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GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Or
SOREL IN SEATTLE
RONALDO MUNCK
Globalisation and Social Exclusion Unit
University of Liverpool
Introduction
The notion of ‘global social movement’ is now gaining currency across the social sciences (see, for example, della Porta et al, 1999, Cohen and Rai, 2000 and Hamel et al, 2001) and hopes for social transformation are being pinned on their development. But is the GSM simply a Sorelian myth as the ‘general strike’ once was, resonating with meaning but ultimately an ideological construction? To answer this question we need to review some of the recent debates on the nature of globalisation and its contestation by various social and political forces. Has ‘globalisation from below’ emerged as a credible challenge to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) bid to transform the world according to the tenets of free-market neo-liberalism? From Seattle 1999 onwards, the prospects for a global social movement contesting this process have increased. Having reviewed the general terrain of globalisation and contestation, followed by the movements emerging from Seattle onwards, we can move to a more theoretical and reflexive consideration of the new universalism embedded in the notion of GSM as prime mover of the new counter-globalism. Reflections on Sorel in Seattle follow.
Globalisation and contestation
Much of the literature on globalisation still lacks the degree of complexity necessary for it to act as an effective guide to action. In becoming the new overarching paradigm for the social sciences, the term ‘globalisation’ has assumed certain imperialistic characteristics, often over-reaching itself in the process. However the globalisation paradigm can also be seen as part of the way in which the social sciences are accepting notions of complexity as the physical and biological sciences had already done about a decade ago. This is argued most clearly by John Urry for whom “globalisation brings out how there are non-linear interdependencies between peoples, places, organisations and technological systems across the world, interdependencies that problematise the notion that global systems can be said to reach any state of equilibrium” (Urry, 2002: 3). Indeed, after 11 September it is no longer so outrageous to argue that the world is always on the brink of chaos. The decentered, complex world we are now in is global, indeed, but it is also characterised by hybridity and an intense inequality.
If the globalisation debates are still somewhat simplistic the same could be said about the accounts of its contestation by subaltern social forces. More or less at random we can cite Jeremy Brecher and co authors for whom: “Just as the corporate and political elites are reaching across national borders to further their agendas, people at the grassroots are connecting their struggles around the world to impose their needs and interests on the global economy. Globalisation from above is generating a worldwide movement of resistance: globalisation from below” (Brecher et al 2000: 10). This by no means uncommon perspective gives us a picture of inevitability, what Unger once called ‘false necessity’ (Unger, 1987). The debate on the ‘new labour internationalism’ both in the 1970’s and today (see Munck, 2000a) shows how wrong it is to expect the subaltern classes to match or mirror capital’s moves in a linked symmetry. It is not only an elusive search but also, ultimately, a debilitating politics because it is simply reactive. It also tends to be demobilizing in its impact if its target goals (anti or counter globalisation) are unrealizable.
To be ‘against’ globalisation is not, I would argue, a fruitful position. For one it subsumes too many of the ills of society under the one overarching label. It can also become a path towards a reactionary localism. The sorry fate of the ‘delinking’ strategy in the 1970s should be recalled. More specifically, as Cecilia Lynch argues, the ‘discursive demobilization’ of the GSM ‘vis-à-vis globalisation is compounded by the lack of knowledge or common articulation of against whom or what any challenge to globalisation is targeted” (Lynch, 1993: 163). This makes anti-globalisation ultimately a disabling political discourse. It is a discourse and a social movement which has had an undoubted effect over the last three or four years. It has deligitimised, at least to some extent, the rampant globalisation drive of the mid-1990’s. However, it is quite unclear what the broad array of movements under the anti-globalisation banner may have in common and how they might be able to articulate a unifying normative platform and strategy for social transformation.
The non-complex understanding of globalisation and its contestation extends to the issue of tactics. The slogan ‘Fix it or nix it’ might just be a catch phrase but it has come to symbolise the political philosophy of the anti-globalisation movement. The very success of Seattle 1999 in actually stopping a World Trade Organisation session encouraged this ‘all or nothing’ perspective. If the anti-move globalisation movement could not ‘fix’ the way the WTO worked, it would simply ‘nix’ (stop) it. Of course, in practice, there are many more options than this simple binary opposition and the global social movements have had considerable success in altering the agenda of some of the multilateral economic organisations (see, O’Brien et al, 2000). The more successful of the GSM’s such as those of women and the environmentalists have effectively engaged in a strategy of radical reform to transform globalisation. For Unger “reform is radical when it addresses and changes the basic arrangements of a society: its formative structure of institutions and enacted beliefs” (Unger, 1998: 18-9). Perhaps this has not been achieved by the GSMs but it has probably been more than mere institutional tinkering.
Another major simplifying tendency has been to proclaim the wave of anti-globalisation protests since 1999 as a new ‘anti-capitalism’ movement. Thus a collection edited by Emma Bircham and John Charlton (2001) lists under the banner of anti-capitalism just about every conflict in the world, from the Middle East to GM foods, from Argentina to the new anarchists. But if we accept that globalisation is complex so, inevitably, will be the protest or reactive movements it generates. We cannot by simple definitional fiat, as it were, homogenise these movements and, even more fantastically, subsume then under an anti-capitalist banner. We need to understand and explain the diversity of these movements and what motivates them. It really does not help this task to tell the anti-globalisation protestors, that “in building movements against the system they are treading the same path that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels set out on nearly 160 years ago” (Harman, 2000: 56). This is the type of simplistic politics that once made Marx himself declare that he ‘was not a Marxist’. It certainly does not benefit the movements to ‘lump’ them in this way and prematurely ‘label’ them politically.
It is possible now and necessary, I believe, to develop a complex understanding of globalisation and its contestation. We need to move beyond the simple binary oppositions of ‘globalisation from above’ versus ‘globalisation from below’ or the even simpler global=bad, local=good. Not only do these conceptions entail a geographical or spatial fetishism but they also imply ‘levels’ in society in a way that is quite disabling. They are based on a zero-sum conception of power based on mutually exclusive domains. A focus on a specific global social movement (GSM), that of labour, soon shows how inadequate these perspectives are. Trade unions operate at local and national levels as well as transnationally, not forgetting the regional domain that may well become increasingly important. From the lobbying that the ICFTU (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions) does within the multilateral economic institutions through to a local strike, there are a myriad forms of labour contestation of sensible labour strategists do not seek to prioritise ‘levels’ any more.
There is no simple ‘out there’ of globalisation distinct and separate from the ‘in here’ of the places where we live. Social processes are spatially and temporally diverse and particular but they are articulated with each other. As Michael Smith puts it: “the global-local interplay becomes a matter of ‘locating’ both transnationalism and globalisation on the ground in all of their untidy contingencies as various projects get constructed, accommodated to, or resisted in specific times and places” (Smith, 2001: 3). What the globalisation and anti-globalisation discourses seem to lack in similar measure is precisely attention to ‘untidy contingencies’, to particular ‘times and places’, not to mention that old-fashioned term, contradictions. They share this in common in spite of the economism of one and the voluntarism of the other. Place and space have, indeed, been transformed by globalisation in ways that are still developing. But the new social relations emerging globally are messy and cannot be reduced to a unified capitalist process roaming free across space as against a place-bound citizen.
We can now understand more clearly that the making of globalisation is quite inseparable from its contestation. So, for example, the action of workers worldwide contesting capitalism in the 1970’s played a considerable role in shaping capital’s global restructuring in the 1990’s. Today, if we examine the dynamic and the dialectic of protest events since Seattle 1999 we can see how ‘globalisation from above’ is really inseparable from ‘globalisation from below’. In practice there is an engagement between the ‘enlightened’ drivers of globalisation and the ‘reasonable’ end of the anti-globalisation spectrum. The era of the post-Washington consensus is different from the heyday of neo-liberalism in the early 1990’s. The market is moderated by a renewed call for some regulatory role by the state and the ‘social capital’ perspective is not the same as turning a blind eye to the impact of neo-liberalism. While the Sorelian myth constructed around the anti-globalisation movement since Seattle is understandable, it is necessary to distinguish between the simple myth and complex reality.
Perhaps a good way to illustrate the limitations of counter-globalism is in relation to Chiapas and the real/discursive story of the Zapatistas. There has been a very clear Sorelian mythification of the Zapatista movement especially through the Internet. For Manuel Castells: “The success of the Zapatistas was largely due to their communication strategy, to the point that they can be called the first informational guerilla movement” (Castells, 1997: 79). Of course the diffusion of the Zapatista struggle through the Internet was a notable event but it is hardly the main characteristic of the movement. We would need to distinguish between a ‘real’ and a ‘virtual’ Chiapas to introduce some complexity into the rather one-sided accounts of the electronic solidarity sites. Judith Hellman argues persuasively that: “Given the elegant simplicity of these images [of Chiapas, Marcos, etc] in a world normally filled with ambiguity (or worse, post-modern relativism), it is not surprising that there are progressive people around the world who would do anything to support the struggle in Chiapas except learn the confusing details” (Hellman, 1999: 162).
There is now an ample literature analysing Chiapas from a complex materialist perspective (see Harvey, 1998) yet the virtual GSM seems to prevail. The issues of land and religion are considerably more complex on the ground. The notions of ‘civil society’ and NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) are often applied in a way that obscures as much as it simplifies. Chiapas is a more confictual and diverse place than it appears to be in the Internet. Leanne Reinke goes as far as to argue that: “In addition to the appropriation of the Zapatista struggle by intellectuals in the developed world, many writers have turned the ‘struggle’ into a romanticised circus” (Reinke, 2002: 82). Cyber-solidarity may well be a good thing but it is not innocent of political contradictions. Romantic Thirdworldist myths and investment in an exotic Other are probably not the best way to build a global social movement for democracy. I am not even sure to what extent the ‘real’ Chiapas is part of a global social movement, Intergalactic Encuentros against neo-liberalism notwithstanding, other than in a symbolic way.
Seattle and beyond
The protest movement against the WTO Ministerial held at Seattle in 1999 has, of course, become a major element in the unfolding myth of the new global social movement. For four days some 40,000 protestors from the student and environmental movements but also, significantly, from the trade unions virtually brought the city to a standstill and the WTO meeting broke up inconclusively. Those familiar with labour history would have known that in 1919 a general strike had paralysed Seattle for five days. As Levi and Olson write in an interesting historical retrospective “one of the seeming ironies of the 1999 Battle in Seattle was the presence of the longshoremen, workers who thrive on international trade, at the forefront of actions directed at regulating international trade” (Levi and Olson, 2000: 316). In the event these workers and others in the transport sector did develop an alliance of sorts with the environmentalists - ‘Teamsters and Turtles” - in pursuit of a common objective. The point is simply that history counts.
Most of the contemporary accounts of Seattle 1999 lacked a historical perspective or stressed, perhaps understandably, the novelty of the movement. Thus Danaher and Burbach in their introduction to ‘Globalize This!’ declare that: “Seattle was the coming out party for a new global movement for citizen power that will certainly go on...” (Danaher and Burbach, 2000:5). Great emphasis was placed on the Internet as a mobilizing tool and on the originality of some of the protest modalities. The anarchist or libertarian ethics of many demonstrators and their mode of organizing were highlighted. The fact that the protest could be classified as a victory - insofar as that particular round of the WTO negotiations could not be concluded - meant that Seattle 1999 would be etched in popular consciousness. It was perhaps inevitable that a Sorelian myth would emerge around the events at Seattle at the very close of the 20th century.