ReCovIntComp-B Updated: 180212

PART IV: THE GLOBAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT AND WORLD SOCIAL FORUM

Banners at the opening march through the streets of Porto Alegre at the World Social Forum, 2002. Photo: Author

CHAPTER 15

Social Movements, Old and New, and the Augean Stables of Global Governance (2006)
[Source: Waterman, Peter. 2006. Union Organisations, Social Movements and the Augean Stables of Global Governance, Warwick University, Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, Working Paper 211/06. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/]

Left: The symbol of International Framework Agreements on a Global Unions website at least until I (or others?) pointed out the hierarchy implied. It was later replaced, Right, by one in which the social partners stand on a level playing field . But which one owns the Rolex? See http://www.global-unions.org/.

A fighting image from an anti-WTO demonstration by an Indonesian Migrants Workers Union, 2005. Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Anti-WTO_ banner_by_IMWU.jpg

The Augean Stable was one of the Twelve Labours of Hercules. Hercules's task was to clean out a stable that had been soiled by years of neglect. Hercules succeeded by using a boulder to gouge out a trench, diverting a river through the stable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augean_Stable

fter the unacknowledged failure of its 15-year campaign to obtain a social clause (international labour rights) within the hegemonic global institutions of capitalist free trade, the traditional international union organisations are now reproducing its logic in a whole series of social partnership initiatives at global level. Prominent amongst these is their commitment to global governance.1 This project, however, comes from a UN system trying to make itself functional to capitalist globalisation (Corporate Watch 1999, Judge 2001). It therefore originates with forces outside and above the unions. The unions are addressing themselves to hegemonic capitalist and interstate instances, and are doing so by lobbying. Today this dependent orientation is increasingly challenged by a global justice and solidarity movement, more interested in the democratisation of the global, and primarily involved in public consciousness-raising and mobilisation. The new movement, moreover, operates in places and spaces, with forms and understandings that relate rather to a contemporary globalised and informatised capitalism than the old one which gave rise and shape to the unions. If they are to effectively advance even effectively defend worker rights and power under the new global conditions, the international unions will have to abandon the discourse of global governance for that of global democracy, and operate on the terrains of this new movement. This argument is advanced by consideration, firstly, of the position on global governance of the traditional union organisations, secondly, that of the new movement, as revealed in a wide range of movement positions, thirdly, by consideration of the new places, spaces and forms of emancipatory thought and action. The conclusion suggests that even if the hegemonic international union institutions are here reproducing an unacknowledged error, the historical socialdemocratic tradition can still make a specific contribution to global democratisation.

At the conference to which this paper was presented an earlier presentation was made by Ulrich Brand (2006), so far available only in abstract or PowerPoint form. This is a paper definitely complementary to my own but rather more theoretical and, therefore, rather more far-reaching. I look forward to its appearance in print and will resist the temptation to respond to its provisional forms here.
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The Traditional International Trade Union Organisations and Global Governance I will be here talking about traditional international trade union organisations (briefly TIUs) because they are old (originating a century or more ago, during the national, industrial, colonial phase of capitalism), are literally inter-national (being confederations of nationally-based and nationally-oriented unions) and are formal institutions (as distinguished from looser or networked movements). But I will also distinguish individual organisations where appropriate. Indeed, in talking about attitudes to global governance, it is difficult to avoid starting with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) the associated Global Union Federations (for separate or related industries), themselves parts of the Global Unions (GU) network. These form the dominant contemporary international union alliance. The ICFTU, its affiliates and associates are heavily committed to the notion of social partnership - those between labour on the one hand, capital and/or state on the other. And they are energetically promoting these at the regional and global level. This has so far been done without consideration of why such partnerships are in crisis, or have failed, at national level, where workers have had more power (at least over their unions). Nor has there been argument, as distinguished from assumption, about why they should succeed at the regional or global levels (where they are much more in the minds and hands of union officers). Social partnership has always meant the subordinate contribution of labour, as junior partner, to the development of capitalism and the state, as senior partners.2 Indeed, it has to be asked whether it was not faith in the ideology of social partnership at national level that was responsible for, or at least facilitated, neo-liberal globalisation - the rise and rise of an aggressive, destructive and anti-democratic capitalist world order. The TIUs are heavily committed to the International Labour Organisations (ILOs) World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalisation. This was a commission with some 26 members, of which only two are from trade unions (General Secretaries of the South African Cosatu and the US AFL-CIO), and two from civil society.The other 24 or so are (ex-) Presidents, CEOs, Academics, a British (Labour) Lord and other representatives of the global elite. Whereas labour has a 25 percent representation within the ILO as a whole, it had here less than 10 percent. The World Commissions report is
A recent example of such subordinate partnership would be the World Banks Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRSs). The ICFTU encouraged national union participation in this process, publishing a handbook on just how they should do this (ICFTU 2001). The ICFTU thanked the AFL-CIO and its Solidarity Centre and the German Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung for their assistance in developing the booklet. The PRSs could have been seen from the beginning as a participatory figleaf for World Bank imposition of structural adjustment policies on Third World countries. Detailed empirical evaluation has now demonstrated that this is the case (Gould 2005). I am not aware of any ICFTU re-evalution in the light of such criticism.
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perhaps the most important argument for a global neo-Keynesianism a globalised capitalism with redistribution from growth. Unlike Keynes himself in a less-mealy-mouthed period, however, the Commission confines the word capitalism to a bibliographical footnote.3 There seems to be some kind of literal division of labour between the ILO, on the left of globalisation and the UN, on the right. Yet the ICFTU appears to be as committed to the Global Compact of the right globalisers (http://www.unglobalcompact.org/)4 as it is to the World Commission of the left ones. The attraction seems to be the very existence of any international forum the TIUs are invited to join or any body they are permitted to lobby. This love-in between the TIUs and the international elite is, in at least some instances, enthusiastically (if diplomatically? hypocritically?) reciprocated. Thus when World Bank President, Wolfensohn, was invited to a congress of the international organisation of education workers, Education International, he had this to say:
I am very happy to greet you at this 4th World Congress of Education International [] The first thing Id like to [note is] the very close identity between the objectives of our institution and the objectives of Education InternationalWeve had the opportunity, in these last six months, of working with your colleagues in trying to do some research and establishing a research program which deals with the elements of what makes good conditions for teachers [] We also, for our part, need to think in terms of the financing of the education system and we also need to say to you - to all of you - that this bringing together of the education system together with the financial system is something where no doubt there will be important areas in which trust between us will be very important [] My colleagues and I at the Bank are really thrilled that we have this building relationship between our institution and yours. (James Wolfensohn, President, World Bank, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 22 July 2004, as recorded on an Education International CD of the event) The document clearly deserves an analysis for which there is here no space. However, its highly ideological intentions are quite clear from its feel-good self characterisation with sceptical square brackets added:
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Our experience working in the Commission makes us confident of the future. The Commission is a microcosm of the very wide diversity of opinion [just one well-known critic of the WTO], concerns and perspectives of the real world [no prominent figure from the global justice movement]. We come from some of the wealthiest [15 or 16] and poorest countries [10 or 11]. We comprise trade unionists [2] and corporate leaders [3-4], parliamentarians and presidents [11 or 12], leaders of indigenous peoples [1] and womens activists [1 or 2], scholars and government advisors [5 or 6]. We have seen, in the course of our work, how divergent positions can be spanned and how common interests can lead to common action through dialogue. (ILO 2004] Much, if not all, of the Global Unions network of the ICFTU has endorsed it, as have the national left union centres of Spain, the Comisiones Obreras, and the South African Cosatu! Yet even a liberal-democratic thinker on democratisation of the global condemned the Global Compact from its inititiation (Judge 2001).
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For historical background to such relationships we have to remember the failed campaign for the social clause (Hodkinson 2005, Forthcoming, Waterman 2001, 2004).5 That 15-year period of wasted effort (and un-reported financial cost) was intended to achieve international labour rights within the World Trade Organisation (WTO, previously GATT). The WTO was, of course, not only clearly intended to destroy labour rights but is so structured as to guarantee this.6 In their attendance at, address to and commitment to such hegemonic instances, the TIUs would seem to be playing the role of what the
Stuart Hodkinsons painstaking work on the ICFTU, focusing on the Social Clause campaign argues
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that the social clause strategy was adopted primarily as an instrument for managing institutional change and renewal within the ICFTU whilst maintaining general Northern trade union control. (2005b:10) That this strategy had more to with preserving an institution and its dominant socio-geographic oligarchy, rather than serving the interests of unions or workers internationally, is a devastating assertion. Hodkinsons overall conclusions are fourfold: First, there is not a new trade union internationalism at the official international level. While the ICFTU has undergone a process of modernisation, its core ideology, methodology and structures are strongly embedded in the OLI [Old Labour Internationalism]of the past. Second, the ICFTU, like other official international trade union bodies, is heavily constrained in its activities by political, structural and financial factors, all of which are underpinned by workers and unions continued attachment to the national level. Third, the ICFTU itself is at a critical turning point in its history. Increasingly challenged from outside by other international union bodies and NGOs, and steadily losing vital financial support from its own affiliates, the ICFTU appears to be enveloped in a process of long-term decline. Fourth, the findings of this thesis are qualified by a number of reliability problems, most of which relate to the serious difficulties faced by researchers investigating the international trade union movement. The thesis concludes that a major research project into the new labour internationalism at every level of international trade unionism is urgently needed. (2005b:11) Whilst Hodkinsons assumption of ICFTU decline would seem to be contradicted by the present process of merger internationally, and of international union dialogue on globalisation in the Americas, critical observers would likely agree that the old social-partnership model of internationalism is in profound or terminal crisis and that research on a new one is indeed urgent. I am reminded of this by a new article by the international union specialist on and enthusiast for the WTO, Mike Waghorne (2006). Waghorne, Assistant General Secretary of Public Services International, points out that any single national member of the WTO has a veto power. Yet, whilst having apparently shelved his own past energetic attempt to get a social clause at the WTO, he now favours the attempt to establish various other rights here. In other words, he still seems so fixated on the power of the WTO that he fails to recognise 1) that one nations veto can block any pro-labour clause, big or small, and 2) that rights granted by a central organ of international capitalist power and neo-liberal ideology would a) give this legitimacy, and b) be tainted by the source of the concession. It is, finally, notable
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Dutch call town mayor in wartime - a mediating role between an autocratic power and an otherwise unrepresented and powerless citizenry.7 Concerning the prime exemplar of the global governance it is identified with, the ICFTU said in 2002,
The Global Compact isan initiative that is based on dialogue, including social dialogue, built around the core labour standards of the ILO as well as other universal standards relating to human rights and the environment. This is an important opportunity for the social partners and other parties to develop relationships that will resolve problems inside companies and industries as well as to develop dialogue on compelling policy issues. Global social dialogue has taken concrete form in 14 framework agreements signed by major companies with global union federations. The agreements are important not only for what is on paper but for the social dialogue that produced them and that continues to make them living agreements. They are pioneering ventures that contribute to good industrial relations. http://www.icftu.org/displaydocument .asp?Index=991215023 &Language=EN 8

In its more recent guide to globalisation for unions, the ICFTU devotes much space to the Global Compact. Here it reveals certain qualifications but also the liberal ideological framework within which these are contained. Thus:
The trade union experience with the Global Compact has been mixed. Throughout the activities of the Compact, too much attention has been devoted to promoting the CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] industry while not enough attention has been spent on genuine dialogue. Opportunities for dialogue were often bypassed. For example, many national networks were launched without involving the trade unions, the representative employer organisations or the relevant NGOs that should have been involved. (ICFTU 2004: 77)9 that the new strategy apparently requires no more activity by flesh-and-blood workers than did the previous one. Waghorne appears to be devoted to the cult of Sisyphus (Sisyphean Task 2006) rather than that of Hercules, for whom see final paragraphs and footnote of this paper. I recall the concept from a Dutch international union officer, in the 1980s, admitting this to be commonly the nature of the African trade union leaderships the Dutch were funding.
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Significantly, Civicus, a previously hyper-moderate NGO that claims to represent global civil society, fails to share the enthusiasm of the ICFTU for the Global Compact. It would seem that the NGO status allows it to be less devoted - to at least partnership with transnationals - than the ICFTU (Garca-Delgado 2005).
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This guide reproduces the widespread error of reducing globalisation to an economic process. This might make it more manageable, both conceptually and politically, for union organisations that have historically reduced themselves to partners of industry. Yet any critical understanding of globalisation must surely conceive it as a political, social (gender, ethnic), military, cultural (media, cyberspace) and ideological phenomenon. And the global civil society of which the ICFTU is increasingly claiming membership also increasingly addresses itself to all of
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But its underlying concern seems to be the defence of a traditional liberal-pluralist notion of social dialogue within industry from some neo-liberal attempt to distinguish between workers as internal stakeholders and unions as external stakeholders. Unions, the ICFTU insists,
are part of industry, as well as of civil society. By definition, social dialogue involves management and workers, which are the two sides of any business. (76)

Whilst this might imply that the ICFTU wants to negotiate inter/nationally on both an industrial and a political stage, any notion of a socio-structural, ideological or ethical difference between the social partners on either stage is left out of consideration. And, in any case, the enthusiastic commitment of the ICFTU to an increasingly neo-liberalised UN was shortly afterwards restated on a global stage. At the 60th anniversary of the UN, New York, September 2005, Guy Ryder, General Secretary of the ICFTU, was talking from inside the box. He was proposing the reform, improvement, implementation of some global neo-Keynesian capitalist utopia taken as existing, at least potentially:
Joining together to achieve [social] justice is our [UN plus nation-states and unions? PW] best contribution to making sure that we and our children can live in a world free from poverty, desperation and conflict in future years. Let us all rise to the challenge. The UN has known its greatest successes, and won its lasting authority from those occasions when its member states have risen above narrow self interest to the uplands from which the vision of a better common future becomes clear. This Summit must be one such occasion. It is in your hands to make it so. http://www.un.org/webcast/ summit2005/statements.html

This language suggests the continuing faith of the socialreformist ICFTU in a UN system adjusting itself to the corporations and in a neo-liberalised capitalist democracy. Today, however, there are other actors on the global scene and other voices can be heard. The Global Justice and Solidarity Movement and Global Governance Here also we need to first consider the names of our subjects. There are problems in comparing institutions with movements and, in particular, the TIUs with the anti-globalisation movement even with its most institutionalised and documented expression, the World Social Forum (WSF). This is because of the fluidity of social
these. It is, indeed, difficult to imagine how the economic or industrial impact of globalisation might be tempered, reversed or surpassed without a holistic understanding of globalisation. Another problem with the guide is the presentation of globalisation largely in terms of a threat. Concepts such as alter-globalisation, again growing within civil society, suggest that globalisation (and informatisation) contains possibilities to be realised as well as threats to be resisted.

movements in general, and the self-denying ordinance under which the WSF avoids taking common policy positions. There is a problem even in naming the movement. The conventional term used above suffers, as do all negative definitions, from dependence on that against which it is posed. Which is why I prefer the name that came out of the World Social Forum process itself in 2002, the global justice and solidarity movement (GJ&SM).10 There is a major problem, also with governance, global or not. Governance is not simply a neutral new political science term, intended to focus attention on power relations even beyond existing inter/national11 institutions: it is a concept that leans heavily toward management. It tends to de-politicise its subject matter. It clearly conceals any understanding here of hegemony, with the latters implications of domination (military, political, ideological).12 The neutralising new term therefore threatens to turn social movements, unions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), into managers of global discontents (to paraphrase Wright Mills 1948 on the US unions of his day). In identifying, finally, the position/s of the GJ&SM on global governance, I am bound to be presenting snapshots, although it seems to me that there it is possible to see a family relationship between the portraits I present below. It has been argued, to begin with, that the concept of governance is specifically linked to the ideology and institutions of neo-liberalism:
[G]overnance, far from representing a paradigm shift away from neoliberal practices, [is a] central element of the neoliberal discourse in a particular phase of it, when neoliberalism and capital in general face particular stringent problems of accumulation, growing social conflict and a crisis of reproduction. Governance sets itself the task to tackle these problems for capital by relaying the disciplinary role of the market through the establishment of a continuity of powers based on normalised market values as the truly universal values. Governance thus seeks to embed these values in the many ways the vast arrays of social and environmental problems are addressed. It thus promotes active participation of society in the reproduction of life and of our species on the basis of this market normalisation. Neoliberal governance thus seeks co-optation of the struggles for reproduction On the problem of naming this movement, see the extensive survey and argument of Catherine Eschle (2005). Whilst considering the relevant academic literature, Eschle gives significant weight to the various names suggested by activists, in so far as a movement can be considered to be constructed by those so involved.
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By Inter/national I mean national and/or international. The figure also reminds us that international does not surpass nationally-founded entities but rather combines such. This contrasts with global.
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As Wikipedia reminds us, in a commonsensical way, Hegemonyis the dominance of one group over other groups, with or without the threat of force, to the extent that, for instance, the dominant party can dictate the terms of trade to its advantage; more broadly, cultural perspectives become skewed to favour the dominant group. Hegemony controls the ways that ideas become "naturalised" in a process that informs notions of common sense. Throughout historyhegemony results in the empowerment of certain cultural beliefs, values, and practices to the submersion and partial exclusion of others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemon.
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and social justice and, ultimately, promotes the perspective of the end of history. (De Angelis 2003:24)

An alternative focus, on the relations of social movements with a global civil society in the making, would seem to me hypothetically more open less reproductive of failed national social-democratic projects and failing liberal-pluralist thinking than a focus on governance (Waterman and Timms 2004). This needs to be said because there is a parallel capitalist project, corporate social responsibility (CSR), intimately linked with global governance, and with which both the old and the new international social movements are intertwined. Charkiewicz (2005) characterises CSR as
a paradigmatic example of how policy dialogues increasingly operate as virtual spectacles where governance is performed according to carefully scripted rules and norms. NGOs [and unions PW] are offered voice without influence. Concepts such as poverty reduction or CSR have taken a discursive life of their own and by so doing pretend that poverty or CSR and accountability is addressed. The virtual performance of governance makes the differential effects of the organisation of the global production and consumption on the realities of peoples livelihoods invisible, as it assumes that these are addressed. [] Whilepolicy discourses such as CSR are conducted in the name of caring for life, and claim to deal with the social and environmental effects of production and consumption, at the same time they obscure that in order to generate value and profits life has to be killed. Inextricably linked with the caring face of global governance which operates through biopolitical security discourses such as the one on CSR is the global economy which operates as war on livelihoods. (Charkiewicz 2005:81)

Another such theoretical critique, from the position of the Situationist International of the 1968 era, declares that
Central to global governance as a hegemonical strategy is a broad attempt to assemble a global civil society in which to embed neoliberal concepts of control. Key here are twinned processes of severance and recomposition. At once, the making of global civil society involves i) cutting off social forces and organisations willing to work within a global market framework from other social contexts and ii) re-assembling the lot into a functional and efficient whole that will work to solve global problems and, in the process, fix the terms of social and political interaction in the world economy. In governances schemes, then, global civil society is to be anything but an autonomous realm, or a theater of history (in Marxs sense of civil society), but a collection of atomised organisation with little or no autonomous sense of itself (Drainville 2006)

The Indian ecofeminist, and localist, Vandana Shiva, goes beyond capitalist (or statist) democracy, favouring a living democracy:
We need international solidarity and autonomous organising. Our politics needs to reflect the principle of subsidiarity. Our global

presence cannot be a shadow of the power of corporations and Bretton Woods institutions. We need stronger movements at local and national levels, movements that combine resistance and constructive action, protests and building of alternatives, non-cooperation with unjust rule and cooperation within society. The global, for us, must strengthen the local and national, not undermine it. The two tendencies that we demand of the economic system needs to be central to people's politics -- localisation and alternatives. Both are not just economic alternatives they are democratic alternatives. Without them forces for change cannot be mobilised in the new context. http://www.zmag.org/content/GlobalEconomics/ShivaWSF.cfm.

Patrick Bond, of the Centre for Civil Society in South Africa, is a libertarian socialist. He has been closely associated with the recent wave of movements and campaigns against neo-liberalism, nationally and internationally (Bond, Brutus and Setshedi 2005). Targeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of the UN, he argues against civil society participation in and legitimation of such, and for movement decommodification struggles:
To illustrate, the South African decommodification agenda entails struggles to turn basic needs into genuine human rights including: free anti-retroviral medicines to fight AIDS (hence disempowering Big Pharma); 50 litres of free water per person per day (hence ridding Africa of Suez and other water privatisers); 1 kilowatt hour of free electricity for each individual every day (hence reorienting energy resources from export-oriented mining and smelting, to basic-needs consumption); extensive land reform (hence de-emphasising cash cropping and exportoriented plantations); prohibitions on service disconnections and evictions; free education (hence halting the General Agreement on Trade in Services); and the like. A free Basic Income Grant allowance of $15/month is even advocated by churches, NGOs and trade unions. All such services should be universal (open to all, no matter income levels), and to the extent feasible, financed through higher prices that penalise luxury consumption. This potentially unifying agenda far superior to MDGs, in part because the agenda reflects real, durable grassroots struggles across the world - could serve as a basis for widescale social change... (Bond 2005)

In a forthcoming work, the Neo-Gramscian political-economist, Susanne Soederberg devotes a chapter to the Global Compact, tracing its origins, structure, ideological functions and particularly its domination by the International Chamber of Commerce and exclusion of nation-states as actors. She concludes:
What the Compact does, albeit inadvertently, is to accept certain demands from below such as the need to enforce human rights, labour, and environmental protection through established state sanctioned principles like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights while also encouraging counter-hegemonic movements to restrict their struggle to the electronic terrain of the learning network. This in turn prevents the dominance of neoliberalism from being challenged, while TNCs are granted ever more freedom to pursue neoliberal strategies in the South. (Soederberg 2006:92)

The Neo-Marxist or Thirdworldist theorist and activist, Samir Amin, has critiqued the relationship between structural adjustment,

Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, the New Partnership for Africas Development (NEPAD) and governability in Africa:
Unquestionably even more serious, the NEPAD document lines up with liberal thought on the discourse of good governance. This is a concept that is useful as a way to dissociate democratic progress from social progress, to deny their equal importance and inextricable connection with one another, and to reduce democracy to good management subjected to the demands of private capital, an apolitical management by an anodyne civil society, inspired by the mediocre ideology of the United States. This discourse comes at the very moment when the interruption in the construction of the state (begun in the Bandung period) imposed by structural adjustment has created, not conditions for a democratic advance but, instead, conditions for the shift towards the primacy of ethnic and religious identities (para-ethnic and para-religious, in fact) that are manipulated by local mafias, benefit external supporters, and often degenerate into atrocious civil wars (in fact conflicts between warlords)The NEPAD documents exposition, its hesitations or anodyne character, acquires its meaning in this context. For example, the wish to alleviate the debt is expressed, but this is done precisely because the debt has fulfilled its function of imposing structural adjustment. NEPAD also proposes an integrated (Pan-African) development, just like the EU, giving its preference to arrangements with regional African groups. But, in the end, this document remains, as far as its proposals on trade, capital transfers, technology, and patents are concerned, aligned with liberal dogmas.

Here, finally, are two voices from the international consumer movement. The first addresses the food multinational, Nestl, and argues that
[T]he Global Compact is based on and propagates the credo that there is no fundamental contradiction between profit-maximisation and the will and ability to voluntarily respect human rights and foster human development and democratic decision making [] Replication of the Global Compact model all over the world risks creating new networks of elite governance, entrenching corporate-led neoliberal globalisation and eroding democratic structures. (Richter 2003:44]13

The second concerns the chemicals multinational, Bayer, a signatory of the Global Compact:
Bayer considers itself a founding member of the UN Global Compact, but its dedication to the Compact's nine human rights and environmental principles should be seen in the context of an extremely controversial corporate history. The Coalition Against Bayer Dangers (CBG)has found that Bayer has been using its "membership" in the This evaluation needs to be compared with the international trade union relationship with Nestl, as expressed in a report on the trade union networking strategy of the Global Union Federation for the food and allied industries, known as the IUF (Rb 2004). Whatever might have been achieved by this interesting adaptation of the networking principle, it is clearly taking place without any consideration of the nature of the product, nor, for that matter, of the sincerity of Nestls attachment to the Global Compact. This confinement or compartmentalisation of social movement concerns might have been customary in the past but seems archaic today.
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Compact to deflect criticism by watchdog groups, without addressing the substance of the criticism. Bayer's use of the Global Compact is a classic case of "bluewash" -- using the good reputation of the United Nations to present a corporate humanitarian image without a commitment to changing real-world behaviour. (Minkes 2002)

Finally, we might consider information embedded within an article by a well-respected reformist critic of the UN system, Richard Falk (2005/6). The box considers the problems and prospects of the Global Compact, pointing out that whilst French companies are seriously over-represented amongst endorsers, those of the USA are just as seriously under-represented. Major multinationals, such as energy giant Haliburton, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Puma and Adidas, are absent. It is therefore suggested that
If hundreds of thousands of workers, predominantly in the developing world, remain excluded from the minimal protection offered by the ten principles of the Global Compact, then it is difficult to see what difference this initiative could make. (Leveringhaus 2005/6)

It is not without significance that this item, was published within the broadly social-democratic Global Civil Society yearbook, based within the historically social-democratic London School of Economics!14 There is, thus, a considerable ideological variety and geographical spread amongst critics and critiques of the orientation toward global governance taken by TIUs. This surely suggests that TIU positions have been dependent not on any international labour, left or democratic approach but on a Western neo-liberal one, modified by some social-liberal aspiration.15
For another work in this tradition, see Patomki, Teivainen and Rnkk (2002), this one being limited, I feel, by an implicit political-science or international-relations frame which fails to consider the extent to which power under globalisation is concentrated in corporations, or empowerment in the cultural/communicational sphere. Since we are members of the same network, we will no doubt continue to argue about this.
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Considering the matter more theoretically, Tony McGrew (200?) distinguishes between four approaches to global democracy: Liberal Internationalism, RadicalDemocratic Pluralism, Cosmopolitan Democracy and Deliberative Democracy. The current approach to global governance of the traditional international unions would seem consistent with Liberal Internationalism (that of the UN itself). Those of the GJ&SM would seem to fall within his Radical-Democratic Pluralist type:
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Radical democratic pluralism is essentially a 'bottom up' theory of the democratisation of world order. The new democratic life politics, as opposed to the old politics of emancipation, is articulated primarily through the multiplicity of critical social movements, such as environmental, women and peace movements, which challenge the authority of states and international structures as well as the hegemony of particular (liberal) conceptions of the 'political'. In 'politicising' existing global institutions and practices, not to mention challenging the conventional boundaries of the political (the foreign/domestic, public/private, society/nature binary divides) critical social movements are conceived as agents of a 'new progressive politics'...There is no reason therefore to presume that democracy and democratic legitimacy have to be grounded in territorially delimited units such as nation-states. Rather

Global Places, Spaces and Forms of Emancipatory Thought and Action It would seem that we have considerable tension not to say an antagonistic contradiction - between the TIU position on global governance and that of the GJ&SM. Firstly, however, it seems to me, such a contradiction cannot be seen as Manichean (vice v. virtue), nor as simply or primarily ideological. As I might have already suggested, there are people of the social-democratic tradition on both sides of this contradiction. Secondly, we have to recognise that the ICFTU and its affiliates or associates are not only prominent participants in the WSF process but even represented on its International Council! 16 Many such inter/national unions participate in anti-war or anti-privatisation protest initiatives of the broader GJ&SM. The TIUs may have a foot within the World Economic Forum and the Global Compact, but they have at least a toe within the spaces of a global civil society in the making (Waterman and Timms 2003/4). Thirdly, it seems to me that, in addressing the present global institutional order, the GJ&SM has not yet moved from protest to proposition on global governance, or, in this case, global democratisation. Considering the movements One No and Many Yesses!, it is easy to find and identify the No but quite difficult to discern even one distinct Yes.17
'real' democracy is to be found in the juxtaposition of a multiplicity of selfgoverning and self-organising collectivities constituted on diverse spatial scales - from the local to the globalThe spatial reach of these selfgoverning communities is defined by the geographical scope of the collective problems or activities they seek to manage, although there is a strong presumption in favour of the subsidiarity principle. Transnational democracy, in this account, is defined by the existence of a plurality of diverse, overlapping and spatially differentiated self-governing 'communities of fate' and multiple sites of power without the need for 'sovereign' or centralised structures of authority . It identifies, in the political practices of critical social movements, immanent tendencies towards the transcendence of the sovereign territorial state as the fundamental unit of democracy. I do not wish to necessarily endorse this conceptualisation and its implications. But I do wish to forestall the dismissal of this and earlier statements as academic (the nicest of three adjectives addressed angrily to me by international union officers on two separate occasions) . The fact is that the TIUs prefer, or absorb via the media, the language and orientation of other academics. A recognition of the extent to which movement-oriented intellectuals are moving in another direction might give the TIU organisations pause for reflection. Such ambiguities are likely to increase within the ICFTU. For example, one can find Peter Bakvis, the ICFTUs Man in Washington being simultaneously or alternately compromised with the neo-liberal World Bank and International Monetary Fund (UNI 2005) and with the anti-neo-liberal Hemispheric Social Alliance of the Americas (at least according to Marchand 2005:115).
16

Within the GJ&SM we can certainly find different orientations. Some who talk of global democratisation see this, like the unions, primarily in terms of reforming multi-lateral institutions (http://www.reformcampaign.net/index.php?
17

Whilst I favour dialogue, this does not mean either that there is or should be a compromise halfway between the two orientations I have sketched. Given the diffuse nature of even the WSF, some such kind of negotiated compromise, seems anyway unlikely. What the more general GJ&SM represents, after all, is not simply one or more new positions but new places, spaces, forms and understandings of emancipation globally (meaning both worldwide and holistic). I have already mentioned one of the places, the events organised worldwide within the WSF process. It seems, increasingly, that the old institutionalised international unions are using the WSF to launch or publicise their policy proposals, including such as the ILO one on decent work (critiqued Waterman 2005a) or Labours Platform for the Americas (see below). Another such place would or could be the increasing number of academic events, on or against neo-liberal globalisation, commonly with union participation. I have been critical of some such for their narrow or self-congratulatory nature (Waterman 2005b). Yet, given the current crisis of unionism, it is nonetheless possible to find, in the interstices of such conferences, more autonomous expression. It was thus that I discovered Khanya College, Johannesburg. This is an adult-education, research and publication operation, with one foot in the traditional labour and community movements, one in the new social movements of South Africa. Apart from the resources it might provide to such traditions in the country itself, it has a Southern African solidarity programme. A special issue of the quarterly Khanya magazine, distributed at the colloquium I criticised, was devoted to South(ern) African unions (Khanya 2005). National and international union activist, Maria van Driel, argues here that social dialogue, which is the policy of the main South African trade unions, cannot advance the interests of the working class under conditions of neoliberalism (van Driel 2005:27).
Whilst this issue may not have been concerned with the global, or internationalism in general, it projected a national orientation that suggests how the trade union organisations could learn from the newest social movements.

As for spaces, we have to consider that potentially emancipatory space, Cyberia. TIU websites provide increasing amounts of information and ideas, including, as this paper reveals, those about global governance. However, these sites have two
pg=9&lg=eng), others in terms of empowering local actors, seen as increasingly involved in and addressing global politics where they live and work (Saskia Sassen 2005). The point is, however, that whilst the first orientation leaves the initiating NGO (in this case Ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.org/) in the role of mediator, the second requires the (self-) mobilisation of men and women in their localities, horizontally linked through the internet.

common limitations. One is the lack of space for dialogue, or feedback. The other is that they are subordinated to the institutions: they are seen merely as tools.18 Even the autonomous, sophisticated, innovative and widely respected - international labour site, LabourStart http://www.labourstart.org/, confines itself to the institutionalised trade union organisations and only deals with such autonomous labour or social movements as might be acceptable to the TIUs. Indeed, a search within it failed to identify an innovatory international union declaration on neo-liberal globalisation, Labours Platform for the Americas http://www.gpn.org/research/orit2005/! However, this document, co-signed by the ICFTUs regional body in the Americas, the ORIT, and associated bodies, has failed, at time of writing, to reach the website of the ICFTU itself!19 As we move deeper into Cyberia, we will find sites closer to the GJ&SM. Whilst the Global Policy Network (GPN) and associated Economic Policy Institute (EPI) are closely associated with the TIUs, distance implied by their institutional autonomy and/or research function is apparently permitting them to go where no TIU has gone before. And their websites are permitting us (at the base, at the margins, far away) to see what they have to say. Thus the GPN both facilitated and now hosts the above-mentioned Platform. And the EPI has published a book entitled The Global Class War (Faux 2006), described as follow: Faux explains how globalisation is creating a new global political elite"The Party of Davos"who have more in common with each other than with their fellow citizens. Their so-called trade agreements (like NAFTA) and the World Trade Organisation act as a global constitution that protects only one kind of citizenthe corporate investor. The inevitable result will be a drop in American living standards that will have dramatic political consequences. Faux concludes with an original strategy for bringing democracy to the global economy beginning with a social contract for North America. http://www.epi.org/ content. cfm/books_global_class_war. Here there is at least an implicit challenge to TIUs still clinking wine glasses at the cocktail party of the global elite. These two cyberspaces are, however, both 1) based in the USA and 2) primarily addressed and functional to traditional
Developing an idea of Mark Poster (1995), I have elsewhere suggested that cyberspace needs to be considered not only as a tool (like a hammer) or a community (like Germany) but also as a utopia (a non-existent but desirable future). Poster points out that whereas Germany produces Germans, a hammer does not produce hammers but drives nails into wood. Utopia, in my understanding, is something that could inspire Germans to produce a community broader, deeper and more humane than Germany, and to create new multipurpose tools for new Post-German purposes.
18 19

The only explanation I can suggest here is that this incrementalist document was nonetheless too assertive or autonomous for the conservative, Eurocentred and top-down ICFTU/GU! More information and other explanations would be welcome here.

inter/national union institutions. Rather than now considering all those sites and networks that might cover the workers and issues, or provide the dialogical possibilities suggested by the GJ&SM, let us consider one in the further reaches of Cyberia. This is ProlPosition, http://www.anarkismo.net /newswire.php?story_id=2453, an anarcho/ communist/ autonomist (I think) portal that concentrates on inter/national labour conditions and struggles, regardless of whether these are within the boundaries or vision of the TIUs. In a piece addressing regional, if not global, governance (the so-called Bolkestein Directive, aimed at levelling down European Union rights and conditions in the interests of the most ruthless multinationals), Laure Akai (2006) says:
Within the context of protest politics, we often find even radical activists calling for protection and rights, which rests on the assumption that there is a body, be it the nation state or an extranational institution, which regulates for the good of society, above the interests of capital. This illusion is becoming more and more appallingly nave; money making and capital interests are firmly entrenched in government. The moments where the state plays social protector are acts of cheap PR played out with our public funds which we have worked for and earned and opposition to the bottom line can only take place in relation to the power and wealth of the society; in this, some nation states are at a distinct disadvantages in the spectacle known as protecting its subjects. Many leftists envision the transition of the state from power broker and capital enabler to social protector and insurer. While this (arguably) may be a considerable improvement in its role, there is also the perspective of decommissioning it and replacing it with workers self-government and international federalism. The underlying principle, the creation of a libertarian society, would presuppose various mechanisms for the elimination of material deprivation and disparity, and, most importantly, the elimination of the causes of inequity.: the key to the creation of any future socially equitable society lies in divesting capital and state of its powers.

It is this kind of voice that the internet allows us to hear, possibly for the first time. And the Prol-Position site, on which I found Akai, has a front-page feedback feature. But it is not the existence of this or that labour, social movement, or civil society site, or even networks of such, that reveal the manner in which the web as a space, and communication as a practice, go beyond the political and institutional order within which the TIUs have lived for 50 to 100 years. The fact is that we live in an increasingly networked world order or disorder (Castells 1996-8, Escobar 2004). This implies that both dominating power (power over) and emancipatory power (power to) are increasingly expressed and exercised here. Recognition of this can, once again, be implicitly found in those places and spaces in which the TIUs and the GJ&SM do meet. The next case addresses itself to new ways of labour and social movement being and doing, in other words of their

recognition of the new terrains of struggle. This is a special issue of a publication of the French Bibliothque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC) on the internet and social movements (Matriaux 2005). The compilation includes both empirical accounts and conceptual discussion of a global and movement-informed civil society in construction. And it recognises, both implicitly and explicitly, that cyberspace represents a privileged place for labour struggle under the informatised networked capitalism of the 21st century.20 The collection deals with new forms of informatised work, with the practices of French trade unions and parties and with inter/national social movements. Although this is, of course, in traditional print form, some of the contributions in English are on the website of the Feltrinelli Foundation (see Websites and Lists below). And whilst, as I have said, the collection may not address global governance, it does recognise the centrality of the web for contemporary social movements:
The use of Net tools has been very useful also, evidently, for the development of transnational militancy (of which, in addition to the nationstate, the scales of action are on the local or global level). Without going too far, one could thus say that if alter-globalisation was not born from the Internet, it certainly could not have existed without it. (Matriaux 2005:7)

Finally, I mentioned forms of emancipatory thought and action. I think it must by now be evident that the forms common to the TIUs in their address to the global are not in any sense emancipatory (meaning setting free from the power of another). Defensive, certainly, and in the past resulting in amelioration. But the adequacy of such defence within the places or spaces designed and dominated by capital and state are finally being questioned, at least at the periphery of these institutions (the Faux book?). And it would be difficult to argue that the trade union impact internationally is today one of amelioration, unless this word is stretched to mean the reduction of pain, or an aspiration for some golden, if tarnished, past. Now, one has to recognise within the history of the international labour movement two major traditions in relation to wage-labour. The first was A Fair Days Wage for a Fair Days Work, and it finds contemporary expression within the ILO campaign, endorsed by the TIUs, for Decent Work. The other one was Abolition of the Wage System, the contemporary expression of which might be The Liberation of Time from Work (Gorz 1999, discussed Waterman 2005a). The first tradition seeks solace
There is here an implicit connection with the argument of Hardt and Negri (2004) that, although industrial labour is not dead, it is today immaterial labour (not only intellectual, creative and computerised but much service and care work) that is hegemonic. This is in the sense that it provides the dominant logic of work, as did industrial labour in an earlier epoch. The implications of this are far-reaching for an appropriate organisational (better, relational) model for inter/national labour defence and assertion in the 2ist century.
20

sometimes salvation - through work for capital, the second in productive and creative activity freed from capitalist exploitation and alienation. Whilst the WSF and the more general GJ&SM may not have addressed itself adequately to the emancipation of labour, it has certainly expressed itself for emancipation from capital - at least in its most aggressive current forms. And it has considered such emancipation over a very wide, if not complete, variety of areas of human existence, of capitalist alienation and of social protest and counter-proposition. These encompass the emancipation of women and the sexually discriminated; indigenous, local, immigrant and other minority rights; peace, cultural and communication rights; the environment; health; participatory and direct democracy, and different forms of labour (the traditionally waged, migrant, the old casual and the new precarious, rural, urban petty-commodity). Many of these, and other issues, find at least some mention in the so-called Bamako Appeal (2006), which whilst not representing the position of the GJ&SM, certainly addresses itself energetically and provocatively to labour. Bearing in mind the extent to which the GJ&SM is reinventing social emancipation for the age of a globalised and networked capitalism, it would certainly seem to provide the space within which it would be possible to discuss, formulate and put into action a set of complementary propositions for a radically-democratic reinvention of the global and in such a way as to empower the regional, the national and local places. This would, of course, be a space within which the key term would be not global governance but global democracy.

Conclusion A re-invention of the inter-national union organisations as a global labour movement, a re-assertion of labour in the global arenas of information-communication-culture, would seem to be the alternative to reiteration of old formulas. Only thus, it seems to me, can we surpass the nightmare scenario I have sketched elsewhere: The trade unions turn out to play football against the capitalists, only to find that the football field has been turned into an ice stadium. The capitalists are kitted out for ice hockey and are whizzing around the footballers, practicing their devastating shots. Appealing to the neutral or at least pluralist - umpire, the unions complain against this un-negotiated change in the nature of the game. But what can I do?, the umpire complains, If I dont let them play here they will simply shift somewhere else. This is a cruel parable but actually inadequate to the case. The capitalists may be still playing football in a national, or ice hockey in an international, stadium. But what they are primarily doing is playing computer games in global cyberspace. The reinvention of the international labour movement in the light of contemporary capitalism requires that movement invent new places/spaces, new rules, and that it then address itself to, and empower all, working people: there is a world out there, urgently needing to be saved. Finally, it has to be said that if the grand old tradition of social democracy is in a serious condition, it is not dead. 21 This has been suggested earlier. Amongst the contributors to its re-invention has been the one-time General Secretary of the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF), an energetic contributor to international debates on labour. As he says in the preface to a collection on the future of organised labour globally: Those who are developing the concept of global social movement unionism, or of the global justice movement, are seeking to rebuild a labour movement with a shared identity and shared values not the lowest common denominator, that is what we have today and this movement, as it is, can only lose. Beyond the lowest common denominator, we need an alternative explanation of the world, alternative goals for society and a programme on how to get there that all can subscribe to. A new international labour movement, armed with a sense of a broader social mission, can become the core of a global alliance including all other social movements that share the same agenda. Such a movement can change the world. It can again be the liberation movement of humanity it set out to be hundred and fifty years ago. (Gallin 2006:10).
Or possibly suffering from schizophrenia? In his brilliant continuing work on cosmopolitan democracy, David Held (2004) claims to be thinking in socialdemocratic terms. This claim is questioned by Patrick Bond (2004). Perhaps we are witnessing here the difference between a politically- and a socially-oriented social democracy?
21

This requires a Herculean effort. But the task of boulderseeking, trench-digging and river-diversion is one to which many traditions are going to contribute. Hercules did not make his effort from within the Augean Stable. The means he required came from outside. He achieved the task without much Augean Dialogue with the hegemon, who had for so long been befouling the stable and leaving the surrounding lands unfertilised. As a more extended description of the case reveals,22 the contract that King Augeas made with Hercules was broken unilaterally by the king. Hercules, apparently, did not get involved in any concession bargaining, nor did he even complain about the failure of the king to act in the word or spirit of the contract. Fortunately, for him, the kings son reflected on the power that Hercules had demonstrated and decided it would be wise to honour the contract. This was a compromise. I have no doubt they shook hands. Hercules, however, was not compromised by the settlement. Nor, as far as we are informed, did he henceforth consider Royal Contracts an ideal, or even pragmatically necessary, for heroic labour. One assumes that he preserved his autonomy power deriving from forces outside the contractual relationship for any future dealings with devious monarchs.
Augeas, the king of Elis had been given a huge amount of cattle as a gift from his father, many herds in fact. His problem was, the stables where he kept them had never been cleaned. His neglect was so great that not only the stables, which were in a very bad state, but the land surrounding them had been unfertilised for many years, due to the unused manure which lay within the compound.
22

Heracles task was to clean them. This seemed to Augeas to be a long and arduous labor for Heracles to undertake. Thinking it would be totally impossible Augeas wagered Heracles a tenth of his cattle, if the huge task was finished in a single day. Without hesitation Heracles accepted Augeas' challenge, then set about working out a plan in which to do the job in a swift but thorough way. The next day Heracles started his formidable labor, not only using his great strength, but using his brain to plan this challenge. The first part of the mammoth task was to dismantle the wall which protected the rear of the stables, and with Heracles' great strength this was an effortless job. Next he made a diversion in the two rivers which flowed close by, the Alpheus and the Peneus. After digging a canal in the direction of the stables, Heracles released their banks, and when the two rivers merged they created a surge, which, by the time they flowed through the stables, turned into a torrent. The power and also the amount of water, washed all the filth away. After the rush of water passed through the stables it not only cleansed them but cascaded on to the fields below, giving the soil life after being deprived of manure for many years. With the task complete, Heracles sought his prize, which Augeas had promised; one tenth of all his herds. The king was infuriated by his defeat, thinking the great hero would never clean such a mountain of filth in such a short time, and refused to pay the wager. This time it was Heracles who was infuriated. However, Phyleus the son of king Augeas, thinking of the consequences of Heracles anger, affirmed the agreement and brought about an amicable settlement, which Heracles accepted. (Leadbetter 2006).

Inspiration for a necessary and possible future can, it appears, be drawn not only from contemporary parable but even from a mythical past.

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Websites and Lists Debate List. http://lists.kabissa.org/mailman/listinfo/debate Global Labour Institute. www.global-labour.org Guide for Social Transformation in Europe (Mayo Fuster, Marco Berlinguer) http://www.euromovements.info/english/who.htm, http://www.euromovements.info/html/new-chronos.htm Tools for Change. http://www.iol.ie/ %7Emazzoldi/toolsforchange/revolution.html. Alliance for a Corporate-Free UN. http://www.earthrights.org/pubs/UNCompact.pdf Codhos (Collectif des Centres de Documentation en Histoire Ouvrire et Sociale) www.codhos.asso.fr/ Drainville, Andr. 2005. Beyond Altermondialisme: Anti-Capitalist Dialectic of Presence, Review of International Political Economy. No. 5, pp. 884-908. Drainville, Andr. 2006. Beyond Altermondialisme : Anti-Capitalist Dialectic of Presence [Authors draft of item published as Drainville 2005. Feltrinelli Institute, Conference on Archives of the Present: From Traditional to Digital Documents. Sources for a History of Contemporary Social Movements. http://www.feltrinelli.it/Fondazione/convegni-interna-archiviit.htm. Global Civil Society and Global Governance. http://www.globalpolicy.org/ngos/role/ govindx.htm Topic - Corporate Governance, Global Union Research Network http://www.gurn.info/ topic/corpgov/index.html UN and Business. http://www.globalpolicy.org/reform/indxbiz.htm.

CHAPTER 16

The Bamako Appeal of Samir Amin: A Late-Modern Janus? (2006)

[Source: Waterman, Peter. 2007. The Bamako Appeal : A Post-Modern Janus? in Sen, Jai and Mahuresh Kumar (with Patrick Bond and Peter Waterman) (eds). A Political Programme for the World Social Forum ? Democracy, Substance and Debate in the Bamako Appeal and the Global Justice Movements. New Delhi and Durban: CACIM and Centre for Civil Society. Pp. 357-390].

Samir Amin (second row, blue jacket and white hair), surrounded by supporters of the Bamako Appeal, crossing the Niger, Bamako, Mali, January, 2006. Photo: http://forumtiersmonde.net/fren/ forums/fsm/fsm_bamako/appel-bamako-appeal.htm

Janus is the Roman god of gates and doors ... beginnings and endings, and hence represented with a double-faced head, each looking in opposite directions. He was worshipped at the beginning of the harvest time, planting, marriage, birth, and other types of beginnings, especially the beginnings of important events in a person's life. Janus also represents the transition between primitive life and civilisation, between the countryside and the city, peace and war, and the growing-up of young people. (Janus 2006).

he Bamako Appeal (BA) is a substantial international anticapitalist document of some 9,000 words, containing a 10point programme for a global social transformation. It seems intended to do for our globalised informatised capitalist era what Marxs Communist Manifesto of 1848 did for his inter/national industrial one. The BA was drawn up at a conference organised to immediately precede one of the tri-continental editions of the World Social Forum, in Bamako, Mali, January 18, 2006. It was sponsored by a small group of overlapping non-governmental organisations: the Forum du Tiers Monde/Third World Forum, the World Forum of Alternatives, the Tricontinental Centre, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, the Malian Social Forum and a Dakar-based ecology and development NGO, ENDA (for relevant URLs see Resources below). The two leading individuals involved are prominent figures within these NGOs and the WSF, the veteran Thirdworldist thinkers and activists, the Egyptian Samir Amin (based in Dakar/Paris) and the Belgian Franois Houtart. The BA was either presented or unpresented (accounts conflict) to the Bamako WSF. It was later apparently also presented to the Call or Assembly of Social Movements at the WSF held in Caracas, Venezuela, January 24-9, 2006. It was not, however, approved by either in any shape or form. Around one month later it appeared on the website of the World Forum of Alternatives (WFA), here preceded by an appeal for endorsements. Information about the background, the organisation, the funding and the intention and even about the individuals involved is lacking from the site. Since its launch the BA has been reproduced, often without commentary, in newspapers, magazines, on websites and lists, in Europe, the USA, Latin America, South Africa and India. Further information about the BA, its participants/endorsers and funding has had to be gleaned from one of its initiators, or provided unsystematically by some of those involved. There is so far no formal report on the event either by its sponsors, nor an extensive analysis from independent or critical sources. My account above and below has to be therefore considered tentative. The BA appears to be a second attempt to move the World Social Forum from what has been primarily a space for open-ended

dialogue on alternatives to neo-liberal globalisation to one of deliberation, decision, organisation and action. (For recent overviews of the WSF process, see Bourgeois 2006, Vargas Forthcoming) The first attempt had been made by Amin and/or his friends, Bernard Cassen (of Attac, France), Houtart and others, one year earlier, at the Fifth WSF, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2005. Here it became known under such names as the Porto Alegre Manifesto (PAM) and the Appeal of 19. This first initiative provoked the anger or ridicule of many at the WSF, particularly its International Council members, many of whom considered it, variously, as some kind of attempted political coup, as elitist (dominated by white, male intellectuals, emanating from a chic hotel), as circumventing the well-established Call of Social Movements, and (in my case, Waterman 2005a) of being both meagre in extent and lacking in bite. One who thought it worth a critical response was Patrick Bond (2005). In the face of such reactions, even some of the signatories seemed to back off from the PAM. Critical reactions to the new Bamako Appeal have come from WSF International Council members, the Brazilians Chico Whitaker (2006) and Antonio Martins (2006). The former seems to see it as an attempt to reinstate the centrality of the nation state to the project of social emancipation. The latter asks:
Why should we rush into a choice of campaigns supposedly capable of unifying the world of social forums? Why should we propose them from small groups; are we re-establishing the barrier between those who think and those who fight, and violating the simultaneous commitment to equality and diversity?

He completes his point with a footnote:

The Bamako Appeal, published 24.01.06, has the same structure as the Porto Alegre Manifesto launched in 2005, at theHotel San Raphael. A preamble in which the old tradition makes all possible concession to altermondialisation, followed by the announcement of the priority campaigns.

Other members or supporters of the IC have apparently been either holding their fire or preserving radio silence in the hope that the BA of 2006 will follow the fate of the PAM of 2005. Yet others, who like myself are not so identified with the WSF IC, have been expressing themselves for, against, or both for and against the BA. Both this manifesto and some of the discussion around it is available on line. (See, for example, the WSFDiscuss list in Resources, and Bamako Appeal Spikes Controversy 2006). In addressing myself to the content I will concentrate on Part 6, the Labour Chapter (Appendix 1). This chapter will have to stand in for what is anyway a stitched-together patchwork of such positions. And it is an area I have been working on for some 15-20 years. In what follows I will argue that 1) such charters, declarations and manifestos are normal within the wider Global Justice and Solidarity Movement (GJ&SM), occur within the WSF itself and should be

welcomed; 2) that the process by which the BA has appeared and been launched reproduces old movement practices that the new movement has been surpassing; and 3) that the Labour Chapter suggests the possibility and necessity for a dialogue on the BA. In any case, the initiators of the Bamako Appeal have no more control over what others do with it than does the WSF have over the production of such appeals. This loss of control, thanks largely to the internet, is something that makes feedback on any significant text both consistent with the new technology and a sign of the significance of the contemporary media to contempoary emancipation (de Jong, Shaw and Stammers 2005). Let a Hundred Charters Bloom! My subtitle paraphrases the famous slogan of Mao in the mid1950s, Let a hundred flowers bloom: let a hundred schools of thought contend. Whilst, in the Chinese case, this turned out to be a momentary and Machiavellian policy, which ended with the chopping off of 99 blooms, it would seem to well represent the ethic of a movement which has as its orientation one no and many yesses (a Zapatista slogan). There have been, are and will be 96 others. (A generation apart, and addressed to different identities/interests, consider the South Asian Feminist Declaration 1989 and the Declaracin de Caracas 2006). The Bamako Appeal (Appeal of Bamako 2006) calls for the creation of a new historical subject (a collective force for social transformation). This concept is close to the classical Marxist one, in which this subject was the working class. However, the BA does not seem to have either this class or a homogeneous substitute for such in mind. It seems to the thinking of an emancipatory force, the goal of which would be
a radical transformation of the capitalist system. The destruction of the planet and of millions of human beings, the individualist and consumerist culture that accompanies and nourishes this system, along with its imposition by imperialist powers are no longer tolerable, since what is at stake is the existence of humanity itself. Alternatives to the wastefulness and destructiveness of capitalism draw their strength from a long tradition of popular resistance that also embraces all of the short steps forward indispensable to the daily life of the systems victims.

The BA declares the necessity to 1. Construct a world founded on the solidarity of human beings and peoples 2. Construct a world founded on the full affirmation of citizenship and equality of the sexes 3. Construct a universal civilisation offering in all areas the full potential of creative development to all its diverse members 4. Construct socialisation through democracy

5. Construct a world founded on the recognition of the nonmarket-driven law of nature and of the resources of the planet and of its agricultural soil 6. Construct a world founded on the recognition of the nonmarket-driven status of cultural products and scientific acquisitions, of education and of health care 7. Promote policies that closely associate democracy without pre-assigned limits, with social progress and the affirmation of autonomy of nations and peoples 8. Affirm the solidarity of the people of the North and the South in the construction of an internationalism on an antiimperialist basis These principles are then spelled out in 10 parts or chapters: 1. For a multipolar world system founded on peace, law and negotiation; 2. For an economic reorganisation of the global system; 3. For regionalisations in the service of the people and which reinforce the south in global negotiations; 4. For the democratic management of the planet's natural resources; 5. For a better future for peasant farmers; 6. To build a workers united front; 7. For a democratisation of societies as a necessary step to full human development; 8. For the eradication of all forms of oppression, exploitation and alienation of women; 9. For the democratic management of the media and cultural diversity; 10. For the democratisation of international organisations and the institutionalisation of a multipolar international order Finally, the BA proposes a series of working groups, presumably to develop the chapters or to spell out the action necessary to achieve them. Although the Appeal makes a gesture toward the Bandung Conference of 1955 (see Resources), that was an inter-state conference of Third-World countries that, whilst condemnatory of Western and (implicitly) Eastern imperialism or domination, was sponsored and endorsed by states mostly of a single-party or military nature. Moreover, the grand hopes of creating a unified, autonomous and peaceful Third World bloc rapidly broke down, most dramatically with the China-India War of 1962. More substantially does the BA reveal its origin in the Dependency Theory or Neo-Marxism of the 1970s, and a related Thirdworldism the notion that the primary contradiction under capitalism was that between core and periphery, and that the states and/or peoples of

the Third World were the primary force for development and/or revolution (the latter exemplified in Gerassi 1971). Curiously but significantly, the BA makes no reference to the Organisation of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL, Resources). This was a Cuban state project launched 1966, of more populist address and revolutionary rhetoric than Bandung. That project was, however, also limited by its statesponsorship, its foundational state-movement alliance and an ideology that justified this. The OSPAAAL continues a shadow existence today, with an office in Havana, remembered more for its brilliant posters than any political achievements or inspiration. There is, moreover, a Cuban Connection with the Bamako Appeal, in so far as several of its prominent supports, like Chilean Marta Harnecker, have close relations with the Cuban regime. Moreover, the BA notion of internationalism seems to reproduce, by implication, the OSPAAL project in seeing international solidarity primarily in South-South or North-South terms, and in its failure to specify what is meant by this term. Yet, given the problematic history of the concept, calls for internationalism surely today require discussion of at least the subjects thereof (workers? citizens? women? peoples? states?) , its axes ((East-West?), its directions (North to South?), its type (Identity, Substitution, Complementarity, Reciprocity, etc), its reach or target (India-Pakistan as well as India-Nicaragua?), its impact on those involved, its meaning for them (Waterman 1998/2002). Gerassi (1971) reveals the Thirdworldist weakness here, in putting a New International on his book cover, whilst having no single word about it inside! Samir Amin is himself today proposing a Fifth International, of a specifically Socialist or even Communist nature (Amin 2006:48), whilst again failing to surpass the 1970s rhetoric. (Those promoting any such Fifth International today might like to consider the League for the Fifth International, in the Resources: this is predictably dismissive of the WSF - but also of Amin). Yet whilst the BA is indebted to the past, it at the same time reveals the impact of the WSF and GJ&SM, recognising a variety of contradictions, stressing diversity, here avoiding the word socialism (too identified with failed Communist and RadicalNationalist states or Social-Democratic regimes?): rather does it suggest that democracy without prescribed limits will lead to socialisation. The BA seems, unlike both Dependency Theory and Thirdworldism, to be primarily addressed to social movements. Thus, although possibly coming from closer to the WSF than other such collective or individual declarations related to the new movement (Callinicos 2003, Monbiot 2003), it hardly seems to warrant the anxiety that has been revealed (or concealed) about it. And even if Amin were to create a Fifth Socialist/Communist International, such would be likely beset from its Founding Congress or World Socialist Forum? - by all the factionalism of dozens of competing groupuscules and a half-dozen Peoples Revolutionary Armies. It would surely suffer the falling away of both

the agencies that funded the BA (because of the Bandung echo?), and diverse people and organisations that had endorsed a Bamako Appeal from which the words Communist, and even Socialist, had been diplomatically excluded! These qualifications made, it is necessary to recognise that the BA is only one of many such documents coming out of the GS&JM. I will deal briefly with four. 1. The Call of Social Movements, an established feature at the WSF, and at most related regional or local ones, provides a first point of comparison. The Call of Social Movements (2004) appears, on re-reading, to be a shorter, lighter and less-radical version of the BA, coming over rather as a condensation of what has occurred at the WSF, and listing protest events to be supported for the coming year. Although opposed to neo-liberalism, it avoids identifying capitalism as the problem. I have criticised the Call elsewhere (Waterman 2005a), not simply for its lack of radicalism but also for its lack of transparency - and its failure to say what it means by social movement. It was, however, the Call that helped make the anti-war demonstrations of February 2003 a global phenomenon (Call of the World Social Movements 2003). The Call of 2005 (Call From Social Movements 2005) was, regrettably, shorter on analysis than previously and even longer as an agenda of coming protest events. The Call to the Social Movements Assembly (2006) specified some interesting new problems or demands (women, gays and lesbians, children) but again stressed protest events and was no more a holistic statement than were previous ones. 2. Nobody identified with the WSF seems to have been alarmed by the production in 2004 of a feminist Global Charter for Humanity (World March of Women 2004). Indeed, I have so far been unable, to my regret, to find much comment on it (for an exception see ILGA 2005). And this despite the fact that it is a holistic declaration, neither confining itself to women nor avoiding an explicitly anti-capitalist position:
The World March of Women, of which we are a part, views patriarchy as the system oppressing women and capitalism as the system that enables a minority to exploit the vast majority of women and men. These systems reinforce one another. They are rooted in, and work hand in hand with, racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and forced labour. They breed manifold forms of fundamentalism that prevent women and men from being free. They generate poverty and exclusion, violate the rights of human beings, particularly womens rights, and imperil humanity and the planet. We reject this world!

We propose to build another world where exploitation, oppression, intolerance and exclusion no longer exist, and where integrity, diversity and the rights and freedoms of all are respected. This Charter is based on the values of equality, freedom, solidarity, justice and peace.

3. As for Labours Platform for the Americas (2005), I fear that simple disinterest or passive acceptance might be its fate. This manifesto was either launched at or presented to the WSF in Caracas 2006 (Valente 2006). It is a classically incremental socialpartnership (meaning capitalist partnership) document, calling for Decent Work for Sustainable Development, and claiming, without evidence, to have been co-produced by civil society. The title alone implies an identification with work-for-capital and the development of sustainable capitalism. The platform proposes no such dramatic joint or international action as workers and citizens of the Americas have been taking against free-market fundamentalism. Nor does it refer to the fact that such action has been often taken as part of the GJ&SM. However, it does at least confront neo-liberalism, does propose an alternative, and was endorsed by the major international and some significant national union centres of the Americas. (For its temerity, it still, early April 2006, remains unpublished on the major international union websites!). It is therefore, willy-nilly, an invitation to labour and social movement commentary and criticism. As well, of course, to comparison with Chapter 6 of the Bamako Appeal! 4. Observations and Reflections: Bases for Building a PostNeoliberal Agenda (Post-Neo-Liberal Agenda 2006). By its cautious, if not self-efacing, title, this document might seem to distance itself from anything as aggressive as a manifesto. Yet it represents just such an intervention into the current process as do the other documents. And, like several others, it seems to have been sponsored and/or funded by a small group of (largely Braziloriented) funding agencies and NGOs. In this case they are the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Germany), Attac-Brazil, the Articulacin Feminista Marcosur (Montevideo), Action Aid-Brazil, Planeta Porto Alegre (Brazil) and IBASE (Brazil). This document is unique in so far as it seems to have come from the very heart of the WSF: many of the NGOs and individuals named are members of the WSFs International Council. One of them is Antonio Martins, the Brazilian who first responded to the BA and another is Candido Grzybowski. The PNLA makes clear at various places its intention to overcome capitalism. However, in both its title and its content it comes over as an over-general reiteration of criticisms, of concepts, analyses and propositions produced by five years of the WSF: In the debates on building a post-neoliberal agenda, it is fundamental to discuss the question of who the builders are. The supposed existence of political subjects who are special protagonists in the struggle for social change, and the notion that there exists a hierarchisation between the struggles, are

conceptions that still persist in our political field and jeopardise dialogue and the overcoming of inequality. The reciprocal recognition of the presence and pertinence of the proposals borne by the various political subjects is fundamental for creating political, theoretical and methodological conditions for this collective construction. In the past, delegating the task of social change to a single subject and delegitimising other political agendas that also proposed novelties led to a repetition of the logic of exclusion and to reproduction of inequality and privileges. It also caused weakening of the collective propositive capacity. On the other hand, accepting and promoting the diversity of the political actors interested in social change strengthens a democratic construction fed by multiple visions and capable of formulating alternatives and mobilising different subjects from the local to the planetary sphere. (19) The assertion of the positive value of diversity is demonstrated by the numerous positive references to women, sex(uality) and femin/ist/ism. Yet this seems to go at the expense of reference to workers, the working class, unions and socialism reference to which is sometimes critical or negative. The first set of terms receives 18 mentions, the second eight. A final chapter, From Conquering the State to Autonomy, argues that:
Given the de-politicisation of social life promoted by neoliberal globalisation, a post-neoliberal agenda must first of all propose a re-invention of politics. It is necessary to re-establish political debate in the public space in order to recover the plurality of perspectives and the acknowledgement of new social actors, to formulate the notion and practice of representation and to return the economy to the decision-making power of the community of citizens, because the economy has to do with their work and the wealth that they produce. In short, it is indispensable to rebuild the priority of politics over economics. Re-inventing politics is at the same time radicalising democracy, by placing society under the control of its members, making popular sovereignty effective and democrati[s]ing the public sphere and daily social life. [] It is necessary to create a popular counter-power by articulating social movements, networks of movements, organisations of active citizenship, religious entities, and other entities that represent civil society. These will be the foundations to promote strategies based on the diversity of points of view and emancipatory proposals, whenever the situation calls for a position to be taken and whenever possible anticipating the facts. (Original italics. 29)

The subtitle and following statement here may be left-democratic in nature but hardly either original or specific. (For something that is both, consider Adamovsky 2006). These admittedly limited sketches cannot do full justice to the documents concerned. The point is rather to note how common and similar in presumed intention - such declarations of position are. One could, without leaving ones computer chair, find, if not 96 other such flowers, at least 10-20 more, marked by their

condemnation of neo-liberal globalisation and their very varied global alternatives. Within this context, the Bamako Appeal could be considered a challenging addition or alternative. There seems little likelihood of it disappearing into the Saharan sands. And if it were to do so, I would consider it a loss to the movement. At time of writing, however, it seems as if both the BA and discussion about it are emerging out of rather than disappearing into the wastes. An Old Left Political Process? The WSF and the GJ&SM are highly sensitive to process, seeming to have understood that it is actually means that determine ends. Whilst those controlling or coordinating the various fora are sometimes criticised, or dismissed as verticals, they spend an inordinate amount of time considering appropriate process. The self-denominated horizontals do the same. There is, again, Zapatista language that encapsulates the aspiration for a prefigurative politics one which demonstrates in the dystopian present the social relations of a utopian tomorrow. One expression is Nos Re-encontramos Caminando Juntos Preguntando...Reflejando (We Re-encounter Each Other Walking Together Asking.Reflecting). Another, Mandar Obedeciendo (Leading by Obeying). If this is the poetry, prosaic propositions are nonetheless repeatedly made. These concern such issues as control over WSF themes and events; the implications of state-, foundationor development-agency funding; representativity; the presence of the poor (up to 70 percent of participants in early WSFs have been university educated), marginalisation of the youth camp; protection of women from sexual harassment; the provision of space to women (40+ percent of participants, but on one forum day, according to Obando (2005) subject of four percent of the events; domination by the panel form; the dominating role of our celebrities; leadership bias toward the older, the whiter, the more intellectual; and the relationship of the social forums or social movements with political parties, states and statespersons (national or international). The Bamako Appeal came under immediate scrutiny and challenge because of its pre-history (the PAM of 2005), its manner of creation, its mode of operation, and the fact that it was publicised as a declaration for endorsement. The initiative was funded, according to an unconfirmed report, by various European development agencies, and to the extent of a sum so huge I cannot bring myself to reproduce it! But, in the absence of the kind of accounting that the WSF now feels obliged to publicly make, speculation will inevitably continue. Equally unlikely rumours relate to the provision of assistance to the BA, in cash or kind, from President Chavez. Invitees to the BA launch were selected (not necessarily funded) by the organisers. Those attending were presented with a draft, which was then complemented in working groups, their reports being edited by Amin, Houtart and Rmy

Herrera (a leftist French political-economist). According to an account by someone present,

the reports of the working groups were presented to the plenary session of those at the Bandung conference but at no[] point was the full document presented to the Bamako WSF at least not as far as I know! The final version of the BA is an edited (and elaborated/rewritten) version of what was reported from the working groups).

One particular cause for suspicion or hostility has been the manner in which the two successive initiatives have been given titles identifying themselves with successive forums: the Porto Alegre Manifesto at the WSF of 2005, the Bamako Appeal at the WSF of 2006. It has been asked why the latter was not rather called the World Forum of Alternatives Appeal (as was its predecessor, World Forum of Alternatives 1997!). And, indeed, it may be noted that few of the other manifestos or declarations (an exception is the annual Call of Social Movements) has such an identification. Houtart (2006a) notes expressed fears in Bamako of the imposition of the Bamako Appeal on the WSF but declares that such fears were overcome. According to Houtart, again, the appeal was later circulated for signature. The results by late-March were, approximately, 21 collective endorsements, 66 personal ones, and 121 invitations pending. Amongst collective endorsers were the major Brazilian union confederation, CUT and Brazils landless labour organisation, MST, as well as the Assembly of Social Movements at the WSF in Caracas. Amongst personal signatories were Aminata Traor, a Malian ex-minister prominent in the African Social Forum, Mahmoud Mamdani, an outstanding Ugandan radical academic, John Bellamy, editor of the US Monthly Review, Bernard Cassen, President of Attac in France, and Devan Pillay, an academic labour specialist, South Africa. The name of Nicola Bullard, of Focus on the Global South, Bangkok, a leading figure in the Call of Social Movements, appears both as a signatory and as a non-signatory on the list provided by Franois Houtart (2006b). In fact, however, neither she, her NGO or her network has signed it. These endorsements nonetheless suggest that the BA already has an international appeal to left intellectuals, social movements and NGOs and one that could be predicted to grow. This recognition does not, however, reduce my own discomfort about a document produced by a tiny group of individuals, complemented by an invited audience, edited by the original group, and accepted (whatever that might mean) at the event and, apparently, at (not by) the WSFs in Bamako and Caracas. I had myself originally considered endorsing the document. But it struck me that it would have been more in the spirit of our new movement if the BA had been issued for discussion in the wider community of social movements and critical intellectuals worldwide. Such seems to be the general posture of the Indian activist Jai Sen, of CACIM (see Resources). Sen, an energetic, if critical, promoter of the forum

idea in India and globally, has also been a moving force behind the collection and publication of information and analyses of the BA. He says
Our opinion is that the Bamako Appeal should have been discussed more widely and more openly before being finalised, especially given the potentials of todays communication technologies but also since the three World Social Fora were then just coming up (Bamako, Mali, January 19-23; Caracas, Venezuela, January 24-29; and Karachi, March 24-29). Having just one days discussion of such a major 17 page document could not, we feel, have done justice to the wide range of ideas and formulations put forward there, nor really allowed further ideas to come forward. This reading has been/is being echoed by others who have earlier commented or are now commenting on the Appeal, on various listserves. At another level, the Appeal is also quite uneven, with some sections being far more mature than others. There are several sections in the Appeal that in a document of this potential historical importance demand more complete formulation. (Sen 2006)

One could add at least two more points. The first is that given, precisely, the nature of the movement and the informatised world in which it operates, intellectual property is, or can rapidly become, a public good. Just as the WSF cannot operate like either the Vatican or the Union/Party, neither can the initiators of the Bamako Appeal. (Indeed, both the Vatican and the unions/parties are increasingly aware of this). Whilst the authors of the BA seem to have been assuming that this document would have the reception positive or negative of the Communist Manifesto, or of the 10-Point Bandung Declaration (which I cannot find on the web), our new movement increasingly insists on critical engagement and dialogue. Means determine ends. The second point has been made earlier and now surely demonstrated: in its acts of commission or omission the BA is no lone sinner. The Labour Chapter: a Suitable Case for Dialogue The labour chapter, short as it is, may well be the most radical political statement on the topic to be found within or around the World Social Forum. The WSF has so far proven weak, general and cautious on the general question of labour, whilst producing various relevant positions on aspects thereof. I suspect that this weakness compared with WSF positions on the environment, war or democracy is due to two interlocked reasons. It seems to me that the core forces in the forum process are 1) still maybe marked by the previous (1970s-90s) opposition of new identity to old interest movements, and/or 2) that they prefer not to enter territory occupied by the traditional union internationals and the ILO. For evidence on Point 1, consider the meagre address to labour

of the Anti-Neo-Liberal Agenda. Evidence on Point 2 is more difficult to come by since this is a matter of an absence: in this case absence of criticism or alternatives to hegemonic international union positions in an agora over whose entrance there hangs Marxs injunction, Criticise Everything!. Be this as it may, the inclusion of a chapter on labour within a manifesto with holistic intentions or pretensions is an achievement to be noted. The BA gives the labour question at least a formal equality with the nine others. But the Labour Chapter also gives the impression of having been patched together out of elements from different directions or sources, that are in tension with each other, or which anyway do not form a whole that is more than the sum of the parts. Some of the proposals in the chapter are existing union campaigns or aims, such as the constitution of effectively transnational trade-union structures (compare Davies and Williams 2006). Others can be found in the Labour Platform mentioned above, such as address to the informal or marginal workers and to migrants. Here the chapter merely repeats or continues what is being said or done - if in an important new context. I have a further problem with the title, given that United Front belongs to the historical vocabulary of the Communist International (Comintern), where it actually meant an alliance between existing parties, led by a Communist Party (United Front, Resources). This is clearly different from the new kind of dialogical/dialectical relationship in which it is assumed that all parties involved are (open to being) transformed. I note the brevity and generality of this chapter. It is both shorter and less specific than the one on peasants (reflecting the existence of a major new global peasant/farmer movement within the GJ&SM?). It is behind both the union internationals and the Labour Platform in so far as women do not even appear within it. In sum, the chapter represents an innovation in degree or of issue rather than one of underlying social theory or ethical principle. Yet such inspirations are surely both necessary to the case of labour and consistent with the stated intentions of the BA. If the international union movement is in relative or absolute decline, and if it is in the deepest crisis of its 150 year history, surely more is called for? Now, there has, over the last 15 or 20 years, been considerable debate about Social Movement Unionism or the New Social Unionism (reviewed Waterman 2004). There has been considerable innovatory feminist writing here too, primarily, of course, on working women (Chhachhi and Pittin 1996, Hale and Wills 2005). Recently this kind of challenge has been added to significantly by the protests of and theoretical/strategic discussion around the precariat, at least in Western Europe (Euro Mayday 2004). Hardt and Negri, in their latest controversial book, have a challenging chapter on labour (Hardt and Negri 2004:Ch. 2.1). This argues that work (labour carried out for capital) is undergoing a fundamental transformation, that the multitude (their alternative to people, masses, working class, worker-peasant alliance) are

all those who do so work for capital and who can thus potentially refuse this rule (2004:106). This suggests, simultaneously, a relativisation of the traditional proletarian (and his typical organisation), but a considerable extension of the role of labour within a movement for global social emancipation. Given the marginal role of the labour question within our new movement, this is a powerful and positive argument, potentially attractive to radical unions, union radicals and labour activists beyond. This chapter, furthermore like the Labour Platform - only gestures in the direction of labour internationalism, whereas there has been much movement innovation here and various attempts to formulate a new labour internationalism or global labour solidarity sometimes in relation to the new movement (Waterman and Timms 2004). Whilst much of this innovation has been within labour studies rather than within the labour movement more generally, it surely needs to be fed into any such innovatory and emancipatory labour strategy as Labour Chapter presumably intends. I do not wish to make excessive claims for my own contributions to formulating a new kind of global social movement unionism. But they might allow for a stimulating compare and contrast exercise with the existing chapter (Appendix 2). Any such exercise would anyway be only a part of a more general and more global dialogue. I am not, however, here concerned with awarding white, pink or red marks to the Labour Chapter. I am simply suggesting the value, even the necessity, of an extensive global dialogue around the Bamako Appeal as a whole. Being familiar with the charter of the World March of Women, I suspect that many feminists (and feminisms!) would have a similar attitude towards the BA chapter on women. (For feminist criticisms of the WSF itself see, AFM 2005, Obando 2005). I note, moreover, missing chapters: there is nothing on indigenous peoples and movements despite their demonstrated significance in Mexico and Bolivia. There is nothing on religious and communal fundamentalism which cannot be simply ignored or dismissed as a by-product of imperialism. For a document drafted by political-economists, it is surprisingly silent on the informatisation of capital, labour and society (Hardt and Negri 2004, Huws 2006). The Internet only appears in a sub-chapter on management of the media! One could and should, of course, continue with indeed start with - the general theoretical approach, analysis and strategy represented by the introductory part of the BA (i.e. that part issued by the authors and not submitted for discussion at the initiating event)! But I have to leave this task for others. Conclusion: the Janus-Faced Nature of the WSF and the GJ&SM The Modern Janus, according to Tom Nairn (1975) is - or was at least then - nationalism. Referring to the Bamako Appeal as a late-

modern Janus is not simply a rhetorical device (although it is obviously this also). My intention is to record the significant transformation of capitalist society or civilisation related to that from a national-industrial-(anti-)colonial capitalism to a globalisednetworked-informatised one. By transformation I mean such a dramatic development that all the characteristics of the previous phase are relativised. This means relativising also the stable understandings of such - the ruling commonsense. And that means also recognising the extent to which there is, or needs to be, a significant transformation within the emancipatory movement. In this case the transformation needs to be from the single subject, and simple formula, of the Communist Manifesto (ProletariatInternationalism-Revolution-Socialism) to recognition of todays many-headed hydra (Linebaugh and Rediker 2001), and its need for a world that allows for many others (another Zapatista expression). In suggesting that the Bamako Appeal faces the political past as well as the social future, I do not see that it is here on its own, nor that it represents some unique new threat to the WSF and the GJ&SM more generally. I would myself still consider the greatest threat to the new movement to be some kind of global neokeynesianism, in which smart capitalists, imaginative statespeople, dependent academics and counter-elites (from the unions, left parties, academia and the new movements) settle for the morecivilised capitalism suggested by the UNs Global Compact, the International Labour Organisations Decent Work (Brand 2006, Waterman 2005b, Waterman 2006), and, for that matter, the Labour Platform for the Americas itself! Here I would echo those feminists who have said that those women who seek equality with men lack ambition. The Bamako Appeal reveals the distance travelled by the Dependency theorists and Thirdworldists since, well, Bandung, the impact on them of the new movement. It also suggests tensions between their old positions and the new ones. If, moreover, we were to consider the history of such emancipatory manifestos since 1789 or 1848, we would see or should see - to what extent each of these was a prisoner of that which it intended to liberate us all from. The same goes for the WSF itself, for the GJ&SM in general unless one is going to do a selective reading which identifies only the innovatory or emancipatory elements (or those we prefer to consider so). Thus the WSF was launched by a number of mostlymale, mostly-white, mostly-middle-aged, mostly Euro-Latino personalities, themselves coming out of the Janus-faced world of non-governmental organisations (with these NGOs highly dependent on the equally Janus-faced world of national party or state support, Northern development funding agencies and corporate foundations). All this has been extensively discussed elsewhere, as has the relationship of dependence-on/autonomyfrom nation-states, political parties, statespersons, municipal

authorities and inter-state agencies (for an original and radical statement here, see again Adamovsky 2006). Here a parenthesis might be in order. It is, admittedly, a new point but it might provoke further reflection on emancipatory social movements and internationalisms. This is the position of Andr Drainville. Self-associated with the Situationist International of the 1960s (a libertarian cultural movement with, I recall, limited international spread or internationalist activity), he finds the WSF itself to stand in a long and ignoble tradition of programmatic internationals. With the partial exception of Marxs first one, Drainville finds that the following (would-be) emancipatory internationals began with some procrustean ideology, with which they attempted to squeeze or stretch such masses or classes as they cared to address. He concludes:
That Another World is Possible has become the ensign of the lefts common sense. For all its engaging cheerfulness, and for all the hope and energy that can be drawn from itthis slogan advertises the wrong kind of anti-capitalist politics. Aping the ways of the ruling class is a sure way to fall into easy ambushesThis is no less true now that governance is trying to humanise neo-liberal concepts of control than it was when Gramsci wrote. Rather than abide by the immense condescension of drawers of programmes wishing to order and stabilise the global movement of multitude, we need to think from concepts of resistance that are drawn from what men and women acting against capitalist restructuring have already invented; rather than consider those inventions too small or not political enough for the world-restructuring task at hand, we need to think with enough imagination to see the relative coherence and thus the depth and the strength - of what is being born of present circumstances. (I cite from a draft of Drainville 2006)

Drainville seems to consider all such efforts as bearing the devils footprint of the Comintern. Yet I (someone who grew up in this very tradition) have been rather energetically defending the production of charters, declarations and manifestos. Perhaps this is because I see these condensations of thought and calls to action as themselves having roots in or being inspired by movements they then, true, have tried to dominate and instrumentalise. If they had had no such contact, these internationals would have moved no one. My defence of manifestos is also due to confidence that the emancipatory subjects we are seeking have, at least today, education and in the case of at least some of their local leaders internet access. The immense condescension of drawers of programmes only applies, surely, to those draughtspeople who fail to structure into their projects the on-going feedback from those they claim to speak for. But forget for a moment the masses being condescended to: I, armed with all the (problematic) faculties and facilities of my class, profession, gender, ethnic origin, income group, age and national identity, I find these documents essential. The same goes for the famous Beginners Guides, with their customarily disrespectful

treatment of solemn subjects (see Adamovksy 2005, now available via Amazon, and Rius 2003, now available from Walmart!). And for the Wikipedia (Resources), which reveals its artisan, collectivelycreated and provisional nature. I have neither the time nor the skill to become myself an expert on urban housing, agricultural production, gender budgeting - even the precariat, migrant and women workers - on indigenous peoples, the position(s) of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals. Their documents, or those drawn up on their behalf, allow me to orient myself within an increasingly diverse and complex world of struggle. That such may reproduce capitalist, religious or old failed emancipatory movement understandings and strategies, I take for granted. But this only obliges me to read them critically. And to make such critical assessment available to others. Which is what I am trying to do here. Acknowledgements Appreciation must be expressed to a small number of people who provided me with information, or with comments on earlier drafts. They are Gina Vargas (Lima), Jai Sen (New Delhi), Geoffrey Pleyers (Paris) and Nicola Bullard (Bangkok). They cannot, of course, be held responsible for what I have either done or failed to do with their contributions. Indeed, I am hoping that the shortcomings of this piece will encourage them to themselves publish on this topic.

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to the Social Movements Assembly. 2006. http://www.resist.org.uk/reports/ archive/wsf2006/wsf200601.php Callinicos, Alex. 2003. An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto. Cambridge: Polity. Chhachhi, Amrita and Rene Pittin. 1996. Confronting State, Capital and Patriarchy: Women Organising in the Process of Industrialisation. Houndmills: Macmillan. Charter of Porto Alegre. 2005. Manifesto of Porto Alegre, http://www.zmag.org/ sustainers/content/200502/20group_of_nineteen.cfm Davies, Steve and Glynne Williams. 2006. From Global Union Federations to Global Unions? Playing to the Strengths of Democracy, Paper for International Workshop on Global Challenges for Labour, University of Kassel, April 5-6. Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences. De Jong, Wilma, Martin Shaw and Neil Stammers (eds). 2005. Global Activism: Global Media. London: Pluto. Declaracin de Caracas 2006. Declaracin de Caracas: otra integracin es urgente, posible y necesaria (Another Integration is Urgent, Possible and Necessary). http://www.pidhdd.org/inicio/article.php3?id_article43 Drainville, Andr. 2005. Beyond Altermondialisme: Anti-Capitalist Dialectic of Presence, Review of International Political Economy. No. 5, pp. 884-908. Euro Mayday. 2004. MAYDAY, MAYDAY!! Why precari@s, intermittents, cognitari/e are rebelling across NEUROPA..., www.interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/3033. Gerassi, John. 1971. The Coming of a New International: A Revolutionary Anthology. New York: World Publishing Co. Hale, Angela and Jane Wills (eds). 2005. Threads of Labour: Garment Industry Supply Chains from the Workers Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Houtart, Franois. 2006a. The Bamako Appeal Answers. http://www.openspace forum.net/twiki/tiki-read_article.php? articleId132 Houtart, Franois. 2006b. Signataires de lAppel de Bamako (Signatories to the Bamako Appeal). (This version of the original document, with English translation of title and subtitles, prepared by Jai Sen of CACIM, New Delhi, India, March 26 2006). http://www.openspaceforum.net/twiki/tikiview_articles.php?type= Article. Huws, Ursula. 2005. The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World. London: Merlin. ILGA (International Lesbian and Gay Alliance). 2005. Beijing 10 Review and Womens Global Charter for Humanity. http://www.ilga.org/news_results.asp? LanguageID1&File Category1&ZoneID7&FileID497

Janus. 2006. Encyclopedia Mythica. Retrieved March 30, 2006, from Encyclopedia Mythica Online. http://www.pantheon.org/articles/j/janus.html. Labours Platform for the Americas. 2005. http://www.gpn.org/research/orit2005/ Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. 2003. Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. New York: Beacon Press. Martins, Antonio. 2006. What Other World is Possible (Que outro mundo possvel). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism#Postmodernismin_political_ science Monbiot, George. 2003. The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order. London: Flamingo. Nairn, Tom. 1975. Nationalism: The Modern Janus. New Left Review, Vol 1, No. 94, pp. 329. Obando, Ana Elena. 2005. Sexism in the World Social Forum: Is Another World Possible? http://www.iiav.nl/ezines/web/WHRnet/2005/February.pdf PAM, Porto Alegre Manifesto. 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Porto_Alegre_Manifesto. Post-Neo-Liberal Agenda. 2006. Observations and Reflections: Bases for Building a Post-Neoliberal Agenda. Rio de Janeiro: IBASE. Rius. 2003. Marx for Beginners. http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?product_ id=2068037. Sen, Jai. 2006. Signatories to the Bamako Appeal, http://www.openspace forum.net/twiki/tiki-read_article.php? articleId131 South Asian Feminist Declaration. 1989. http://www.sacw.net/Wmov/ sasiafeministdecla. html. United Front. 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_front Valente, Jonas. 2006. FSM Caracas: Foro sindical de las Amricas da paso importante rumbo a la unidad, Carta Maior. http://agenciacartamaior.uol.com.br/ templates/ materiaMostrar. cfm?materia_id9921 Vargas, Virginia. Forthcoming. Foro Social Mundial: Las disputas emergentes en el Foro Policentrico de Caracas (World Social Forum: Emerging Disputes in the Polycentric Forum of Caracas), Cotidiano Mujer (Montevideo). Waterman, Peter. 1998/2001. Globalisation, Social Movements and the New Internationalisms. London: Cassel/Mansell. Waterman, Peter. 2004. Adventures of Emancipatory Labour Strategy as the New Global Movement Challenges International Unionism, Journal of World-Systems Research, Vol. 10, No. 1. http://jwsr.ucr.edu/index.php. Waterman, Peter and Jill Timms. 2004. Trade Union Internationalism and A Global Civil Society in the Making, in Kaldor, Mary, Helmut Anheier and Marlies Glasius (eds),

Global Civil Society 2004/5. London: Sage. Pp. 178-202. http://www.choike.org/ documentos/waterman_unions.pdf Waterman, Peter. 2005a. Making the Road whilst Walking: Communication, Culture and the World Social Forum. http://www.nigd.org/docs/Making TheRoadWhilstWalkingPeter Waterman Waterman, Peter. 2005b. From Decent Work to The Liberation of Time from Work: Reflections on Work, Emancipation, Utopia and the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement. Inter Activist Info Exchange. http://info. interactivist.net/article. pl? sid05/03/24/170247 Waterman, Peter. 2006. International Union Organisations, Global Social Movements and the Augean Stables of Global Governance, International Workshop, Global Challenges for Labour, Masters Programme on Labour Policies and Globalisation, Universitt Kassel, 5-6 April, 2006. Whitaker, Chico. 2006. Rumo ao Qunia em 2007 (The Path to Kenya in 2007). http://www.dadu.famed.ufu.br/? url=midia&num_pag=1&id=118 World Forum of Alternatives. 1997. World Forum of Alternatives Manifesto. http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/ope/archive/9706/0057.htm l World March of Women. 2004. Womens Global Charter for Humanity http://www.marchemondiale.org/en/charter3.html Web, URLs Bandung Conference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandung_Conference CACIM, India Institute for Critical Action: Centre in Movement. http://www.all4all.org/2005/10/2125.shtml. CETRI, Centre Tricontinental. www.cetri.be ENDA, Environnement et Dveloppement du Tiers Monde. http://www.enda.sn/english/publi.htm FTM, Forum du Tiers Monde/TWF, Third World Forum http://www.forum tiersmonde.net/fren/FSM/fsm_bamako/appel_bamako_en.htm League for the Fifth International. http://www.fifthinternational.org/index.php OSPAAAL, Organisation of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSPAAAL WFA, World Forum of Alternatives. http://www.forumtiersmonde.net/fren/ FSM/fsm_bamako/appel_bamako_en.htm Wikipedia.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page.

CHAPTER 17

Five, Six, Many New Internationalisms! Eight Nine Reflections on a Fifth International (2010)
[Source: Choike Blogs, http://blog.choike.org/eng/peter-waterman/919]

Chavez Calls for a 5th International. An unsourced image on the Links (Australia) website, http://links.org.au/taxonomy/term/94. One might imagine it to be a Cuban poster, given it includes two of its statesmen. But it was actually produced by the state-sponsored Venezuelan party, the PSUV. The iconography requires a paper of its own. In the middle is Jos Carlos Maritegui (18941930), the Peruvian Gramsci, who famously said: Las comunicaciones son el tejido nervioso de esta humanidad internacianalitada y solidaria (Communications are the nervous system of a humanity internationalised and in solidarity).

t the turn of 2009-10 proposals for and public interest in a new Left International seemed to come to a head. The initial and major initiative was that of Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela. This was widely endorsed at an international conference of Left parties in Caracas, November 2009, and was to be followed by an international conference, in Caracas again, April 2010.

The second initiative was that of Michael Albert, the theorist of Parecon (Participatory Economics) and coordinator of the humungous Left Znet website in the USA. This began with an article by Albert and was followed by the project itself, which allowed for individual endorsements (1,802 by April 2, 2010). This second project was provoked by and addressed to the Chavez-sponsored conference. In the spirit of Gramscis scepticism of the intellect, optimism of the will, I wish (in reverse order) to both welcome and challenge these interrelated projects. My response follows that which some of us accorded an earlier such project, that of the Neo-Marxist and Thirdworldist political-economist, Samir Amin (Jai Sen, et. al. 2007, Chapter 16 above). Like Samir Amins initiative, those of Hugo Chavez and Michael Albert relate not only to the World Social Forum (founded 2001) but also to a long history of left internationals, going back to the International Working Mens Association (the so-called First International), founded 1866, with the notable contribution of Karl Marx. The Chavez project evidently emanates from a radical-nationalist state(sman) with socialist aspirations. It combines features of a socialist and thirdworldist international, being apparently open to states (or to state-aligned or state-sponsored parties such as that created by Chavez) as well as to other Left parties and social movements. Whilst recognizing that the current crisis of global capitalism touches all spheres of life, and the necessity for diversity, a Caracas conference call echoed the Left tradition, declaring:
The international encounter of Left-wing Political parties held in Caracas on November 19, 20 and 21, 2009, received the proposal made by Commander Hugo Chavez Frias to convoke the Fifth Socialist International as a space for socialist-oriented parties, movements and currents in which we can harmonise a common strategy for the struggle against imperialism, the overthrow of capitalism by socialism and solidarity-based economic integration of a new type.

There was here a notable silence on the state nature (the subjectposition?) of the initiator. But the non-state socialist project of Michael Albert is equally silent on the role of the state (or states?) in his participatory-socialist international. On the other hand he is explicit on the issues and forces familiar from the WSF and the global justice and solidarity movement more broadly: economic production, consumption, and allocation should be classless - which of course includes equitable access for all to quality and accessible education, health care and the requisites of health like food, water, and sanitation, housing, meaningful and dignified work, and the instruments and conditions of personal fulfilment gender/kinship, sexual, and family relations should not privilege by age, sexual preference, or gender any one group above others - which of course includes ending all forms of

oppression of women, providing daycare, recreation, health care, etc culture and community relations among races, ethnic groups, religions, and other cultural communities should protect the rights and identity of each community up to equally respecting those of all other communities as well - which of course includes an end to racist, ethnocentric, and otherwise bigoted structures as well as securing the prosperity and rights of indigenous people political decision making, adjudication of disputes and implementation of shared programs should deliver peoples power in ways that do not elevate any one sector or constituency to power above others - which of course includes participation and justice for all international trade, communication, and other interactions should attain and protect peace and justice while dismantling all vestiges of colonialism and imperialism - which of course includes cancelling the debt of nations of the global south and reconstructing international norms and relations to move toward an equitable and just community of equally endowed nations ecological choices should not only be sustainable, but should care for the environment in accord with our highest aspirations for ourselves and our world - which of course includes climate justice and energy renovation I do not here wish to debate with either the Hugo Chavez or Michael Albert projects, which I have already done on the Znet site. Nor, for that matter, to respond to the growing number of contributions to discussion on the one project or the other. Some of these are well worth reading. They can be traced in the Resources below. I wish, rather, to make nine points23 I consider relevant to a new kind of international/ism that surpasses the limitations of past ones and that is relevant to the era of a globalised and networked capitalism. 1. Let a hundred flowers bloom! One can express this slogan with either enthusiasm or resignation (or, in the case of Mao, cynicism). The era in which it was possible for one international or internationalism to gain or be granted primacy is over. I nonetheless incline to welcome any new internationalist project because of a) the long dearth of discussion on internationalism and the absence of the necessary renewal, b) their thought-provoking effect, c) because these latest ones are themselves marked by the rising wave of the global solidarity and justice movement and because, d) in an increasingly interconnected and informatised world, such other
23

Originally, as the title of this piece suggests, there were only eight points. But internationalist inititiatives seem to be developing thick and fast. So in this update, I feel obliged to also address the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change, Cochabamba, Bolivia. See Point 9 below.

movements or networks are likely to be or become aware of and respond to them. 2. The old left internationalisms are confronted and challenged by the new The notion of a new Left international/ism is evidently dependent on the old Left whether this goes back to the Third World internationalisms of the 1960s, the First, Second, Third and Fourth labour or socialist internationals, or to the French Revolution itself. The Left is the Left because of the position occupied by the radical and populist wing of the Constituent Assembly of that revolution. The Left is inevitably relational to a Right or Centre. This means that it was and is a part, as well as a critic, of that first great modern, national, liberal, but also militarist, commercial, bureaucratic, racist and problematically-democratic project. (Its fraternity was not only machista but also nationalist and therefore compatible with French state centralism and imperialism). Something similar goes for the labour and socialist internationals, profound critics and opponents of the political-economy of capitalism yet in part also prisoners of its Eurocentred, national, industrial, productivist and centralising notion of modernity. The newest global social movements often only pose themselves against neo-liberalism and globalisation as suggested by the adoption of such names as anti-globalisation or alter-globalisation. But increasingly they have been criticizing and taking action in and against the economy, politics, social relations and cultural and communication practices of capitalism more generally. Moreover, their internal and external articulations (articulation, meaning both connection and expression) commonly go beyond those traditional to an industrialnational-colonial capitalism. At a time of crisis for both capitalism and its Left, these newest global social movements, ideas or expressions, are surpassing the limits of both of these entwined opponents and reviving the utopian thinking lost by the Left as capitalism over the centuries normalised itself. The newest movements, thinkers and activists tend to surpass old Left ways of being, doing and proposing. They are surely better thought of as global social emancipatory movements. And the fact that this new emancipatory movement has so far only been sketched out is to its (and our) advantage. It is still inventing itself. We can all take part in this invention. That the historical or traditional international Left is now trying to reinvent itself is surely to be welcomed. Its major sometimes overwhelming - stress on the political-economy of capitalism, on the import of class and class struggle, as well as more recent reflections on a post-capitalist political economy, all these make a welcome contribution to a new movement that may be weak on one or all of these. But the Left has not only to reinvent itself. It has also given past crimes and misdemeanors in its name to reassure once-burned publics, particularly in societies that experienced that particular Left. And this

would in turn seem to argue for maximum modesty in the face of the new global social movements that have in large part inherited the Lefts own original emancipatory appeal and role. 3. Beyond the privileged emancipatory subject, an expanding universe of underprivileged ones Historical internationalisms/ists have depended on a privileged revolutionary subject (the proletariat, the peasantry, the lumpenproletariat) or a privileged place (Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuelaor the next weak link in the capitalist chain). They tend to particularise or prioritise one or two problems or enemies (the capitalist politicaleconomy, imperialism, the North). The new global solidarity movements may be sympathetic to or even positive about such priorities and may themselves appear to be single-issue movements, but they are also commonly fundamentalissue movements (ecology, health, gender, housing, ethnicity), they obviously identify with their partners globally and, increasingly, with the global justice and solidarity movement more generally. The new movements are, however, highly sensitive about attempts to incorporate them into some universalistic (a particularistic universalist) project. Particularly when this is identified by or with a particular state or statesperson, a particular party, theory or ideology. True, new political parties or tendencies, new states and statespeople (as well as elderly clergy in the tradition of liberation theology), have been affected by and are cognisant of the necessity of allowing for many or all emancipatory movements. As have certain projects for a New International. But until and unless the Left a) seriously recognises its traditional limitations, b) prioritises social movement internationalisms over those of parties and states, and c) acts as rearguards to such, it may not be considered as a trustworthy partner in creating a new kind of international/ism. 4. From a Left International (singular) to the global solidarity and justice movements (plural) Enthusiasm for any new internationalism needs to be tempered by reflection on its etymology and history. International suggests a relationship between nations, nationals, nationalisms, nationalists. It is self-evidently dependent on the word national. There has been a tendency - even amongst some on the Left to side-step the problematic implications of the historical internationalisms by using the concept transnational. This, however, is a descriptive category, still dependent on the national and carrying no necessary implication of solidarity. I propose we talk, rather, of the new global solidarity or the new global solidarities. There were internationalisms before internationalism (and the nation), such as the religious universalisms, bourgeois and liberal cosmopolitanism, and the radical-democratic universalism of the French revolutionary epoch. Internationalism, however, came into its own as

the universalistic aspiration of the 19th century labour and socialist movement. Each of the previous internationalisms carried its own particularism, not only inviting but often imposing its universalism (Christendom, the Islamic Ummah, Western Modernity). Labour and socialist internationalisms stood on the shoulders of these giants - and reproduced various of their Achilles heels. These 19th century internationalisms, too, were Eurocentred and often Eurocentric, hierarchical, mutually-competitive, dogmatic, and reproductive of the very nationalisms and state-isms they originally aspired to surpass. The universalistic (or ethnic, or regional) third-world internationalisms that followed World War II were linked to and commonly became dependent upon the post-colonial or anti-imperialist states. This does not imply denying or repressing national, regional or ethnic identities but of relativising them in the light of both globalisation and other more-local or cross-cutting identities (as is anyway happening with the concept of pluri-nationality promoted by the indigenous movements in Latin America). The name Global Justice and Solidarity Movement (GJ&SM) comes out of the Assembly of Social Movements at an early WSF. It still seems to fit. The idea of global solidarity as ethic, theory and movement opens a way beyond the historical internationals. Global obviously implies worldwide, but also encompasses that ever-expanding arena, cyberspace. Global moreover, suggests holistic and therefore allows for a surpassing of the single-subject, privileged-subject, regionallybiased or one-sided internationalisms of the past. The GJ&SM could and should be the developing expression of radical-democratic social movements themselves, rather than the states or inter-state organs that claim to encompass or represent We the Peoples, or the partisan politics/parties/politicians that have previously mediated between the variously-alienated, exploited, marginalised social collectives and the capitalist, patriarchal, fundamentalist, military, polluting, racist hegemons. Finally, both the diachronic (historical) and synchronic (social) perspectives suggest the necessity for specifying the much too easilyused concept of solidarity. It has long been an under-theorised term, thus allowing for the most contradictory and counter-productive practices of paternalism/maternalism, of group self-interest, of political manipulation, militarism, and of social, cultural and regional/racial domination. Solidarity needs to be specified in terms of such possible different and partial elements or aspects as: Identity (Workers of the World Unite!), Substitution (standing in for the other), Reciprocity (exchange of equal qualities over time), Restitution (compensation for past wrongs). It also needs to be specified in relation to the different parties involved (worker to worker? worker to indigenous?). And in terms of its Axis (North-South?), Direction (South to North?), Reach (EU? Europe includingVladivostok?) and - most difficult of all - the Impact or Meaning for the collective actors addressed or involved (reinforcing corporate identity? opening up to other others?) (Waterman 2001: 2358).

5. Beyond institutionalisation, networking Is a Fifth (or other Left) institutionalised internationalism either appropriate or possible today? The various bureaucratised and/or sectarian splinters of such abound. There is still an International Trade Union Confederation, its allied Global Unions and a recent pragmatic innovation union-sponsored or union-friendly international NGOs, mostly headquartered at the core of the globalised capitalist European Union. Some of these are heavily dependent on EU funding. There are various internationals of Left, Socialist, Communist, Maoist, Anarchist or Marxist political parties or tendencies. There is a Sao Paulo Forum of Latin American Left political parties. There are the remains of various state-sponsored and state-funded Thirdworldist internationals. There is even a (Trotskyist?) League for a Fifth International! None of these has a particularly high profile either internationally or regionally. None is an evident source of innovation. None of them seem relevant to the epoch of a globalised networked capitalism and the rich but complex struggles against and beyond such. The temptation to create or endorse a Fifth International, in either explicit or implicit reference to previous such, is comprehensible. But the promoters of these seem to make only superficial reference to the transformed the revolutionised - nature of global capitalism, to the crisis of the state and inter-state system, of the political parties, of worker internationals or to the relational principles (it would be limiting to say organisational principles) of the multiple global solidarity movements - the way they operate internally or externally. The new relational principles here surely prefigure a democratisation of democracy that the world just as surely needs. Within and against a globalised, informatised capitalism, increasingly networked and operating in cultural and cyberspace, we see the newest global solidarity movements operating at all levels (local to cyberspatial). They are developing a cultural/communicational internationalism that goes both beneath and beyond the state-defined nation, the world of nation states and their literally international relations. Whilst commonly provoked by and addressed to the excesses of capital, state, inter-state agencies or strategies, the new global movements are at least implicitly aware that the power of the enemy lies in the weakness of (global) civil society (here understood as that which is in increasing tension with state, capital, industrialism, racism, fundamentalisms). The increasingly common orientation is not to capture the commanding heights of capital, state, the military or culture, but to disempower these by reference to the principles of peace, justice, equality, the commons, the local, the popular, the radicallydemocratic, the extension and deepening of self-determination, selfmanagement, the environmentally-responsible and climate-friendly.

Whilst the New International projects, prophets or sponsors show awareness, to differing degrees, of Manuel Castells real virtuality (cyberspace) it is hardly seen as either the foundation stone (an admittedly too-concrete metaphor) of their projects nor even a building block for such. This despite the New International projects being overwhelmingly known through and discussed on the web! If the past was that of place-fixated and institutional internationals - connected by the press, rail, telegraph, later by phone, radio and film the present is surely the age of a communications and cultural internationalism, an increasingly networked and horizontal movement, operating in infinite space, re-inventing itself according to a computer logic (horizontality, feedback and multi-directionality) and as powerful new applications develop. Increasing millions of workers, women, citizens and the indigenous have some kind of computerised access (if only a cell phone), often in their own language. Billions have computer communication and millions have programming skills. Information and communication technology (ICT) is not simply a tool (a hammer, a sickle, a gun, a vaccine), nor simply an existing community (The Hague, the Andes, trade unionists, women, Marxists). It is also utopia a non-existing but desirable place or space (or various compatible or cooperative ones) to be constructed by those interested and capable. The web is where capitalism increasingly lives and governs, and where increasing radical-democratic struggle occurs. And in relationship to that old world of institutions of industrial, financial, military, national, religious, educational, inter-state agencies our own region of cyberspace operates less to capture hegemonic heights than to circumvent, subvert, dissolve, decentralise, democratise, to connect, to advance a never-ending dialogue and dialectic of movements and civilisations.

6. Not beyond the World Social Forum but alongside There are certain things that the World Social Forum will not do, cannot do and even should not do. Projects for a New or a Fifth International have been informed by WSF achievements, tend to pay it homage sometimes grudging and to present themselves as complementary to rather than competitive with the WSF. Others may consider their project as superior to this. The areas or issues of struggle globalised by the WSF may even find recognition in the charters or programmes of these new projects. But the question must arise of whether the new projects go forward from or back before the WSF and the global justice and solidarity movement of which it forms a part. The two latest projects highlighted above seem open to the presence within their particular internationals of states, statespersons, and state-created or state-dependent political parties. The WSF distances itself in principle from such participants. But

in practice it has made concessions to such, and even to commercial interests. Are we now to go back to the future? However decisions might be taken in such a New International, it must be recognised that state-like instances, state-subordinated parties and self-proclaimed vanguard parties with anti- or simply counterhegemonic claims, are going to carry disproportionate institutional weight and - particularly where state-linked - financial power. They have historically been ideologically heavy and democratically light. (Many development funding agencies, foundations and NGOs carry heavy financial weight and disguise their Euro- or Atlantic-centrism behind developmentalist jargon or technological funding criteria). It thus behooves proponents of any New International to take this into account and to prioritise with all the problems and ambiguities this might itself imply social movements of a radical-democratic nature. This can be done by foundational charter, by definition of membership (collective and individual) and by rules of procedure. It is, surely, one thing to have states or their substitutes within an international, something quite different for an autonomous international to enter into openly negotiated relationships with such. 7. The labour movement: internationalisms 800-pound gorilla? An 800-pound gorilla is not like a bull in a china-shop. It is simply an awkward, worrying and somewhat threatening presenceor absence? Given the extent to which the latest projects for a New International refer back to the socialist internationals of the past, their failure to make more than passing or rhetorical reference to the international working class and the organised labour movement is, well, striking. Admitting the existence of this 800-pound gorilla requires surpassing ritualistic chants and rhetorical appeals and then responding to contemporary socialmovement realities. Whether in the room or outside the house, labour is going to represent a major challenge for any Fifth International (as well as for any socially-emancipatory internationalist project).24 It may well be that an implicit invitation to all (revolutionary? participatory? social-democratic?) Leftists to join a Fifth International would result in a considerable number of national, sectoral or regional unions (or shopfloor organisations, or autonomous labour networks) joining. It could have the effect of stimulating discussion amongst trade unions more generally. These have for decades seen little or no consideration of the meaning of international labour as distinguished from union - solidarity. Yet, given the common destruction or reduction of unionism consequent on capitalist globalisation, given the world-wide
24

A sobering footnote: my own multi-year effort to launch discussion on a Global Labour Charter has so far failed to interest even Left union or labour activists. I would like to put this down to labours profound continuing incorporation into a previous era of capitalism, social struggle and compromise (for which see, most powerfully, Green 2008). It may be that the Fifth Internationals of either Hugo Chavez or Michael Albert will have more appeal to labour than my own apparently too-individual or too-utopian project. It may, however, also be that any such endorsement would reproduce the history of party and ideological divisions between labour movements. Update 170212: Both have died the death: no funeral announcement, no expressed regrets, no self-criticism. But today I received news of a cyberspace international, the Global Square!

informalisation or precarisation of labour, such discussion is more urgently needed than ever.25 This has, however, not notably occurred within the World Social Forum, despite its openness. Traditional trade unions, national or international, have increasingly joined, and the Brussels- or Genevabased and Euro-centred International Trade Union Confederation/ Global Unions and some of their members are members of its International Council. The ITUC has used the WSF largely as a friendly global civil society space in which to propagate its Decent Work campaign (which actually originates with the UNs inter-state labour agency, the International Labour Organisation!). An alternative Labour and Globalisation network within the WSF has represented a union-oriented pressure group rather than an alternative pole of emancipatory orientation. The earlier New International project that of Samir Amin had a short but serious chapter on labour and has organised some dialogue on its internationalism, but has little to show for its efforts. The profound dependency of the international trade union movements internationalism is revealed in its tail-ending of any new social movement initiative. The latest is the climate issue, with the unions tagging along, creating special departments or sponsoring NGOs (with their activities, I suspect, either totally or partially dependent on state or foundation funding agencies). Such dependency is revealed by the non-attendance and almost total lack of response by the ITUC itself to the Cochabamba Climate Change conference dealt with in Point 9 below.26 Given the weight and complexity of globalisation both within capitalism and for emancipation from it it would seem essential to have a wide-ranging, geographically-universal, deep-going dialogue on a new labour internationalism and its relation to the global justice and solidarity movement. And this before any pronouncement or institutionalisation
25

A more cheering footnote: Peter Hall-Jones (2009) - no Marxist or Autonomist but rather someone with an international union background and of social-democratic orientation - has written a piece on the precariat and the necessity for a radically transformed international labour movement. He here goes way beyond what considers itself to be the international trade union(-oriented) Left. The piece requires translation, distribution and extensive discussion. And, also, the spelling out of its implications for a new labour internationalism.
26

Late April 2010 the ITUCs climate change webpage, http://climate.ituc-csi.org/?lang=en, still had no coverage of the Cochabamba event. And its documents for and activities at the earlier failed inter-state conference in Copenhagen suggest that it is 1) heavily oriented toward lobbying European and other Northern interstate events, and 2) that its policies and activities place it amongst the appeasement-oriented NGOs rather than the more radical and confrontational ones. There does exist in Spain an international trade union-backed NGO, SustainLabour. This reveals its direct funders (though not necessarily who funds these). It also provided a short report on Cochabamba, suggesting that the European and international unions had considered this a Latin-American rather than an international event, leaving attendance to interested regional trade unions, http://www.sustainlabour.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=580&Itemid=255. A serious critique of trade union climate-change policies and activities is urgently needed. One socialist attempt to analyse the relationship between labour and climate change is provided by Jonathon Neale (2010). But its coverage of unions is, if critical, brief. And Neale, a Trotskyist, reproduces the traditional Marxist-Leninist dogma that it is only revolutionary socialists (such as his theoretically-sectarian and politically-opportunist Socialist Workers Party?) that can bring the climate-change and labour movements together. A short report by a participant mentions one labour workshop at Cochabamba, http://ilcaonline.org/content/bolivia-climateconference-ends-high-note. See, however, a short but pointed critique of ITUC climate-change policy by socialist eco-feminist, Ariel Saleh, to be posted on my ReinventingLabour site.

takes decisions over the heads out of the hands - of the organisations, the networks, the support bodies and the workers concerned!

8. Speaking before leaping! Simple pronouncement of a Fifth or New International, so far subject more to endorsement than dialogue, and with a foundation to occur within months: this is to risk, if not invite, failure. Such proposals carry with them the scent of individual or group vanguardism - of a selfproclaimed elite or individual prophet substituting for a specified constituency, for all real or revolutionary socialists, the working class, the people, or even humankind. Yet, given the very internet that these projects might gesture toward, the coordination of an open-access worldwide dialogue, or several such, would seem not only more democratic and more likely to mobilise but also cheaper, more ecologically friendly, more flexible, more sustainable and, of course, less manipulable. Such discussion as is occurring on the matter might even lead to the conclusion that what we first need is a website, or a web portal drawing attention and giving access to the growing number of those concerned with a New International/ism (such as the Australia-based Links, for which see below). It is less with an authoritarian or even authoritative international structure and leadership that the road to global social emancipation starts, it is in virtuous spirals of dialogue, coordination, reflection, proposition, action and evaluation as well as forms of cultural expression and exchange reaching parts of the human psyche that politics cannot touch. Now: this paper was first written before the amazingumm?nonoccurrence?...of the Fifth International, announced by Hugo Chavez for April 2010. Even more astounding was the silence of the lambs who had previously reacted to, enthusiastically endorsed, and (one has to suppose) eagerly awaited this Fifth Coming. The silent patience speaks of dependence of followers on a prophet to show them the way (if not necessarily one capable of providing air-tickets and accommodation?). The only compensation for these paradoxically silent socialists must be the rumour (so far unconfirmed) that in 2010 April will occur in September after Venezuelan parliamentary elections in September.27 But perhaps they do not even expect a fifth-and-a-half coming? Perhaps their aspirations are at such a low level that such socialists are

27

I am enlightened here by In Defence of Marxism, the British supporters of which apparently sent a delegation to Caracas without checking whether the proposed conference was actually going to take place. They took their disappointment on their revolutionary chins, with narry a question, never mind a complaint. They then apparently used their time in Caracas as good tourists of the revolution, now uncritically endorsing revolutionary achievement if at a level below the international http://www.marxist.com/venezuela-visit-to-inaf-april-2010.htm.

accustomed to having their depreciated or ignored?28

hopes

disappointed,

their

existence

9. An international(ist) state initiative informed by the newest social movements So, there can be a statist initiative for a New Socialist International which does not take place as announced. And then, amazingly, there can be a state initiative informed by the new internationalisms which does take place! Even within the same continent and the same inter-state alliance (ALBA - the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America). This second initiative was, of course, that of the government of Evo Morales in the poverty-stricken, landlocked, but new plurinational (multi-ethnic) state of Bolivia. It was on climate change and followed, on the one hand, the miserable public failure of the interstate conference in Copenhagen, 2009, and, on the other, the considerable impact there of the social movements or (radical-democratic) civil society (Neale 2010). The initiative was also clearly fuelled by the rising tide of Bolivian, Latin American and global indigenous movements. And it took place in the city that, with the successful Water Wars of 2000, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Cochabamba_protests, became one of the iconic moments/places of the new global movements. The World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, to give it its official title, took successful place April 19-22, 2010. Numerous state and inter-state organisations were in attendance, and there was an extensive list of self-organised activities, proposed by interested NGOs, social movements and even a few Northern unions. 29 All this could be found on the WPCCCs attractive website, http://pwccc.wordpress.com/. The PWCCC represents a radical innovation in state-initiated international conferences. Two of these can be found in the title itself. The first is the address to peoples rather than to states or nations, thus assuming the attendance of peoples existing within or across states; participation was numerically dominated by the indigenous, these coming not only from Bolivia but also from the region and the world. Another radical innovation was, of course, the address to the rights of mother earth, a notion originating with neither the West, Modernity,
28

We are here standing on a moving escalator. April 28, 2010, I discover that two Australian-connected activistsof the newest left, energetically involved with the Venezuelan revolution, finally managed to interview Julio Chavez from the International Commission of the on-going ideological congress of the PSUV. Their polite, even diplomatic, questioning elicited from him only that the Fifth International would eventually be founded, but that it would now be called the First International of the 21 st Century, so as to take account of local Communist sensitivities. For the rest, I have to say that Julio Chavez so conflates the Venezuelan party with its state, the national with the international, the proposed international institution with the international movement, that my confidence in the project has fallen even lower. I encourage readers to check out the interview (Links 2010b). And to pay particular attention to the ambiguities expressed with respect to such anti-imperialist but possibly less-than-socialist states, as Iran.
29

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5904/finding_convergence_between_cochabamba_and labor_movement/.

the_

Socialists or the Proletariat but coming directly out of the experience and cosmovisin (somewhat larger than a weltanschauung or worldview?) of indigenous peoples. Yet another innovation was the decision to organise a referendum or plebiscite of the worlds peoples on the issue. Finally, and in self-evident contrast to the invisible Fifth International, the PWCCC not only had its own professional website but was accessible worldwide, due to the use of the full range of web applications. Such broadcasting was not only of a one to many kind since numerous participant or observing entities were carrying out their own activities here.30 Despite its innovatory address to Mother Earth (Pachamama to Andeans), to peoples rather than states or nations, some of my aboveexpressed doubts about the Hugo Chavez International re-appeared with respect to the Evo Morales project. These came first from the Uruguayan ecological activist, Eduardo Gudynas and had to do, firstly, with the ambiguity of the regime with respect to the conference itself (Gudynas 2010a), secondly to the new extractivismof the new left governments of Latin America more generally (Gudynas 2010b). That such doubts were grounded was literally demonstrated when the WPCCC took place. Community groups elsewhere in Bolivia were embarrassing the government with a strike and transport blockage against a mining multinational. And autonomous social-movement events were held before and during the conference itself. The most dramatic of these was the addition of an unofficial Mesa 18 (Workshop 18) to the 17 officially listed. This workshop, held under some police surveillance, outside the official conference, was sponsored by Aymara activists. It proposed the expulsion of all extractive industries from Bolivia, and the adoption of a new development model based on the Andean cosmovisin, on the ayllu (the traditional collective land-holding form) and on local self-sufficiency. I am dependent for my impressions of the conference on the internet.31 What came over to me was the extent to which this statesponsored conference appeared to be influenced by the model of the
30

Possibly the least interactive of these activities was for me, simultaneously, not only the most interesting but the most useful. This was the presence in Cochabamba itself of Democracy Now (DN), a New York based one-hour daily news and analysis programme available on various TV channels within the US and worldwide, in excellent quality, at http://www.democracynow.org/. During the conference, Amy Goodman, founder and presenter of DN was giving heavy coverage to Cochabamba whilst doing her customary reporting of the US and other world events. The segments on the conference consisted mostly of interviews with both well-known North American and international NGO or movement figures and of numerous local and indigenous ones. DN covered, thus, the dissident Table 18, presenting it in an informative rather than sensationalist manner. In a final coup de theatre, Amy Goodman staged a one-hour interview with President Morales himself. She also challenged him on those within Bolivia challenging him and/or the conference. The autonomous and international(ist) communication activity of DN at Cochabamba is rich, complex and deserving of detailed study. Apart from DN, the most useful international left web coverage I have so far found is that of the EuroTrotskyist ESSSF, http://www.europe-solidaire.org/ and of the New Left Links site in Australia, http://links.org.au/node/1646.
31

Thanks, also, to a half-dozen compaer@s, mostly involved in the climate movement or participants in the conference, who I consulted whilst drafting Point 9. You know who you are. And I need not embarrass you by mentioning your names, even with the customary disclaimer.

World Social Forum, right down to the official self-organised workshops, and the unofficial self-organised workshops on the periphery! As also, according to at least one participant, of the chaotic programming. I further note the postponement of the planned global referendum on climate change, though this time to a fixed date in 2011 (it being argued that this could not be organised effectively before the next inter-state conference on climate change, Cancun, Mexico, late-2010). In some ways, moreover, it seemed to me that the conference was more radical than the World Social Forum in clearly condemning capitalism and its civilisation (not just neo-liberalism or imperialism, or the North), in its many nefarious aspects. And in calling for an alternative model. This is not called socialism, presumably since it is inspired by pre-capitalist and, indeed, pre-class socio-ecological models and worldviews. In at least one other way, however, it reflected the statist preference for a (UN-approved? inter-state?) climate change tribunal, rather than one modelled on, for example, the non-state model of the Russell Tribunal on the Vietnam War, and its successors, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Tribunal.32 It is difficult to imagine the polluting states, complicit with global capital, agreeing to such a tribunal, with powers (like the World Trade Organisation) to not only judge but punish. And the energy any social movements devote to this effort would inevitably be at the cost of an autonomous tribunal, formed from and oriented toward social movements and civil society. Whilst there were clearly tendencies on the part of the state to dismiss or delegitimise the critical social movements (local, national, global), and, possibly, for some opposition movements to demonise the state, this was not the dominant impression I received online. Here, it seemed to me, the autonomy from/engagement with relationship of the social movements to the state or states had moved to a more advanced level. And the state was recognising the sometimes bothersome social movements as a legitimate and even helpful or necessary presence. Greater scepticism about the prospects opened by Cochabamba came after the event from Edgardo Lander, a Venezuelan academic and activist, best known for his critical engagement with the revolutionary process there. Lander (2010) fears that a developing critique of a perverse civilisational model (capitalist and/or socialist) may be reduced to climate change, understood rather as a problem. And that the energy of the many diverse social movements that found expression in Cochabamba may be reduced to a Global People's Movement for Mother Earth controlled or dominated in practice by the ALBA states. Although Lander nowhere refers to internationalism here, this is one more powerful warning of the limitations built into any state-initiated, statebased or state-dependent movement of global solidarity.33
32

Great minds? June 2010 I discover that the notion of a Russell-type tribunal has come out of Cochabamba. This report from Quebec contains details of other initiatives coming out of this event (Rashi 2010).
33

For another Leftist account of Cochabamba, see Ridenour (2010). For a more general evaluation of the state and social-movement Left in Latin America, taking account of the climate change issue, see Wallerstein (2010).

Conclusion If I started with two explicit projects for a Fifth Socialist International, why do I finish with a state-sponsored conference on climate change, which social movements both motivated and attended, but in which the concept of internationalism did not even figure? This may be because of a feeling that the two initiatives with which I began, one state-initiated and one proposed by a libertarian socialist, belong to the 20th century, either in language, relational form (how they imagine their own immediate community, how they relate to a wider public) or both. And that the radically innovatory Cochabamba conference shows - if we consider global social-movement engagement with it or around it - one of the many faces, aspects or moments of a new global solidarity movement in formation. There simply are more things in the ether and on earth than were dreamed of in your First International, Karl Marx!

Resources Albert, Michael. 2009. A New International?!, http://www.Zcommunications. org/newinternational.htm. Bilbao, Luis. 2009. Fifth Socialist International -- Time for definitions, http://links.org.au/node/1491. Bonfond, Olivier and Eric Toussaint. 2010. Will Capitalism Absorb the WSF? (Interview by Marga Tojo Gonzales). www.cadtm.org/Willcapitalism-absorb-the-WSF. 27 February. Fonseca Tern, Carlos. 2009-10. FSLN on the Fifth Socialist International: Globalise Struggle and Hope!, http://links.org.au/taxonomy/term/120. Green, Brian. 2008. Organising for Defeat: The Relevance and Utility of the Trade Union as a Legitimate Question, Labour/Le Travail, No. 62. http://www.history cooperative.org/journals/llt/62/green.html. Gudynas, Eduardo. 2010a. Una necesaria reflexion acerca del encuentro sobre cambio climatico en Bolivia, http://accionyreaccion.com/? p=216. Gudynas, Eduardo. 2010b. The New Extractivism of the 21st Century: Ten Urgent Theses about Extractivism in Relation to Current South American Progressivism, http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6653. Hall-Jones, Peter. Precariat Greet nMeet, http://newunionism.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/ precariat/#_edn30 Lander, Edgardo. 2010. Reflections on the Cochabamba Climate Summit, http://www.tni.org/article/reflections-cochabambaclimate-summit. Links. 2009a. Venezuela: Chavez Calls for New International Organisation of Left Parties, http://links.org.au/node/1372. Links. 2009b. The Caracas Commitment -- Declaration from World Meeting of Left Parties, November 19-21, Caracas, Venezuela, http://links.org.au/node/1375. Links. 2010a. Fifth International, http://links.org.au/taxonomy/term/431. Links. 2010b. First International of the 21st Century (Kiraz Janicke and Federico Fuentes interview Julio Chavez), http://links.org.au/node/1646. Neale, Jonathon. 2010. Climate politics after Copenhagen, International Socialism, Issue: 1262010. http://isj.org.uk/index.php4? id=637&issue=126. Rashi, Roger. 2010. From Cochabamba to Cancun: Building a Climate Justice Movement in Quebec, http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/367.php#continue. Richter, Jacob. 2010. Participatory Socialist International?: Critique of Michael Albert and Hugo Chavez on Internationals, http://libcom.org/forums/organise/participatory-socialistinternational-critique-michael-albert-hugo-chavez-intern Ridenour, Ron. 2010. Capitalism is The Cause of Climate Illness! Global Movement Begins the Cure!, http://links.org.au/node/1724. Seaone, Jos and Emilio Taddei. 2010. El nuevo internacionalismo, http://reinventinglabour. wordpress.com/2010/07/09/el-nuevointernacionalismo-seoane-y-taddei/

Sen, Jai et. al. 2007. A Political Programme for the World Social Forum? Democracy, Substance and Debate in the Bamako Appeal and the Global Justice Movements http://www.choike.org/2009/eng/informes/5349.html. Smith, Brendan, Tim Costello and Jeremy Brecher. 2009. Social Movements 2.0. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090202/smith_costello_brecher. Toussaint, Eric. 2010. Beyond the World Social Forum... the Fifth International (Igor Ojeda interview), http://www.cadtm.org/Beyond-the-World-Social-Forum-the. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2010. Contradictions in the Latin American Left, http://www.zcommunications.org/contradictions-in-the-latinamerican-left-by-immanuel-wallerstein. Waterman, Peter. 2001. Globalisation, Social Movements and the New Internationalisms. London: Continuum. Waterman, Peter. 2006. The Bamako Appeal: A Post-Modern Janus?, http://www.choike.org/documentos/bamako_appeal_janus.pdf. Waterman, Peter. 2010. Beyond a 5th International (Question-Marked): A Global Justice and Solidarity Network (Exclamation-Marked) http://www.zcommunications.org/fifth-international-by-michaelalbert. (See: Comments). Waterman, Peter. 2008. Needed: A Global Labour Charter Movement. http://www.netzwerkit.de/projekte/waterman/gc. Znet. 2010. Proposal for a Participatory Socialist International, http://www.zcommunications.org/newinternational.htm.

PART V: OUTSIDE AND BEYOND THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM

Peter at home, December 2009 - or in Cyberia? Photo: Dave Hollis

CHAPTER 18

Back in the (Ex-)USSR (2008)

[Source: Published in draft, online, by NetzwerkIT, www.netzwerkit.de/projekte/ waterman/rusreplatest]

arly summer, 2008, I found myself in the small, run-down, but sunny and leafy town of Elets (which I will call Yelets, since it is so pronounced), surrounded by green fields, 400 km from Moscow. I had been invited to a conference of something called Citizen Diplomacy (CD) and was being hosted by some seriously old friends. These were one-time film-student Renita Grigorieva and one-time international student apparatchik, Nikolai Diko. During the period of the World Festival of Youth and Students, Moscow, 1957, we were young friends. More precisely, Renita (born 1931) was the friend I made during two visits to Moscow that year. Diko (born 1928) was actually a friendly colleague, liaising between us at the International Union of Students in Prague and, well, Moscow. We were all Communists and thus jointly devoted to the creation of what an old German Communist song called a sozialistische Weltrepublik (a world socialist republic). I, just 21 in 1957, was clearly younger, wetter behind the ears and certainly cockier. This was not dangerous for me, bearing in mind that I was a Brit and that being a cocky Communist Brit in the Soviet Union of that time would have at worst resulted inwhat? The loss my job? Expulsion from the Camp of Peace and Progress? But no such hypothetical danger actually crossed my mind. However, even though I was arriving in the Communist Mecca, and even if I returned to Prague - and even wrote that the Soviet Union was the most democratic country in the world - I had been heavily impacted by the 20th Congress of the CPSU and Khrushchevs famous Secret Speech.1 My final disenchantment with the USSR came a decade
I realised already 15-20 years ago that 20th Congress or Secret Speech did not necessarily ring bells down the generations. A young, intelligent and leftist Chilean student had to remind me that she had only been born in 1963. Briefly, then, the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, 1956, was when Stalin was denounced, mass repression and murder admitted, and everything broke loose in the Communist world and the world of Communism. For the impact of this event on Russia and the Soviet bloc, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchev%27s_Thaw.
1

later with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, August 1968, when I was again working in Prague for an international Communist organisation. So how and why, after a half century, did I re-establish contact with Renita?

Renita

Nikolai
Renita and Nikolai around the time of the World Youth and Student Festival, Moscow, 1957.

Renita and I, in her London hotel, 1960. This was the last time we were to see each other for some 50 years. The photo was uncovered in Renitas Moscow apartment a half century later. At first I denied that I could possibly have been wearing such a jacket. But a closer consideration of the eyebrows convinced me that it was.

Well, I was am - now in my 70s and writing my autobio, under the working title, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Internationalist. So I had searched on the web for Renita, but in Latin script, not as , .2 I found her only on a site connected with Nikolai Roerich, a Russian (not Soviet) painter, theosophist(?), explorer and traveller in the Russian and Indian east, a humanist, and author of an international charter to protect cultural and scientific treasures.3 There was no response from this address to my Englishlanguage email. But in 2007, Renitas young friend, Alexandra (Sasha) Osminina, in St Petersburg, found me via Skype and told Renita I was not as dead as the latter had been informed. Sasha and her techie photographer friend, Andrey Kluyev, then copied and sent me a dozen or more old and new photos of Renita. And also miracle of miracles Andrey and Sasha scanned and emailed the last remaining copy of my own personal Dead Sea Scroll - a 30-page, 15,000 word, report on my first Russian trip, February 1957! I had typed this account nights in my room in Prague, spring 1957, circulated it only to family and friends and lost all but the one copy in Renitas hands.4 The next time the last time - I had met Renita and Yuri, in London with some Soviet film delegation, 1960, I had begged her to please, please, return this document. She smiled sweetly and said No!. Over the years I mourned its loss and hoped it would somehow turn up amongst my papers. And then, just before Sasha emailed the 30 scanned pages, she warned me that they had, unfortunately, been a little burned in a fire in, I think, Renitas dacha (country cottage). This was not good news. But after 50 years I was stoic. Having, finally, downloaded and perused the charred evidence of my nave if gutsy 21year-old Communist self, I was able to assure Sasha that if the text had been marginally damaged by the test of fire, the artefact had been dramatically improved. My interest in re-establishing contact with Renita was due to her having been the only Russian to talk to me frankly on my first two visits to Moscow. I have told this story in more detail.5 But, briefly, on my first
Web searches in English and Russian are not too helpful with Renitas life and films. One of them even gets her birthdate wrong. But the other problem is in translating the film titles or obtaining descriptions of them. I know she made two films about the Youth Festivals, which are more or less identifiable online. And one about her mothers second husband - the war film, Moscow Calling. She also made a film adapted from a Dostoyevsky novel. Most, if not all of her films are co-credited to her husband, Yuri Grigoriev, now somewhat frail and housebound. She also won prizes for some of her work. Further details, for film and biography buffs, particularly Russian-readers, here: http://www.kino-teatr.ru/kino/director/sov/5960/ bio/http://www.rusperson.com/ html/18/RU01002708.htm.
2 3

http://www.roerich.org/index.html.

Since it was not meant for publication, it now occurs to me this was some kind of mild Western Communist equivalent to the anti- or at least non-Communist Russian samizdat of the Khruschev-Brezhnev years.
4

Draft Chapter 2: Czechoslovakia 1955-8: From Agitator to Agent. Details of other background events and, indeed, foreground ones, are to be found in other draft chapters, covering 1936 to 2000.
5

visit, which included Renitas Moscow film-school, she had told me that she and her colleagues had been warned to take care of what they said to me. This was an eyebrow-raiser in at least two ways: firstly, that such warnings were preceding my visits and interviews; secondly that a Russian, in Russia, was prepared to tell me so in front of others. On my second visit, a half year later, Renita and her friends wanted me to repeat my performance as Critical Western Communist. When, reluctantly, I asked three or four questions about recent shenanigans in the Central Committee,6 they discussed these briefly and laughed amongst themselves and Renita translated collective answer: For 300 years we were under the Tatars. An Aesopian response but more than one could expect for the USSR of 1957.

I had forgotten which boring shenanigans these were until reminded by the Wikipedia entry mentioned above. Feel free to bore yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchev%27s_Thaw.
6

A burnt offering from Visit I to Moscow, typed in six copies, Prague 1957, all lost by 1960 except for the one copy, returned to me by Renita Grigorieva 50 years later. Thanks are due to Alexandra Osminina and Andrei Kluyev for the copying and transfer. And, I suppose, to Renita for the somewhat belated return.

According to Sasha, in 2007, Renita and Nikolai wanted me to come to Moscow for an exhibition and conference on the 50th anniversary of the Moscow Youth Festival.7 When this proved impractical, Sasha insisted I come in 2008. If I could pay my ticket they would host me. I was not quite clear given that I had no direct contact with either Renita or Nikolai who they were. But, still somewhat dubious, I said OK, for one week. Sasha, or possibly they, insisted on two weeks. From Sasha I also gathered some impressions of what kind of group of people I would be meeting. They seemed to be devoted to not only Renita but Roerich, to Citizen Diplomacy (CD), to the mountainous Altai region in southern Siberia, to Yelets, to Renitas mother, Nina Popova, to Popovas home town of Yelets and, finally, to the Russian Orthodox Church. Renita, who I had known 50 years earlier as a budding young Communist film director, had in the 1960s met a Yelets priest, had reverted to the faith of her forefathers, and spent six years in Yelets working in a hospice for the dying!8 Wauw! (thats Wow! in Latin America)! It appeared that whilst I had been doing my Western thing by going beyond Communism (in one direction), Renita had been doing her Russian thing, by going either back before or around it. Just how convinced was I that I should meet Renita and Nikolai, to reminisce about a Soviet propaganda event with which I had long ago settled accounts? The fact is that I had, after my two memorable 1957 meetings with Renita (which I will call now Visit I and II), been to Moscow another two times without meeting her. In 1967 this was on an official delegation of another Prague-based Communist international, the World Federation of Trade Unions (Visit III). Here I was a fully-fledged tourist of the revolution, celebrating in ritual fashion its 50 th anniversary. This was a Soviet package tour, its only notable feature being that, after two failed attempts, the Soviet state finally shoehorned me into the Lenin mausoleum to look at something purporting to be the embalmed Vladimir Ilyich. And that one of my comrades-cum-colleagues had later denounced me to my Czech department boss in Prague, causing me to be carpeted by him (and then smilingly dismissed).

For one official celebration of this anniversary, see http://moskvaimir.mos.ru/offline/_files/8471/mim_69_eng.pdf. For the response of the then-young Russian poet, Yevgeni Yevtushenko, not unrelated to that of Renita and Nikolai, see http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-14/yevtushenko1.html. For academic accounts of the Moscow and other such youth festivals, see the forthcoming work of Pia Koivunen, http://www.helsinki.fi/aleksanteri/kic/ researchers.htm.
7

How far is it from Russian Christianity to Russian Communism, and back again? It has been commonplace to compare Communism to a religion a commonplace which I have selectively endorsed. But the relationship between a state-supported Russian Orthodox Christianity and a state-sponsored Russian Orthodox Communism has been argued in more sophisticated and convincing form (Luke 1987).
8

A WFTU delegation to Russia on the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, Red Square, Moscow, 1967. This was Visit III. From the Left: Me (seriously pissedoff since I had been finally shoehorned into the Lenin Mausoleum), Indian, South African, Iraqi, and Bulgarian colleagues.

The following visit (Visit IV) was actually the most exciting one. It took place in 1993, in post-Soviet Russia, just after Yeltsin had partially burned the new Duma. He thus demonstrated - but now as breaking news on worldwide TV - the sorry history of 20th century Russian parliamentarianism. But I had gone there for something quite futuristic, even utopian. This was an international conference on electronic media and labour internationalism (Waterman 1993). Our Moscow hotel had been full of uniformed men, many with Kalashnikovs, presumably there to ensure the Duma had been sufficiently burned. And the conference had had to be moved to some union conference centre outside Moscow. It

Still high on the collapse of the Soviet empire and the beginning of computer internationalism, I report on the alternative international labour communication conference, Visit III, Moscow, late-1993.

nevertheless permitted us foreign communications internationalists to feel we were part of the process of building a new and internationalist Russian labour movement. After our conference there was another event, hosted, or at least attended, by prominent Soviet socialist dissidents, Boris Kagarlitsky and Alexander Buzgalin (of whom more below). This one was on Socialist Alternatives or Alternative Socialisms something like that. And it gathered together the oddest and most varied collection of the worlds socialists I ever expect to find in one moment and place. Even odder were some of the Russians present, one of whom provided us with a mathematical proof of Marxismor was it merely the Dialectic? I should not forget to mention that somewhere between my visits to Russia, Russia visited me, the World Federation of Trade Unions and Czechoslovakia, in Prague, August 1968. Whilst the Czechs had been inventing their own 1968, the Russians were replaying not for the first time - World War Two, against a country, an international organisation and people previously considered Communist. Anyway, Sasha, from the City-Previously-Known-as-Leningrad (the CP-KAL), convinced me, via Skype, that I could not come to Russia for less than two weeks. I would pay my airfare and they would host me in Moscow and Yelets. With a sense of both gratitude and trepidation, and despite more than a little resolve-testing by the Russian Consulate (just round two corners from my place in The Hague), I came, I saw. And whether I conquered, was conquered, and by what or by whom, we may now consider. Lost, and found, in translation My Russian consists of a limited familiarity with Cyrillic characters, some basic Czech, and a handful of Russians words and phrases. On Visit III, a Californian friend would read out Cyrillic signs and I would apply to these my fading knowledge of Czech. Now, on the slowish journey through the traffic-jammed access roads outside Moscow, accompanied by Renitas young friends, Andrei and Alexei, I nonetheless managed to decipher some of the banners over the urban motorway, particularly when they said, in Russian:

: ,
This transliterates, if bumpily, given traffic conditions, as TAUNKHAUZYI I KOTEDJI: DESHEVLE CHEM KVARTIRIY And then translates, quite rapidly, as TOWNHOUSES AND COTTAGES: CHEAPER THAN APPARTMENTS

Deciphering was possible because this promise was written in what I fancy is New Russian for the Novyi Ruskiy and Biznismany, the class created by the neo-liberalisation of Russia. I didnt see much of these people, except for their SUVs, occasionally doing 80 kph plus down the middle of the broad avenues actually designed by Stalin for less-rapid tank movements. Oh, and these and other luxury cars were also often parked on the pavements that disposable Old Russians some crippled, some young - were obliged to walk on.9 We arrive, however, in another Moscow, one still redolent of Soviet or even Tsarist days. Here in a side street, within literal view of the eternal Kremlin, is a set of heavy apartment blocks in what would today be called a gated community. This is where Renita and Yuri live, in an apartment of maybe seven rooms (I lost count), with three meter high ceilings, two babushki (literally grandmothers, figuratively elderly women), two or three family members. And a floating population of visitors. (This apartment was obtained in exchange for three others belonging to family members). Despite the size of the apartment, particularly if one measures in cubic rather than square meters, it looks like the accommodation of some disinherited aristocrat, with a crumbling ceiling and exposed laths, rotting window-frames, rusty fittings, dubious water taps and for all but one day whilst I was there no hot water. This was a problem for me until I followed the example of a young male tennis-player with a pony tail, and boiled a bucket of water on the kitchen stove. This took me right back to tin-tub baths in the kitchen of my grandmother (herself actually a Polish-Yiddish Booba) in WW2 Northampton. Amidst the packed bookshelves and walls covered with old photos, religious icons, and a photo of Renitas Otche (an affectionate form for her religious Father), a pastel-coloured drawing hit a definite visual chord. Yup. It was an original Chagall Yuri was there, with his TV-producer daughter, Svyetlana, but Renita was far (in Dutch terms) from Moscow, in Yelets. I am shown my fold-down bed, in Renitas library/office, I am fed and fussed over by the babushki. Andrei takes me for an exhausting

For more on literally old Russians, see Surnacheva (2008).

Not your official Soviet citizens. Renita with Otche, Yelets, en route from Communism to Christianity whilst Russia was still under the former and not yet recovered by the latter.

walk, down to and around the Kremlin. Fortunately, it is summer weather and these are white nights. Returning I note, on the outside wall of our apartment bloc, a dozen plaques naming previous residents. They include Dmitry Manuilsky (18831959), distinguished, as a leader of the Comintern, for dismissing the British CP as a party of great friends (Samuel 1985:34). Also by having been a Jew, but nonetheless surviving official Soviet anti-Semitism and Stalins purges. (Also, possibly, for dying of old age in bed in this house?). There are plaques of other prominent members of the nomenklatura i.e. that part of the Soviet elite privileged to have four meter high ceilings and to live within five minutes by car from the Kremlin. Amongst them I note several of the great stonefaces of latter-day Stalinism, such as the justly-forgotten Kosygin. Renitas mother was Nina Popova (1908-95), who began life in Yelets, was orphaned, but who worked her way up in the Soviet system, played roles in the VTsSPS (the state-controlled trade unions), the wartime military, the state and international womens organisations, the Supreme Soviet, and associations for friendship or cultural relations with foreign countries. Popova, a member of the privileged Soviet nomenklatura received various awards, including a Stalin Peace Prize in 1953 (transmogrified post-1956 into a Lenin one). In her later years she seems to have been involved with some renovation of the official friendship societies, now inspired by the earlier-mentioned Roerich. Renita later told me in Yelets that her mother had followed her example in reconciling herself with the Russian Orthodox Church, during the Soviet period, and kept a religious icon within her party card!10 This was clearly a house of the spirits, the kind of multigenerational residence, with many tales to tell, that we hardly know of in our boring single-family North-West European houses and apartments. And it reminded me of the houses of my compaera, Ginas, family, in Lima and Tacna, Peru. Gina herself lives in the smallest apartment of any Latin-American feminist I know. But then there is the three-storey house of Ginas long-departed father (a left-of-centre general and, briefly, prime minister) now occupied by her aged mother, at least two other generations, and various shorter- and longer-term residents. And, again, there is the compound in which live her mothers Italian-descended family, in Tacna, on the border with Chile. That is a block of houses with a finca (translates as: large, sandy, rundown garden) in the middle, a compound full of tias (aunts), of whom a new one seemed to appear every day I was there. And in which Ginas favourite cousin, now regrettably dead, lived with his longtime male companion. Entering Renitas apartment one day, the Russian accompanying me pointed to the door opposite and said, sotto voce, that was once the apartment of Beria. Oh!, I said, without taking in anything except the fact that decades after the state assassins belated and secret
10

For Nina Popova see http://info.elets-adm.ru/index.php? view=article&catid=73%3Aelcnahe&id =201%3A2008-04-16-12-1423&option=com_content&Itemid=96. This is in Russian which (as with similar such web materials I refer to or quote), was machine-translated online. See, further, Popova (1949) and Borisova (2005).

execution, and almost 20 years after the suicide of the responsible state, this was still a name to be whispered. For two or three days/daze in Moscow I made telephone appointments, suffered the slings and arrows of disappointed babushki who offered me kasha (porridge) soup, tea, piroshki (ummpiroshki?) biscuits and sweets at strange hours - and re-familiarised myself with the metro and that handful of Moscow avenues and buildings carved, in my otherwise failing memory, from previous visits. And then Sasha arrived from the City-Previously-Known-As, and people of different generations and even countries (Lithuania) turned up. And five or ten of us were off by bus to distant, romantic, Yelets. (Distant and romantic because, after all, 400km from The Hague lands you somewhere like London or Paris).

Portrait of Nina Popova in the Museum of Yelets, her birthplace. Left: Nikolai Diko, Right Valentina Yakovlevna Orlova, involved with a Russian-Norwegian friendship society. Beneath the portrait is a photo of the pre-Revolutionary gingerbread mansion which, in the Communist period, was the HQ of an official Soviet friendship society, of which Nina Popova was the head. It was right round the corner from where I stayed. Photo: Andrei Kluyev.

Yelets, in Deepish Russia

Yelets, 400 km South-East of Moscow, enjoying Russias early summer, June 2008. Photo: Andrei Kluyev.

It took us maybe two hours to get out of Moscow, after which the German-made bus purred gracefully past fields and woods out of some Russian folksong, but in which, as far as agricultural activity was concerned, I saw only one cow. There were a couple of piss-stops, at which I was the only passenger ignorant enough to enter the new and attractive-looking red-brick latrines. I should have been warned by the fact that, despite their recent construction, they were already falling apart. Arriving in the nondescript suburbs of Yelets, we descended outside some apartment blocks from what - the 1980s? 90s? And here, after fiddling with a couple of locks, we found ourselves in a family apartment divided into separate student bedrooms. An explanation and demonstration of the hot-water system ensued. Not having had a proper bath for several days, I was interested. It appeared that the gas geyser only functioned for the bathroom as long as the gas was ignited and hot water left running down the drain in the kitchen sink. This would occur for an hour or so whilst five or ten of us took our baths. Sasha: I bet you are going to put that in your report, Piter. Piter: Sasha, you read me like a book.

Alexandra (Sasha) Osminina, my translator, interpreter, intermediary, assistant and - sometimes perplexed - friend, She was one of Renitas enthusiastic friends and followers and had handled the prolonged and complex negotiations concerning my visit to Russia. Photo: Andrei Kluyev.

I had trouble with the Geyser Question. Indeed, it kept me from sleep for maybe 15 minutes. And when I remarked upon it to the Russian folks sharing the apartment with me, I was provided with amusing stories concerning other West European neurotics turning taps punctiliously on and off for reasons incomprehensible to their Soviet or Russian hosts. Could the unconcern of the Russians have been because Soviet citizens, moving relentlessly toward the Higher Stage of Socialism, had not been billed for heating (when and where available)? And because, as I had myself learned during a total of five years in Czecho, that which belongs to everybody is the responsibility of nobody? But I am in any case more neurotic than Sasha can have possibly imagined. Because I was also obsessed by the keys and locks of this apartment block. First there was some kind of electronic key for the outside door. This functioned perfectly and could become a hypothetical export item (I am assuming that it carried a unique, secret, but changeable code). Then there were the two keys for getting into the apartment. These were apparently designed with the purpose of punishing drunken husbands returning, at minus 20 centigrade from a bar or the local vodka stall. Because it took half a dozen of us to collectively will the most intrepid to actually unlock the apartment doors. Which may explain why I never even tried to lock my room door. But I do have to admit to a longstanding obsession with bad workmanship, whether in Russia or Peru. Or, for that matter, in Turnpike Lane, a North London area of mostly-Asian immigrants, living in crudely sub-divided apartments, with car-filled front gardens, the houses refitted with shoddy plastic window frames. The ex-Soviet Union, however, wins this Olympics without even entering. On a previous visit (IV? 1993?) I had felt that a below-zero quality of workmanship could not be adequately explained by negligence or lack of qualification. The materials had been produced and mounted, surely, with something more akin to hatred. But, maybe, it was a simple response to a labour relations system under which they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. We surely ought to move on from my nit-picking Western obsessions to my meeting, after a half century, with Renita and Nikolai. I was told to wait whilst a scene was somehow prepared for, if not by, the retired film director. This scene was called tea in English translation and took place in the apartment in which the other half of our team was resident. Out on the table there were tumbled, unpacked and spread all kinds of goodies. Tea of course. And the rest primarily carbohydrates, mostly in generally-sweet or specifically-sugary form. And then, the good fairy herself, Renita, 50 years older and heavier, but unmistakably her smiling, hugging and energetic self. And now talking a more than adequate English! My memory was of us managing in French. And behind her a tall, bulky, shaven-headed guy in jeans jacket and trousers who, no, I did not recognise as Diko. Not at first anyway. But then, as I have said, Diko had been more a colleague than a friend, and had played in my recollection only a marginal role on Visits I-II. And we had anyway at that time no mutual language. And thus we finally met in this packed room, round a tea-table set up and stocked by the visitors themselves, whilst electronic cameras quietly recorded a reunion

across the decades, across the borders, between the survivors of the Cold War and a Chilly Peace. I was gradually gaining an impression true or false of what I had got myself into in the provincial Russian town of Yelets. It appeared to me that Renita was here some kind of matron saint. It was not only that her mother had been born here and that Renita had quite literally devoted some five or six years of her life to the sick and dying of Yelets. It was also here she had had here her epiphany. And this in the mid1960s, when all routes upward in the Soviet Union still required a Party card! Renita was now apparently determined to not only save Yelets from its post-Communist provincial poverty and obscurity but also to make it some kind of centre for global citizen diplomacy. CD (capitalised) was apparently the brainchild, however, of Citizen Diko. He took the initiative still under Communism and with the goodwill of the Soviet state. His inspiration seems to have been the World Youth Festival that had had so deep an impact on both himself and Renita.

A half-century after the Moscow World Youth Festival of 1957, Peter meets Renita Grigorieva and Nikolai Diko in the small town of Yelets, at a conference of the Citizen Diplomacy organisation they were trying to promote. Photo: Andrei Kluyev.

Nikolai, had skirted state diplomacy during his career, preferring rather the life of an academic. Now retired, he had kept his organisation (with its Board, its Statutes and its Formal Recognition by the new regime) going. Its modest website and publications are overwhelmingly in Russian. Its Board is listed on its Official Notepaper in Cyrillic, and most of them are Russian, although a few are from ex-Soviet states. On this headed paper I noticed names from the IUS at the time of the World Youth Festival: Jii Pelikan, our Czech President (his name here marked as deceased), Sasha Yankov, from Bulgaria (later ambassador to the UK and a judge in an international court), Ichiro Ono from Japan, who had studied in Moscow and been an academic specialist on Soviet economics on his return to Japan. And the other citizen diplomats at the Yelets conference? They were apparently the fellowship of a goodwill ring. They were, with barely an exception, New (or Old) Believers, rather more familiar than had been Putin with the necessary genuflections and rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church. Some had been minor figures of Soviet officialdom. There was, exceptionally, the Lady from Lithuania, a medical specialist and academic, involved in the international hospice network, and just as energetically involved in the Pro-Life (anti-abortion) movement. There was the attractive young couple from the Altai, concerned to defend its traditions from the puerile appeals of pop culture. There was a diminutive but enterprising Indian from the film industry, promoting an international festival of peace films; people connected with the fellowship of Roerich; people who had made spiritual journeys to India, from where they had brought back photos to project. And, of course, there was Sasha (remember, from the CP-KAL?), who seemed to embody all these enthusiasms. Increasingly I had the feeling that I was amongst the believers and the followers. We moved between visits to religious sites, mostly in a state of disrepair and undergoing restoration, to the conference of CD (around which I would be inclined to put sceptical quotation marks, given the extent to which it was largely a performance by Renita, with Nikolai in a supporting/competing role) Nikolai came over as a rather more sceptical person. He was, apparently, not a Believer, his Moscow apartment having fewer icons in it than mine in The Hague (which has one). And then there were the visits to the smallish newish university, to a cultural centre and to other instances of local pride. Here there were performances by local people and even a Georgian dance ensemble. One evening Renita chaired a public session which, apart from her student film, made for the Moscow Festival, was largely devoted to her mother. There was a 30-minute documentary about Nina Popova, in which Renita and Yuri both appeared, and then two brief essays about Popova, read out by Yelets high-school students. We were hosted at meals, one dinner being given in his residence, within a new church school complex, by the energetic local priest. This was only the second time in my life I have been at a dinner presided over by a priest. But the last time was when I was skiving from conscript routine, in the British Army Over the Rhine, and the priest was a Jewish rabbi who later ordered me to pray. Moreover, on that dismal occasion,

the stew came out of cans from a kosher cannery in Cardiff (a city not known for its culinary delights, even Welsh). The priest, robed, selfassured, pronounced on globalisation to the effect that it was the will of God, who did not recognise frontiers. As an opening gambit in a conversation this could have been interesting. But we were evidently not being invited to an exchange of views, or even experiences, of globalisation. The guests nodded appreciatively, whilst tucking into Russian delicacies, served on crockery decorated and cutlery plated with gold. Or at least gilt. I was a little disappointed at not being invited by our host to say what I (Jew, Third-Generation Atheist, Liberation-Marxist, and a specialist on more-or-less earthly globalisation) thought about God and Globalisation. And somewhat

Back in the USSR? Schoolgirl dancers release doves of peace and friendship in Yelets. But a backgrounded and somber Lenin offers a Communist future that (as Marx warned of all things solid) has melted into air. Photo: Andrei Kluyev.

ungracefully whispered to Sasha: I take it that priests in the Orthodox Church do not take a vow of poverty. She - possibly pissed at my lack of respect - responded: All the money to build the school and this house was given by parishioners, not the state! Possibly. But poverty-stricken parishioners getting a vicarious thrill out of sacrifice to a wealthy and powerful Source of Truth did not strike me as good news or even new news - for Russia either. There was for me, on this trip, a surfeit of symbol and ritual. I do not refer here to what took places in churches or graveyards, but to what we were doing in Yelets more generally. At one ceremony, Renita pushed into my hands what looked like a small stone reproduction of a Mayan monument, saying, Present this on behalf of yourself and Gina as something from Latin America. I was incandescent. Nobody had done such a thing to me since I had left the Communist world. I happened to have with me in my Peruvian shoulder-bag, at that very moment, other examples of the Andean necklaces I had presented, with less ceremony, to Renita and Sasha. Moreover, I began to wonder whether what was weighing down my hand was not just a piece of airport art. Or Aztec rather than Mayan? At which point I saw - or imagined? - at both sides of the topmost figuretwo little elephant heads? I did, with seriously mixed feelings, make the presentation. And, with the help of the elephants, real or imagined, was able to move from incandescence to amusement. Thus, fortunately, avoiding some kind of Citizen Undiplomacy. But when this performance was added to everything else in Yelets, it did occur to me that mediaeval symbol and ritual might still reign over enlightenment rationality (not to speak of Gramscian scepticism of the intellect) in the ex-USSR. At one event beautiful pale girls, angelically dressed for their earlier dances, released doves, whilst Lenin, across the square, also raised his hand, pointing to a shining future that had long fallen behind us. Yelets itself, in fact, looked pretty much pre-Revolutionary, although most of the wooden houses must have been (re)constructed after the Nazi occupation in World War II. The prominent Soviet buildings were poor imitations of brutalist concrete monstrosities from the West of the 1950s. Many streets in Yelets are still unpaved. Old cottages collapse and lie where fallen. The main street has been pedestrianised and is being attractively repaved. Occasional new houses and apartment blocks arise. But what is beautiful is the cathedral and numerous old churches and monasteries, now being reconstructed after the Soviet vandals had let them rot. I pray that the pavements, buildings and churches have been reconstructed with more care than their Soviet equivalents. Despite Sashas valiant translation efforts, I did not quite get to the bottom of the CD project. It was only when I got back to Moscow that Nikolai provided me with more information and documentation. Yes, there was some idea of creating, in Yelets, an international centre of peace, friendship and cultural exchange. And this was to put Yelets on the map both within Russia and internationally. I was twice asked to speak publicly in Yelets. My major contribution, for the CD conference, was intended to surpass that mixture of Machiavellianism and naivety

that had marked and marred the Soviet project of Mir y Druzhba (Peace and Friendship). I was rescued from my Western bewilderment at what had followed 80 years of Russian Orthodox Communism by the late arrival at the CD conference of Lyudmila Bulavka from Alternativy, herself a member of the CD board. As the name itself might suggest, Alternativy, is something rather more oriented to the global justice and solidarity movement than is CD. To start with, it considers itself a movement rather than an NGO. And then its website (http://www.alternativy.ru/en) comes up in English as well as Russian. Whats more, I had several times met its best-known activist, Alexander Buzgalin, who is also Lyudmilas husband, at various alternative international events (starting with Visit IV in 1993). As we began to chat, further, Lyudmila and I began to vaguely recognise each other from one or other of these events. Later I discovered that she was a labour researcher and a social theorist. Her book on labour protest is entitled, provocatively, Non-Conformism (Bulavka 2004). But it is on the website of Alternativy that I find her social theorising and some kind of key to my sense of being a stranger in a strange land. The piece is in English and is entitled From the Cultural Revolution of 1917 to the Counter-Revolution of the Present:
The country of my birth - the USSR - is no longer in existence today, and for anyone to look back at its history and to highlight, not just the obvious tragedies incurred by the Soviet peoples, but also its achievements and successes - and more than that, to demonstrate pride in those achievements - is tantamount for many to be little more than a sign of disease. But what motivates my desire to go back to the past, and what fortifies my courage, is a recognition that what we are living through now is a fundamental crisis of culture of global proportions, which has not just affected Russia in the most squalid of ways, but which has also destroyed a culture which always united the most contradictory periods of Soviet history. It is my belief that the destruction of these former cultural values has evoked a tragic sensation in the vast majority of ordinary people, whereby they feel nothing more than immigrants in their own country. To add to their belief that they have no real future ahead of them, devoid as they are of economic resources, they are also told that they have no past. What is otherwise a very abstract belief in the so-called 'End of History' is for us extremely tangible and real. (Bulavka 2006)

Renita chairs the conference of Citizen Diplomacy, Yelets, May 31, 2008. Second left is Lyudmila Bulavka of Alternativy. Photo: Andrei Kluyev.

Lyudmila is evidently from her board membership well disposed toward CD. And it is this that encourages me to accept an invitation to join it. This was after I had tried, and failed, to persuade the Citizen Diplomats that I might be a correspondent for them, and that I was more at home with networks than with organisations. Sasha, herself, more at home with the classical music that she had studied and the business management which is her day job, had some difficulty with the idea of networking beyond the world of computer technology. Others in the CD network were possibly given that it consisted of independent and assertive women - puzzled by the concept, feminism. I quoted British writer and one-time suffragette, Rebecca West:
I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat

Despite their religious belief, their social concerns and their internationalist inclinations, my new friends had not heard of the Theology of Liberation or a preferential option for the poor. A pity. I could have put them in touch with my WSF friend and interlocutor, Chico Whitaker.11 Nor do they know of any such tendency within the Russian Church. It makes the Roman Catholic one look like a distributed network. Back round Renitas kitchen table in Moscow, I draw diagrams on paper napkins to distinguish, schematically, between The Organisation and The Network. When I make to throw these away or scribble on them, Renita protests, clearly wanting to keep them for the next half century. I promise to send CD some relevant PowerPoints I had once prepared for teaching purposes. I also heard from Renita, for the first time, that the person who in 1957 warned her to be careful about what she said to me, as someone not friendly to the Soviet Union, wasNikolai Diko! In so far as he was at that time a Soviet official, I am hardly surprised. And given the half century that has past, and the bridges that water has flown under, it was difficult for me to feel more than amused. Particularly when I remember that the politically-approved one of the two of us at that time was Ricardo Ramirez, later known as Rolando Moran, leader of the major Guevarist guerilla movement in Guatemala. (As mentioned in my draft autobio, Ricardo/Rolando was to later thank me for being the first to open his eyes to Stalinism if not to Maoism or Guevarism!). In any case, it is a long time since Diko was an apparatchik. I visited him in his 1950s-style apartment, on the other side of the Moskva, within a few bus stops of the 1950s-style University. Here he leads the life of an elderly bachelor. We had discovered a common
Indeed, I now remember that in addition to Chico, a major Brazilian influence within the International Council of the WSF, I am also acquainted with a couple of priests from this tradition, Gustavo Gutirrez, an old friend of Ginas in Peru and Francois Houtart, of the third-world studies centre, CETRI, in Belgium. In the hope that my Russian friends will read this, let me add that the two latter can be found in the Wikipedia entry on the Theology of Liberation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology.
11

language, Bad Spanish, although I fancy his is less bad than mine. He had had the unique opportunity, in the 1960s, to spend time as a student in Chile. Nikolai actually has two NGOs, both run from his living room. We had a little business to transact, becoming a member of the CD Board. I think I signed something. I certainly received some headed and rubber-stamped notepaper with my name added to that of the other board members. I may now be the owner, proud or not, of my very first Propusk (literally a permit, but in Russian and Soviet bureaucratic tradition endowed with significant weight). Quite what rights and duties might follow from my membership would depend on me reading the 23page Ustav (rules). I had and have no expectation of doing so. I also discovered that the substantial bulletin of CD Nikolai had given me in Yelets actually had an equally substantial contents list in English. I have to assume that CDs money ran out after this was published in 2002. But this bulletin seems to have rather more bite than the language I heard at the Yelets conference. Thus, Putins foreign policy was called immoral, condemned as failing to have learned from historical mistakes in the Caucuses (the first war in Chechnya?), and denounced as opposed to the interests of the Russian people. The bulletin lists a dozen areas of activity, reports on events, mentions public CD statements (JICCD 2002). It suggests rather more potential than I had so far imagined. Nikolai is clearly more attuned to computers and organisation than is Renita. His small apartment is a modern office, with bold printed titles on box files. He is also apparently a socially-minded person, acting as coordinator for the residents committee in his block. This building was just being renovated and there was some suspicion, or even threat, of sitting tenants being shoe-horned out in favour of Newer Russians with newer money. Nikolai has also himself been active in taking up the crimes or misdemeanours of the KGB or its successors.12 He is, finally, busy with some kind of autobiography of his own. I asked Nikolai if he knew what had ever happened to our common Soviet colleague, Igor Biriukov my senior on World Student News in Prague 1955-8. Oh, he died long ago, said Diko dismissively, evidently having no interest in the man. I am saddened. I always felt with Igor that there was a human trying to get out from the apparatchik in his suit, hat and overcoat. And we had considerable affection and respect for each other despite our not infrequent political rows back in Prague.

I suppose, again, one has to explain that the KGB was the Soviet espionage, sabotage and intelligence agency, which changed its name for diplomatic purposes as the Soviet Union became, again, Russia. It was also Vladimir Putins nursery school during the Soviet period and, it is said, the source of his personnel and power in imposing order on (and around) post-Soviet Russia. I would imagine one does not tangle lightly with it in either its past or present emanation.
12

The ex-Soviet unions in the ex-Soviet Union During my last few days in Moscow I had time to stumble across a large, attractive and busy bookshop. It has books in foreign languages, including one by the murdered Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya (2007). It was for writing stuff like this that she was assassinated. Given the scathing criticism she mounts of Putins regime, given further the reputation of that regime for frame-ups and assassinations, I assume she was killed by a henchman, whether under orders of just doing him a favour. When I return from Russia, however, I hear that the Russian state has apparently accused some Chechens of the murder. This state, however, also has a reputation for framing Chechens. But the book shows her as doing the Chechen resistance, and/or Soviet-approved successor regime, no particular favours either. Despite my general familiarity with Russian developments, I was shaken by this book, which reveals one grotesque horror after another. Covering just the two years following the manipulated parliamentary elections, late-2003, it deals with not only official political shenanigans but the war in Chechnya, the armys treatment of its own conscripts, the Beslan school siege, and terrorist bombing incidents. The worst here, for me, is not how the regime treats its enemies but its friends and its citizens (all terms requiring the distancing quotes). I am aghast at the incompetence and inhumanity of these authorities true successors to their Soviet and Tsarist forebears. A convinced liberal-democrat, Politkovskaya has little or no time for those claiming this label in Russia. There is a note of desperation in what she writes:
Our society isnt a society any more. It is a collection of windowless isolated cellsThere are thousands who together might add up to be the Russian people, but the walls of our cells are impermeable. If somebody is suffering, he is upset that nobody else seems concerned. If, in other cells at the same time, anybody is in fact thinking about him, it leads to no action and they only really remember he had a problem when their own situation becomes completely intolerable. (Politkovskaya 2007: 254)

Occasionally she gestures toward the marginalised masses, the left and even the contemporary Communist Party (282, 297) as Russias only hope! I note that she makes but two mentions of specific labour protest (69-79, 257-9) as distinguished from that of the poor more generally. And she makes no mention of trade unions, good, bad or indifferent. Surely there must have been, during those two years, something to write about the unions? My overall feeling, however, is one of sadness that she continued with her high-risk reporting and denunciations even after she had received numerous threats and survived a first assassination attempt. And that in the global justice and solidarity movement we do not know of Anna. And honour her.13 So much, or little, for Anna Politkovskaya and the labour movement. But what about me? I do not recall a travel-report I have made over the last years which has had nothing to say about labour and unions. True, I did not write up my trip to Hong Kong and Seoul in 2007
13

For why she deserves honour, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya.

despite being invited to interesting events by interesting labour movement organisations or people. This was because I had issued myself a self-denying ordinance: Thou Shalt Not Spend Six Weeks Writing Up Your Two-Week Trips. This ordinance had had to be issued by my super-ego to my ego. (My super-egos long-felt feeling, or obsession, is that the privilege of travel carries with it the obligation to report and reflect). Now, my Moscow invitation was, admittedly, not a labour one. Indeed, when I mentioned, late, to Renita that I had not been shown the admittedly small tobacco processing plant in Yelets, she had looked at me as if to say either what tobacco plant? or how do you know there is such a plant? Well, I knew from a phone conversation with my young old friend, Kirill Buketov in Moscow. I had first met Kirill in San Francisco, around 1990, at one of the series of LabourTech events organised by SF internationalist (also Trotskyist and Wunderkind) Steve Zeltzer. Kirill, whilst not over-earnest, was concerned to not play tourist in one of the worlds really great cities. Pity. At that time he was involved with one of several labour-support organisations in the USSR/Russia, inspired by the Polish Solidarnosc and its support group, KAS-KOR. On Visit IV, to what was now the ex-Soviet Union, 1993, we met several such bodies. The union scene at that time in Russia was chaotic. (So, actually, was every scene, given Yeltsins success where Guy Fawkes had failed). But the alternative unions and support groups were then unable to hold together their fragile accord in the face of de-industrialisation, privatisation, and the centrifugal forces affecting ever-poorer and less-secure Russian workers. Despite the passing years, the situation did not seem to be improving, at least according to this 2004 piece by a French journalist:
Russia: Nostalgic for the Soviet Era As President Vladimir Putin went to the polls he faced strong demands to redistribute national wealth and rebuild at least part of the old social welfare system. The demands are linked with a re-evaluation of the legacy of the old Soviet Union. A misremembered past appeals because the present doesnt work and the future looks bleak. (Chauvier 2004).

The labour-support groups and activists of 1993 had gone off in different directions. Kirill, with his labour studies background, organisational experience, left-socialist attitudes and excellent English, had landed up as the Russian (and wider) Coordinator for the Switzerland-based International Union of Foodworkers (IUF). Fifteen years after our last meeting he looked just as young and sounded just as committed. Kirill had indeed not only told me about the Japanese-owned tobacco plant in Yelets but recommended me to find a woman union organiser there. He had also provided me with a long list of Moscowbased labour activists or specialists, some of whom I knew from 1993. The IUF has offices in the building owned by the successor to the official Soviet unions (the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, or VTsSKS). The successor union federation (Federation of Independent Trade Unions

of Russia, the FNPR) is a true son of its father.14 But Kirill claimed that his office operated as much as a labour movement or labour-support body as a union one. It had also been involved in notable labour disputes, often involving international solidarity action, such as one at McDonalds, right in the centre of Moscow. Kirill also continues with the electronic media and communication means we were discussing in Moscow 15 years previously. Thus I got from him an English-language video of the McDonalds struggle and a Russian subtitled version of the prize-winning Ken Loach movie on migrant labour-organising in the USA, Bread and Roses.15 Some of Kirills past writings can be found on the web, as can a unique piece of international union officers collaborative writing (Garver, Buketov, Chong and Martinez 2007). It was reassuring meeting Kirill. Not only because of our common interests and concerns but because he was evidently more involved in a preferential option for the poor than my old/new religious or Citizen Diplomacy friends. Moreover, the piece just referred to contains his contribution, from Russian experience, to international union solidarity strategies. We didnt have the time to go into the labour and union situation in Russia. But what I had been reading before coming, or picked up from the web whilst in Moscow, suggested that neither the one nor the other has settled down during the 15 years that had passed since we had last met. If, however, CD evinced neither interest in nor, perhaps, awareness of workers, both Alternativy and IGSO do.16 For Alternativy I have mentioned Lyudmila Bulavkas book and could see reports on unions and worker protest in their occasional newspaper.17 For IGSO one can look at the work of Boris Kagarlitsky, in 1993 a leader of the shortlived Workers Party and union advisor. Boris, fortunately, writes also in excellent English, one report beginning:
Recently Russian mass media have focused on labour movement. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union the Russian journalists are writing about strikes and workers protests on May 1, 2008. Strike movement has been on the rise in Russia during the last ten months. It was started by the workers of the transnational companies and was assumed by the employees of the Russian corporations. The labor disputes are becoming more intense and enduring. Official trade unions are helpless theyve failed to organise the workers who totally I will not pretend to even sketch the union scene in contemporary Russia. Boudratskis and Kurzina (2007) give a fascinating overview of a complex situation whilst critiquing but simultaneously I think - themselves demonstrating (it is written in Trotskyist mode) the contradictions between and within Russias diverse and still fractured left.
14

He also already had the set of Ken Loach movies on CD that I had brought to Moscow in case anyone wanted to copy them! http://www.sixteenfilms.co.uk/.
15

Alternativy and the IGO (Institute for Globalisation and Social Movements) are led, respectively, by the two Russian Marxist acquaintances from my 2003 visit, Alexander Buzgalin and Boris Kagarlitsky. For Alternativy see http://www.alternativy.ru/en, for the IGSO http://english.igso.ru/search.php.
16

The occasional popular-style, eight-page, information and mobilisation bulletin transliterates as, Dayesh Drugoi Mir!, something like Another World, Lets Go!.
17

ignore those organisations, but neither can they serve the interests of the corporations by preventing or helping to regulate the disputes. When the grassroots worker groups of the official trade unions take initiative proposing to increase the wages or improve the labor conditions, they find themselves in a conflict with the superior agencies and have to turn for support to alternative labor organisations. (Kagarlitsky 2008).

That workers in transnationals have been in the forefront, that the traditional unions are ineffective, that alternative labour groups are active all these factors are familiar from hard-pressed labour movements elsewhere. They give rise to acts or possibilities for global labour solidarity. But it would be difficult to argue that Things are Better that a 21st century model for the emancipation of labour, exists elsewhere.18 The literal de-struction of traditional forms of employment, the fracturing of the traditional working class, the failure of traditional strategies, the disorientation of the Left this may have its particular forms in Russia but would not be totally foreign to workers in South Africa, in Brazilor in Italy. Nor, for that matter, would be the waves of popular protest that are growing against the commoditisation of housing, social security and other neo-liberal provocations and outrages.

A striker holds a sign reading Our Choice is Strike outside the Ford Motor Co. auto factory in Vsevolozhsk outsisde St. Petersburg, Russia, late 2007. For a pioneering 19th century Russian model for the emancipation of labour (and society as a whole), it is worth reading, critically, Plekhanov (1883/4). http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1883/xx/sdelg1.htm.
18

Some 1,500 workers at the Ford Motor Co. went on strike for the second time that year, demanding higher wages and shorter nightshift hours. http://www.daylife.com/photo/04G4e1w1Ir6zc.

Do svidaniye does not mean goodbye Do svidaniye is generally understood by non-Russians to mean goodbye. What it actually means until we meet again. I did not go to Yelets and Moscow as a missionary. There is an unfortunate history of the left missionary position in relation to Russia. At an early moment that of Plekhanov it was largely a matter of Russian pilgrims either traveling to the West in search of revolutionary enlightenment or importing and translating the scriptures. After the Revolution, of course, the flow was reversed. Russia became the Rome and Mecca of revolutionary rectitude. Highly-motivated and trained missionaries were dispatched to Germany, Brazil and China (where they were responsible for premature uprisings ending in bloody repression). Later, the missions were accompanied by arms (old and useless ones to Spain) or borne on tanks (World War II, Berlin 1953, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Afghanistan). When I was on Visit IV, 1993, I was an uneasy witness to the Re-importation of Revolution and even Evolution - with Argentinean Trotskysists, American Socialist-Feminists, Refounded Italian Communists, German Social-Democrats, preaching to the heathen Russians. I was, remember, invited to Russia. And whilst the motivation of my hosts certainly had (too) much to do with my performance 50 years earlier, and perhaps to my own citizen diplomacy experiences and writings more recently, I began to feel, in Yelets, as if I was being immersed in a new/old Russian community of national faith and universal goodwill. But contradictions abound between and within these two projects or anyway experiences. I was twice invited to speak in Yelets, once to a public event at the university, once to the conference of CD. What does one say on completing ones interplanetary voyage (One Small Step for (Wo)man, One Giant Step for Humankind)? Especially when issued with the invitation at very short notice, for brief statements, to unknown audiences? And deprived of ones customary sources and means of reflection and communication (a computer with a Latin keyboard, internet access, espresso)? Well, not much. Nikolai thought that my public address was over the heads or beyond the experience of the university audience. And I later felt that what I said at the CD conference was based on seriously limited knowledge of this body. Howeverwhatever I did, despite my organisational aversions and networking habits, join the Board of CD. And I did agree to seriously consider Renitas suggestion that I return in 2009 to run a short course at the University of Yelets. She asked for a title and I proposed something like Global Social Movements and Global Civil Society. I did not actually know whether she or her friends ha the influence to realise this. Especially since I insisted on a series of conditions (motivated and qualified participants from both university and community, experienced translators/interpreters, one or more local academic collaborators, departmental involvement, access to relevant readings and audiovisuals in an accessible language, an invitation on headed notepaper, signed in

blood, etc). I forgot to mention hot water that turns both on and off. And a solution to the Key Question. I thought it might be interesting to explore the possible meanings of global solidarity beyond the Global City. And to further consider the relationship between a Communist World Youth Festival in Communist Russia and the World Social Forum/Global Justice and Solidarity Movement of the present day. And, actually, to restore and continue a personal/political relationship across borders begun in my salad days when, as Shakespeare reminds us, we are green in judgment.

References: Borisova, N.V. 2005. Nina Popova: Life as Creation (Series: Under the Sign of Love: Essays on Women Leaders of Lipetsk Province). [In Russian]. Lipetsk: Inform. Boudratskis, Ilya and Maria Kurzina. 2008. Russia: The Anticapitalist Left and Social Struggles, IV Online Magazine: IV395 - December 2007. http://www. internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1397. Bulavka, Lyudmila. 2004. Non-conformism: Socio-Cultural Portrait of Worker Protest in Contemporary Russia. [In Russian] Moscow: URSS. Bulavka, Lyudmila. 2006. From the Cultural Revolution of 1917 to the Counter-Revolution of the Present, http://www.alternativy.ru/en/node/84. Chauvier, Jean-Marie. 2004. All that Friendship and Solidarity Collapsed with the Break-Up of the USSR. Russia: Nostalgic for the Soviet Era. Le Monde Diplomatique. March. Garver, Paul, Kirill Buketov, Hyewon Chong and Beatrice Sosa Martinez. 2007. Global Labour Organising in Theory and Practice, Labour Studies Journal, Vol. 32, No. 3, 237-256. JICCD (Journal of the International Committee of Citizen Diplomacy). 2002. Nr. 3-4. Moscow. Kagarlitsky, Boris. 2008. Labour Code as an Instrument of Social Revolution, Eurasian Home, 15 May.http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml? act_id=18274&username=guest@ tni. org&password=9999&publish=Y Luke, Timothy. 1987. Civil Religion and Secularisation: Ideological Revitalisation in Post-Revolutionary Communist Systems, Sociological Forum, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 87-134. Popova, Nina. 1948. Women in the Land of Socialism. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Samuel, Raphael. 1985. The Lost World of British Communism (Part I): Faith, Hope and Struggle, New Left Review, No. I/154, pp. 3-53. Surnacheva, Lisa . 2008. Russia: Life on the Poverty Line, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ node/ 44768/print. Waterman, Peter. 1993. From Moscow with Electronics: A Communication Internationalism for an Information Capitalism. (Draft). Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. Waterman, Peter. 1994. From Moscow with Electronics: A Communication Internationalism for an Information Capitalism. Democratic Communique. Vol. 12, No. 2-3.

CHAPTER 19

Lets Hear it (also) for the Rootless Cosmopolitans19 (2011)

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Breughel, c. 1558. He evidently had a localist and mordant view of what happens to those who try to take flight from earth. This is demonstrated by the disappearance of Icarus into the sea (bottom right), unnoticed by the peasant, the farmer, the shepherd and the fisherman (?) in the foreground. Breugel was evidently familiar with Greek legend and himself something of a traveller, if not a cosmopolitan. This was, of course, long before industrial capitalism, nationalism, socialist internationalism and neo-liberal globalisation. Not to speak of the global justice and solidarity movement and its expanding cyberspace.

19

I have resisted the temptation, and chore, of updating this paper in the light of 2011, which is continuing into 2012. I cannot, however, resist the temptation of mentioning what at present appears the most politically and technically ambitious project, taking shape as I edit this manuscript (manuscript?). It is the Global Square, which seems to have come out of the Occupy movement and hopes to be its Cyberian expression and stimulant.

ootless Cosmopolitans - whether with this name or related ones had a bad press during the 20th century. Not only from Stalin, who was responsible for the concept bezrodniy kosmopolit (literally: countryless cosmopolitan).20 One could, perhaps, expect a bad press from all worshippers of Blood and Soil. After all, the attachment or appeal to these has been a powerful way of bringing or holding people(s) together, and controlling them, during an epoch in which all things solid turn into air (Marx and Engels 1848). Whilst the most radical of the 19th century Left were often exiled or otherwise uprooted cosmopolitans, and had The International as their imagined community (Anderson 1983),21 this was before the nationstate actually the state-defined nation - had really appealed to and sunk roots amongst the masses. I do not believe that even the Marxists ever theorised internationalism. They might have preached it and even practiced it - if in ever more specific, temporary, pragmatic or ambiguous ways. But what they endlessly wrote about and energetically theorised was nationalism.22 That was then. But one would have thought that by the 21 st century at least Marxists would have recognised that this is now.23 So how is it possible that even in our globalised era, with all its increasingly global threats and promises - with all the talk of global civil society, and of the necessity for democratic cosmopolitanism, no one raises a cheer or two for the rootless cosmopolitan? Even Sydney Tarrow a sociologist of social movements, a social historian, an imaginative writer, a humanist and no doubt a determined reformer seems unable to raise a cheer for the Rootless Cosmopolitan. Whilst evidently dismissing Stalin, and critiquing a wide range of contemporary literature attempting to name and tame this significant new historical actor, he places all his bets on the rooted cosmopolitans (Tarrow 2005: Ch. 3).

Rootless Cosmopolitan, (January 1, 2010).

20 21

Online,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootless_cosmopolitan.

Imagined Community, addressed to nationalism, is not only one of the most brilliant but of the most popular of contemporary sociological concepts, certainly surviving the numerous critiques of the Benedict Anderson book (e.g. Davidson 2007). The concept gets some 2,000,000 hits on Google. It certainly appeals to me in thinking about internationalism in the past and the new global solidarity in the future. More than the nation as natural to most of its citizens as a football club to its supporters, the stock exchange to its members does the international have to be imagined. 22 More evidence from Google: Scholarly Works on Marxism and Nationalism earns some 80,000 Googles (if we may so name the new currency), Marxism and Internationalism, a meagre 20,000. This is, however, 20,000 more references than it gets in the brilliant world-spanning historical survey and critique of Marxisms by Goran Therborn (2008).
23

In 2009, following the world capitalist economic crisis, Hugo Chavez called for the creation of a new socialist international http://links.org.au/node/1372. In so far, however, as this was a state initiative, it seemed likely to reproduce the problems of previous state and party-dominated internationals.

Now, lets see. I began drafting this in Lima, Peru, which is where my partner/colleague/compaera of some two decades lives. But where I reside (have a family, an apartment, a bicycle, do my shopping, receive a pension, pay taxes) is in the Netherlands. I am, however, actually English, though I have not lived there on a continuing basis since around 1965. I do not master Dutch or Spanish. And whilst I may feel most at home in England I am hardly ever at this home. I have travelled much and widely. Today, I suppose, I inhabit The Hague, as I have done since 1972. But, beyond my family and a handful of friends and compaer@s, I have limited contact with Dutch social, political and cultural life (or maybe it is the other way round?). Where I seem to have most relationships is in that new found land, Cyberia. I spent quite some time exploring Cyberia in the 1980s-90s. Indeed, I might yet produce a compilation of my papers recording these pioneering, if primitive, efforts.24 I have, or have had, a couple of websites, set up for me by a former student and friend, Daniel Chavez (a much-travelled Uruguayan, himself long resident in the Netherlands). I have so far found these personal websites, however, rather demanding. Today I visit the most familiar parts of Cyberia, travelling in some of its most familiar vehicles, Firefox, Thunderbird or Gmail for email, Google for Web searches, Skype for free or cheap phone calls. Before retirement in 1998 I made two or three Power-Point productions. I have various bits of hard and software on my netbook, and on a PC assembled at a shop round the corner. I am subscribed to maybe a dozen electronic lists. I am active on maybe four or five of such. I consult Wikipedia frequently whilst writing, thus saving hours of work with paper dictionaries, biographies, libraries and bibliographies. I deposit my longer or shorter papers here and there (check <waterman choike> on Google for the largest collection, my blog on UnionBook for the more recent ones). I look for old books and even recent ones on Amazon and Abebooks.25 I order stuff with my credit card or Paypal. I also have certain computer accessories or extensions: a secondhand earlier-generation iPhone (which my grandchildren would not be seen dead with), a separate hard-drive for backup, one or two memory sticks. I do spend an hour or two every day checking and responding to my email. And Skypeing. Indeed, I cannot imagine having kept my living apart together relationship with my partner, Gina Vargas, going since 1990 without these. Gina herself does not claim any particular computer skills, but she is frequently involved in collective online chats (conversations) with her own various international networks. I have been so far little infected by chats or, for that matter, social networking.26 I am
I have also recently revisited an old stamping ground (ground?), international labour communication by computer (Waterman 1992, Waterman 2010).
24

Thus did I discover and order a previously unknown to me work on the internationals by Raymond Postgate (1920). Postgate was a founder member of the Communist Party which he broke with because of its self-subordination to the Moscowbased Third International (Comintern).
25

The new exception to this is UnionBook, an evidently cheeky challenge to Facebook. In so far as it focuses on, or might create, a new international labour community across or beyond the institutionalised union movement. And in so far as its webmaster (Eric Lee)
26

sure these are going to be of value in international networking, even bearing in mind the manner in which they can be used by capital, state and nefarious social movements.27 I have co-edited a couple of books, with my compaero in India, Jai Sen. Indeed, these we are currently producing must be 90 percent dependent on ICT (information and communication technology). The 10 percent that hasnt benefitted from the web has proven to be the Achilles heel of the operation. Thus, we have been able to edit and print cheaply in India, but are then confronted with the logistics of moving these factory-age products, weighing up to 700 grams, to anywhere else in the world. There are similar problems with the production of the attractive and professional series in Lima, which has published compilations of both myself and Gina (Here Google <democraciaglobal>). So for the last few years I have been surfing the web, looking at possibilities for cutting out the middleman in the circulation of ideas the print publisher, the journal or magazine editor. Almost all my articles go first online, commonly marked as Draft or Work in Progress. I more or less gave up submission of my stuff to the then printed Working Papers series of the Institute of Social Studies when I was suddenly informed that these were now being evaluated as final-form publications!? Some final final-form print-publishers or editors including those on the Left object, or reject, when I say that my draft material is online. The overwhelming majority do not. I have also produced compilations online. 28 In the continuing absence of a personal website or blog, these have been vital spaces in my efforts at becoming a nomad of the present (Melucci 1989). Most academics are either happy or unhappy slaves to a competitive and hierarchical system intended to grade and discipline. Left academics are often resigned to conditions they reject both in theory and in the world beyond their profession. Many Left journals that sprang up on the periphery of the system in the 1970s-80s have modified their radical names and/or gone commercial. This does not necessarily mean they lose all intellectual or political value. But there is a price attached (often a subscription price, unpayable outside the worlds wealthier universities). How many Left, Critical, Revolutionary or Emancipatory journal articles have I been unable to access because I have been retired for a decade and no longer have (un)limited free access to such?
continues to resist the temptation to operate also as a webfilter or webcensor, this could be an exciting project. Such issues have been energetically discussed within the Networked Politics project of the Transnational Institute (TNI), Amsterdam, http://www.networked-politics.info/? page_id=12.
27

Recovering Internationalism; Creating the New Global Solidarity (http://blog.choike.org/eng/anlysis/113) in 2008. And a 1,000-page collection of my 1980s-90s Working Papers as a book (a single file) at http://www.intoebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/. Identical or related papers and compilations are available on a German labour network, Netzwerk-IT (http://www.netzwerkit.de/projekte/waterman).
28

Fortunately, some new academic journals are not only circumventing the print publishing juggernauts but escaping to Cyberia. Others are involved in the expanding cyberspace commons by adopting one or other Creative Commons formula.29 I was delighted to be invited to join the Editorial Board of a new global labour journal,30 edited by some of my old international labour studies interlocutors from the 1980s-90s, Eddie Webster and Robert OBrien. My pleasure lay partly in the title but particularly in this being an open-access electronic journal. These features are, of course, no guarantee of the journal becoming either global in authorship (the first issue was heavily Canadian) or radical in content (the first issue being rather heavily social-reformist in orientation). So I was rather more enthusiastic about joining another online journal, of which the main title was the vaguely churchy Interface, but sub-titled, more promisingly, A Journal for and about Social Movements.31 This one is not so much a traditional academic journal, tele-transported to cyberspace, as one that has been thought out in terms of 1) the new global social movements and 2) the possibilities of cyberspace. The first implies that it be seriously international in authorship and readership. It has spokespersons in a wide spread of world areas, including commonly forgotten ones like the Arab world and the ex-Soviet bloc. It also intends, like my old Newsletter of International Labour Studies from the 1980s, to be authored and read by both academics and activists, and activistacademics. It is developing editorial groups for a large number of different world areas, including commonly forgotten ones like the Arab world and the ex-Soviet bloc. The cyberspace aspect implies not only open access but also the possibility for rapid feedback and dialogue, both in the publication and on a spokespersons (English: editors) email list. The first three issues of the journal were on suitably 21st century issues: Movement Knowledge; Civil Society versus Social Movements; Crisis, Social Movements and Revolutionary Transformations. I will follow (and contribute to) such new projects. But, although my expertise lies primarily in the area of global labour studies, I feel definitely more at home in that of the new global social movements. Cyberia, like Siberia, is far from Paradise. It is an ever-expanding universe in which the forces for commerce and control on the one hand, the commons and emancipation on the other, are involved in a complex and often violent conflict. Cyberia is surely the privileged space for emancipation that free-thinkers and revolutionaries 1) projected onto the press, or at least the free press, then 2) with Marx and Engels onto the railways or telegraph, 3) Lenin on the cinema, 4) Brecht on radio, and,
Creative Commons, (http://creativecommons.org/). The cost and complexity of not so doing is revealed, strangely enough, in a Wikipedia entry entitled Commons: Copyright (http://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Commons:Copyright_tags). Nothing common about these, of course. More to do with common-or-garden industrial capitalism and the nation state.
29

Called, unsurprisingly, Global Labour http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/globallabour/, this first appeared in 2009)

30 31

Journal,

Interface, (http://www.interfacejournal.net/). I thought it should actually be called InYerFace.

eventually, 5) Enzensberger on the modern mediaof 1968!. Which is why I do tend to repeat the phrase of Castells about real virtuality and those of Maritegui to the effect that communication is the nervous system of internationalism and solidarity (Waterman 2006, 2008). I note that in his essay about contemporary internationalism Perry Anderson (2002) says nothing about Cyberia. But, then, he also has nothing to say about communication in connection with internationalism. And, for that matter, not too much about internationalism! Sydney Tarrow (2005:136-8) does allow the internet two or three pages, but then qualifies its value, referring to the internets possible subversion of the organisations/institutions seen by him as necessary for effective longterm international campaigning. Both of them, it seems to me, are still enclosed within a world of nation-states, of organisations and institutions. Both use a language - for the ideology (Anderson) or activists (Tarrow) that makes the nation, nationality, nationalism the point of departure. And, possibly, in both cases, of arrival. Neither, in any case seems to imagine a meaningful community beyond or without the state-definednation. I clearly do. Or, rather, I see multiple possible meaningful and radically-democratic communities, some more local than the nation-state, others indeed inter-national (the European Community, possible Latin American ones, the Maghreb and/or Mashraq),32 and yet others of interest, of identity, of ideology for which the nation-state and state-nationalism are either problematic, obstacles to be surpassed or irrelevant. Tarrow starts his book with the story of his father, Moishke/Morris, an East-European Jewish immigrant to the US of the 1920s, who like so many small-town emigrants and international immigrants, before and since, transferred remittances for good works to his homeplace. Later, he was involved in unionism, with rescuing Jews from war-torn Europe, and then in creating a homeland for them in Israel. His father is, for Tarrow, the very model of a rooted cosmopolitan. My own father, Alek Nashibirski/Alec Waterman,33 who had a similar background, came, around the same time, to Britain, and became a Communist internationalist. I mention both because these are recognisable and significant historical types. But whatever their roots and rootedness, we have to note the limits of their cosmopolitanism/internationalism. In the Moishke/Morris case, the transplanted Jewish settlement was created, with the help of foreign powers, in someone elses homeland, and has become an increasingly nationalist, militarist, quasi-theological and racist state. In the Alek/Alec case his Soviet Jewish Communist comrade, Solomon Mikhoels, was killed and Soviet Jewish cultural life ended by
The Maghreb is the Arab countries of North Africa, the Mashraq those of the Mediterranean and Iraq. I only learned of the second name as a result of an International Council meeting of the WSF, 2008!
32

In between these two names, he was Alec Wasserman, a surname adopted from another branch of the family. Why Wasserman when he was an illegal migrant in Britain, rather than Germany, remains a mystery. I was born a Wasserman but was secretly (and guiltily) happy to have a new English name when, aged 19, I went to work for the international Communist movement in Prague, 1955.
33

diktat. This was the fate of rooted cosmopolitanism and international communism in the world of nation states. Without going further into the writing of either Anderson or Tarrow, I do not think that either cosmopolitanism or rootedness are of themselves adequate terms for the understanding and advance of a radical-democratic global movement of solidarity that I fancy both of them would actually like to see. Despite its apparent Greek roots, cosmopolitanism is a construction of the European bourgeois and liberal enlightenment. And - to caricature lightly - what it meant was that we would have a world of peace and justice if everyone spoke French; later English/American, but certainly not Mandarin or Quechua. Is cosmopolitanism an adequate term for what I have been doing, or believe I have been engaged in, for most of my life. I hope not:
Cosmopolitanism is the western engagement with the rest of the world and that engagement is a colonial one, which simultaneously transcends the national boundaries and is tied to it. Instead of perceiving cosmopolitanism and nationalism as alternatives, one should perhaps recognise them as the poles in a dialectical relationship. (van der Veer 2002:11).

As for rootedness, it would seem to me that this is something of a floating signifier,34 value-empty and ready for capture by marginalised claimants, religious or ethnic fundamentalists, ideological localists, and therefore for application in the most varied and problematic of manners. So I think that rather than qualifying, or joining together, cosmopolitanism and rootedness, I would still rather see us work out the possible meanings of a post-nationalist internationalism a new global solidarity. This would be one which surpasses inter-nationalism and is free of debts to cosmopolitanism. What we need is to re-imagine solidarity (for this in relation to labour, see Hyman 1999). With respect to the World Social Forum and the wider global justice and solidarity movement, I have actually argued the necessity for a shift of focus a de-centering - from place-based events, and in two directions, the cyberspatial and the local (local here signifying both a locale and the subject-specific). This is because of the danger of either the Forum or the general GJ&SM remaining events or processes in the hands of the university-educated middle classes, requiring long-distance air-travel and hotel accommodation. I have obviously been one of these middle-class nomads/tourists over the past decade or more - and am not about to become a Self-Hating Middle-Class Jetset Leftist. So I may well continue to attend or even intervene in other Forums. But I am also in favour of the closest possible articulation of, and feedback between, the cyberspatial on the one hand and the local/specific on the other. Indeed, I wonder whether supporters of the intercontinental WSF events should not be required to argue for each of these in terms of their functionality to the local/specific in grounded places, and to the universal/cyberspatial that surrounds us.

Floating Signifier, Online, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_signifier, January 1, 2010.

34

If Cyberia is an increasingly real virtuality, then I wonder why it should not be possible to have roots (also) here. I am attached to this space and to such a degree that the idea of losing access to it fills me with the kind of frustration, anxiety and grief that others might feel at having to migrate, or being exiled. I like it here....there?...wherever cyberspace might conceivably be. Yet, I dedicated my globalisation and solidarity book (Waterman 1998) to four local martyrs of social movements that are today major parts of the GJ&SM. They were: Maria Elena Moyano of Villa El Salvador, Lima, Peru; Chico Mendes of the rural labour and ecological movement in Amazonia, Brazil; Shankar Guha Niyogi, leader of a mineworkers and tribals in Dalli-Rajhara, India; and Ken Saro-Wiwa, leader of the minority rights and ecological movement in the Niger Delta (Waterman 1998/2002). I dedicated the book to them because I thought that with more effective solidarity globally, they might not have been killed. I am not, therefore, proposing the rootless cosmopolitan as the very model of the 21st century internationalist. I am just asking whether s/he is not one possible type of such. And suggesting there is no necessary contradiction, in a cyberspatial world, between being a somewhat rootless global solidarity activist and the protection, promotion and projection of more local ones. Now go back or forward to Footnote 1.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1991 (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed., London: Verso. Anderson, Perry. 2002. Internationalism: A Breviary. New Left Review. No. 14. www.newleftreview.org/?view=2376. Davidson, Neil. 2007. Reimagined Communities, International Socialism, No. 117, http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4? id=401&issue=117. Hyman, Richard. 1999. 'Imagined Solidarities: Can Trade Unions Resist Globalisation?' in Peter Leisink (ed), Globalisation and Labour Relations, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, Or: http://www.antenna. nl/~waterman /hyman2.html. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. 1848. The Communist Manifesto. http://www.marxists.org/archive /marx/works/1848/communistmanifesto/ Melucci, Alberto. 1989. Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (edited by John Keane and Paul Mier). London: Radius. Postgate, Raymond. 1920. The Workers International. London: Swarthmore Press. Tarrow, Sydney. 2005. The New Transnational Activism. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Therborn, Goran. 2008. From Marxism to Post-Marxism? London: Verso. Van der Veer, Peter. 2002. Empathy or Empire, Biblio: A Review of Books ( Special Issue: Cosmopolitanism and the Nation-State). Pp. 10-13). Waterman, Peter. 1992. `International Labour Communication by Computer: The Fifth International?', Working Papers, No. 129. The Hague: Institute of Social Studies. 80 pp. Waterman, Peter. 1998/2002. Globalisation, Social Movements and the New Internationalisms. London: Mansell/Continuum. Waterman, Peter. 1999. `The Brave New World of Manuel Castells: What on Earth (or in the Ether) is going on?' Development and Change. Pp. 357-80. Or: http://www.antenna.nl/ ~waterman/castells.html Waterman, Peter. 2006. Los nuevos tejidos nerviosos del internacionalismo y la solidaridad (The New Nervous System of Internationalism and Solidarity). Lima: Programa de Estudios Sobre Democracia y Transformacin Global/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Waterman, Peter. 2008. Recovering Internationalism, Creating The New Global Solidarity: Labour, Social Movements and Emancipation in the 21st Century. http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/6439.html. Waterman, Peter. 2010. Alternative International Labour Communication by Computer after Two Decades. http://interfacejournal.nuim.ie/wordpress/wpcontent/uploads/2010/ 12/Interface-2-2-pp.241-269-Waterman.pdf.