DeriveApprodi Call to Asia, Africa and Latin America

hydrarchist submits:

Open letter and call for papers from the Italian magazine DeriveApprodi to
social movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia

Who
we are

This
letter is from the editorial collective of the Italian magazine DeriveApprodi,
a publication of the radical left. DeriveApprodi was first published
about ten years ago and since then has appeared at irregular intervals. It was
founded at the beginning of the 1990s with a view to continuing the project of
critical thought and practical politics initiated by the autonomist Marxist and
revolutionary "workerist" movements. In the 1960s and 1970s, these
movements were active in interpreting and orienting the worker, proletarian, and
student struggles that had made Italy into an extraordinary laboratory of
revolution in the West, truly the "weak link" in the chain of
imperialist command. During the 1980s, however, the continuity of these
struggles was violently disrupted: thousands of militants from the radical left
were imprisoned, aggressive capitalist restructuring completely redefined the
geography and forms of production, large working class concentrations
disappeared, and the power of trade unions was gradually weakened. Individualism,
cynicism, and careerism triumphed within institutional politics and throughout
society at large.The
great planetary upheavals symbolically identified with the year 1989 provide the
general framework in which our magazine was established (along with other
factors connected in various ways to the theoretical and political legacy
discussed above). The following years saw the birth of a new movement within the
universities, the diffusion in the main Italian cities of centri sociali
occupati e autogestiti (occupied, self-managed social centers) as vehicles
of political activism and embryos of alternative life forms, and the development
of new forms of grassroots unionism in service and manufacturing industries. All
this seemed to confirm our conviction that new political spaces were opening up,
whereby the radical criticism of the present could be linked to a project of
social change appropriate to the times. During the 1990s, DeriveApprodi
became one of the theoretical-political laboratories that developed an attempt
to examine the potential for social conflict inherent within new societal forms
and in the productive regime established upon the ruins of "Fordism."
Topics dealt with in the past by our magazine have included: the metamorphosis
of labor and new migrations, techniques of social control in relation to
transformations in the form of citizenship and in the political constitution,
forms of "exodus," disobedience and the critique of institutional
politics, the crises of representative democracy and the welfare state. All this
was done without adhering to a prescribed formula, drawing on some of the most
original theoretical and political innovations that have emerged from Italy in
recent years.

Our
proposal

The
first twenty-one issues of the magazine have been mostly concerned with Italy
and more generally with the capitalist "West." The logic here was that
any attempt to build solidarity with social movements in the global South would
be shortsighted until we had managed to expose the fault lines and internal
crises within what many of us still call the "metropolis." But things
changed when, following a path somewhat different to the one we had predicted, a
huge social and political explosion took place in our country. We are referring
to the vast movement that expressed itself for the first time in the protests
against the G8 summit in Genoa in July last year. Since then, the movement has
not stopped growing, giving expression to huge campaigns against the "permanent
global war," for migrant rights, and against the neoliberal reform of the
labor market.
After
the momentous and tragic events in Genoa, we held a discussion among ourselves,
which resulted in the decision to partly modify the editorial agenda of DeriveApprodi
and to launch a new series. Below are listed, in a highly synthetic and
necessarily schematic way, some of the points on which we reached a consensus
within our editorial collective.

1. 
   We
   have been deeply impressed by the feature of a true eruption that the
   movement has assumed for the first time last year in Genoa. In a truly
   surprising way, very heterogeneous individual and collective subjects met in
   the streets and squares of that city. These subjects had followed different
   paths of political development, often difficult to detect from the
   standpoint of official politics, but they had found a common political voice
   in a radical critique of the new order of capitalism. In Genoa, and the many
   demonstrations that followed, this became apparent above all in a level of
   participation that exceeded by far the rosiest expectations of the
   organizers. Subsequently, questions arose concerning the emergence of a new
   type of political agency that could not be reduced to the traditional
   geometry of belonging and solidarity characteristic of the radical or
   institutional left. We suggested that it is possible to interpret the new
   composition of the movement by using the concept of the multitude,
   which was very present in our discussions during the 1990s. By deploying
   this concept, we wanted to emphasize the internal richness of the movement (its
   competencies, experiences, knowledges, individual and collective demands), a
   richness that cannot be easily reduced to a unity. While highlighting
   the movement?s extraordinary potential, we carefully avoided falling into
   an ecstatic contemplation of its multitudinous composition, insisting rather
   on the difficulty and unprecedented challenge that this multiplicity poses
   for political thought and action. In particular we maintained, often in
   disagreement with other uses of the concept of the multitude, that this
   concept should not be opposed to that of class. To the contrary, we asserted
   that the concept of the multitude acquires its fullest and most proper
   significance only when it refers to a work force dominated by capital (living
   labor). Furthermore, we recognized that such living labor has
   incorporated mobility into its most ingrained habits (from this derives our
   special interest in migratory movements) and finds in its heterogeneity one
   of the crucial elements of its contemporary existence.
   
   

The
new and largely unforeseen characteristics of the movement attested the need
to devise innovative practices of interpretation and analysis. We affirmed
that the movement represents a new principle of reality, and it is
upon this principle, we suggested, that political propositions and
interpretative hypotheses concerning contemporary capitalist reality should
be tested. It seemed to us that the existence of a strong and radical
movement required not a suspension of theoretical inquiry for an immersion
in everyday politics but an additional effort of research and reflection
that would accompany political militancy and meticulously register its
limits and problems. Far from renouncing the research and investigations
carried out in the magazine over the past ten years, we decided to renew,
test, and update our working principles under new conditions. Thus the
decision to launch a new series of DeriveApprodi, whose intention is
to be fully internal to the development of the movement without advocating
any political line.

In
planning this new series we also took account of another matter that
appeared important to us in the wake of Genoa; that is, the pressing need
for the Italian movement to open itself to global dynamics. In fact, one of
the most innovative characteristics of the wave of mobilizations that began
in Seattle was the attempt to establish a global movement. Rather
than being against globalization, such a movement would recognize
globalization as the horizon of capitalist development, fashioning itself as
the agent of another globalization, a globalization of struggles and
resistance. Integral to this realization was an explicit polemic against
those, both within and outside the movement, who were privileging (and
continue to privilege) national spaces and the classical mechanisms of the
20th-century welfare state as a means of "channeling",
attenuating or blocking the processes of "neoliberal"

globalization. It is important to understand that for us the point is not to
declare the unfeasibility of political projects that mobilize on the local
and/or national levels to organize struggles and resistance against global
capital. However we do maintain that every political project, regardless of
the territorial scale upon which it operates, should open itself to the
global dimension. We contend that the global networks that straddle the
contemporary world were materially constructed not only by capitalist
development but also by experiences of struggle, from those of workers to
those directed against colonial powers. Notwithstanding its limits, its
ambiguities, and the difficulty it has faced in freeing itself from the
eurocentric nature of many of its concepts and languages, we believe that
the movement born in Seattle potentially embodies this global dimension of
resistance. As such, it offers an extraordinary opportunity to establish
stable channels for the political communication of struggles, experiences,
and knowledge at the planetary level. We also remain convinced, as we wrote
in October last year, that the global movement "finds a substantial
anticipation of its themes, subjects, and practices in the globalized
workplaces of Asia and Africa during the 1980s. While we were experiencing
the triumph of cynicism, opportunism, and fear, new hopes were being kindled
outside the Western metropolis. New movements were arising against the
principle of enclosures and the ferocity of the new forms of primitive
accumulation: the student struggles against the structural adjustment
programs of the International Monetary Fund, the prolonged workers?
insurrection that has accompanied the expansive rhythm of the Korean economy,
the struggles against the South African apartheid and the Israeli occupation
of the Palestinian territories, the huge democratic movement that repeatedly
challenged the dictatorship of Suharto in Indonesia, the Zapatista rebellion
in Chiapas. It would be difficult to speak of a global movement today if it
did not carry the marks of this genealogy in its material constitution."

It
is better to be clear about this: to speak of a global movement is neither to
deny the need to respect the specificity of local struggles nor to ignore the
limits that have marked the work of activists and organizers in the global north.
A certain paternalism on the part of the latter has tended to represent the
global movement as a series of interactions between activist cadres and elites.
We believe, to the contrary, that the construction of relationships from below
should be valorized as the most immediate and direct contribution to practices
of struggle and resistance.

In
any case, the affirmation of the global character of the movement is much more
urgent today in the climate created by the "permanent global war" and
the new "Bush doctrine" in foreign affairs. This is why we decided to
launch the new series of DeriveApprodi by asking whether the concept of a

"global movement" bears weight, by initiating an investigation
into the current state of the world?s movements. We began with an issue
dedicated entirely to European movements, made of about twenty articles,
launched at the European Social Forum in Florence at the beginning of November (if
you ask we can send this to you in Italian, or you can download the materials in
their original languages from www.deriveapprodi.org).
Now we want to follow that up with an issue covering the movements in the three
continents that once formed what was known as the "third world," and
then to complete the first phase of the project with an issue dedicated to North
America, Oceania, and Japan. Our aim is not only to gather informative materials
about situations that are often under recognized in Italy, but also to construct
a web of connections in which to subsequently position the magazine DeriveApprodi
in a transnational context.

Not
accidentally have we used the word investigation, since it recalls a
method of theoretical-political inquiry that is undoubtedly one of the most
important legacies of the Italian "workerist" tradition that we
mentioned at the beginning of this letter and in which many of us find our
intellectual and political roots. By our understanding, an investigation is an open
cognitive process that produces transformation. It can begin with a series
of hypotheses but it must continually test and problematize these over the
course of the inquiry. An investigation also presupposes a continuous exchange
of ideas and experiences between all the different subjectivities involved. In
this sense, we invite you not simply to tell us "what you think about the
world", but to conduct an analysis of the reality that surrounds you,
putting certainties aside, if only for an instant, to search for new
potentialities of transformation of what exists. More specifically, we ask you
for an article of between 4,000 and 6,000 words that describes the

"state of the social movements" in the context in which you operate.
The article should steer a middle line between the "narration" of
political experiences and theoretical reflection. Obviously you are free to
choose the context you refer to (a community, a city, a country, a continent, a
specific field of political activity, and so on), starting from the
specificities of your experience. Considering that the magazine should be
published at the beginning of May, we ask that you send the article to us by
28 February. It would be best, however, if you could send us an abstract or
a draft beforehand, so that we might have a chance to discuss it.

Some
working hypotheses

We
would like to add a few more lines about the hypotheses upon which this
investigation is founded. It may be that many of you find the receiver of this
open letter as the "social movements in Latin America, Africa, and
Asia" unsatisfactory. It is certainly not our intention to suggest that
these three continents are in any way homogeneous. To the contrary, when it was
the norm for both capitalists and revolutionary movements to speak of the "third
world" as a general category that included the "three continents,"

it was perfectly clear that the realities in which they were taking part were
extremely heterogeneous (from historical, cultural, social, economic, and
political points of view). But the "third world" did have a specific
reality, which for the capitalists consisted in the fact that it referred to
territories open to the "neocolonial" conquest of markets and raw
materials, and from a revolutionary standpoint it referred to the potential
convergence of struggles and revolutionary processes that displayed a common
anti-imperialist perspective.

It
is our conviction that today things are noticeably different. For sure,
discourses about the so-called end of the third world have a tone that is
merely and cynically celebratory in the mouth of neoliberal theorists. But we
believe that such discourses can also have a critical dimension, which
emphasizes the persistence of huge inequalities in the global distribution of
wealth and the ongoing unevenness of the relations of dependency and hierarchies
upon which global capitalism is built. At the same time, we hold that these
relations are no longer organized along simple lines such as those referred to
by concepts like first, second, and third worlds, but also north and south, or
center and periphery. When we speak of the "end of the third world,"
we refer to a situation in which there is a gradual convergence between the
"metropolis" and the "periphery." In other words, one finds
in both these sites (although clearly in a fundamentally unequal way), the
entire span of forms of production, work, and social life that coexist under
global capitalism.

Within
global capitalism there seems to exist a determined economic sector, the
so-called "global economy," which plays a leading role in processes of
production and reproduction that are at once processes of domination and
exploitation. This sector comprises a combination of segments of industries,
national and regional economies that have ramifications, in varying proportions,
throughout the world. It conditions directly or indirectly the life of a growing
multitude of men and women, in prospect the entire world population. It is
extremely dynamic but also highly selective and exclusive. In addition, its
boundaries are profoundly unstable: the majority of the planet?s inhabitants,
again in accordance with factors that vary widely between countries and regions,
live outside the "global economy." Nonetheless they must come to terms
daily, often with extraordinary creativity, with its effects.

We
have sketched out this hypothesis only very roughly, and we would like to test
and develop it over the course of the investigation. What we want to emphasize
is that these developments carry great potential for the communication and
circulation of political struggles and experiences. At a time when powerful
warlords, be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, or Hindus, carry on about the
"clash of civilizations," it is surprising to note how often social
movements use an extraordinarily similar language among themselves: how the
zapatista struggle are echoed in the practices of movements in the United States
and Germany, how Indian peasants and African rural communities are rewriting the
grammar of environmentalism in ways analogous to the green movements in Western
Europe, or how the dramatic Argentine revolt of December 2001 seemed to impart
fundamental lessons to the Italian movement. One could continue to expand this
list, without forgetting the way in which the European radical and reformist
left looked at the victory of Lulu in Brazil as if it were something that
concerned them directly, and not in terms of dated schemes of "internationalist
solidarity."
In
our judgment, one of the most pressing tasks of the present time is to
reconstruct internationalism under changed conditions. We would phrase it this
way: to develop through global communication between movements the intuition of
world unity that lives in the everyday dynamics of struggles.
On
this basis, then, we would like to conduct the investigation in which we invite
you to participate. Below we indicate, in a schematic and absolutely
nonexclusive way, a series of problems on which we think it is appropriate to
develop a work of inquiry, and upon which we invite you to elaborate. In any
case, it goes without saying that you are free to follow this scheme only in
part or not at all.

First
we would like to understand what type of resonance the great initiatives of
the global movement from Seattle to Genoa, from Johannesburg to Durban, have
had in the environment in which you live. In the issue of DeriveApprodi
dedicated to European movements we published an interview with an Algerian
comrade who emphasized the eurocentric and merely spectacular character of
these initiatives. Do you share this opinion, or do you think that,
regardless of its limits, the message of a radical revolt against global
capital can circulate at the planetary level?

After
two meetings in Porto Alegre in Brazil, the World Social Forum attempted to
organize itself on a territorial basis, planning continental meetings in
Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How do you judge this effort?

Apart
from the initiatives that we have described as the "global movement,"
is there a single experience of struggle (for example, the zapatista
movement in Latin America, the Palestinian Intifada, or the struggle of the
landless in Brazil) that has provided you with a reference point for a new
wave of struggles and social mobilizations?

What
are the main issues of mobilization in the context in which you operate?
What relations exist between mobilizations concerned with labor issues,
trade unions, those concerned with social groups that live under harsh
conditions of exclusion, and those concerned with issues like the condition
of minorities?

How
would you describe the composition of the social movements in your context?
How are the relations between militants and social groups structured? What
relations exist between militants of different generations and of the
different genders? What are the most active social groups, and what role do
women play within them? How do different social groups communicate and
converge in acts of mobilization?

How
has the concept of militancy changed in recent years? What is the impact of
militancy on the everyday life of activists? What is the relation between
communities and organizations in the construction of your political
practices?

We
would be interested to know, when the question is relevant, how the
politicization of cultural and religious identities interacts with the
development of social struggles, both in organizational terms and in terms
of the mobilization of specific groups.

What
are the forms of expression, within your specific situation, of the demands
and needs of those groups (women, migrants, indigenous populations, rural
populations) whose historical vulnerability and marginalization have been
aggravated by the processes of neoliberal globalization?

What
type of relation exists between social movements and institutions? How have
institutions (and the political and social classes that sustain them)
changed in the context of the neoliberal politics characterized by the total
commodification of the lifeworld, the privatization of public services, and
the attack on the living standards of the working classes?

Let
us repeat that these questions are only a list of issues that seem relevant to
us. It is possible that some of them will have no relevance in your situation.
If this is the case, ignore them -- and write about something else!

In
the hope that our initiative raises your interest, we send you a hug from
Italy!
The
editorial collective of DeriveApprodi magazine