as alternatives of form rather than content, the US and the USSR
represented two different ways of organizing capitalist society: corporate
and state planning together with manipulated markets versus central planning
buttressed by underground markets.

53. The metaphor was once used by Berthold Brecht and has been recently
reappropriated and amplified by the Zapatistas. The original Brecht use was
in his story "If Sharks were People," published in Bertold Brecht, Tales
from the Calendar, 1947. The Zapatista appropriation can be found in the
communiqué "Durito-Brecht Presentation for Table 7: Culture and Media in the
Transition to Democracy" first published in La Jornada on July 5, 1996.

54. When Mexican government spokesperson Gurria used this phrase it was to
cover up the actual violence being used by the police, military and
paramilitaries in Chiapas. Nevertheless, it was at least an approximation of
the character of the major weapons of the forces of rebellion: ideas and
their circulation.

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