Nothing is what democracy looks like: Openness, horizontality and the movement of movements

Rodrigo Nunes

Networked, horizontal forms have been at the centre of many of the political debates of the last ten years, and often been treated alternatively as the limit (by its enemies) and the solution (by its proponents) to the problems of organisation of resistance to global capitalism. This has unfortunately meant that critiques carried out ‘from the inside’ – i.e., by those who have experienced and share a general belief in them – have been much rarer than those carried out by partisans of other forms of organisation, resulting in much back-patting and triumphalism, but few discussions of anxieties and frustrations that seem widely shared; a problem that is only enhanced by the fact that so often it is felt that horizontality must be ‘defended’ from its detractors.(1)

It is this kind of internal critique that this paper attempts to do. In order to do that, it envisages a demystification of openness and horizontality, showing how it is often presented in complete absence of context and pointing to its inherent contradictions and dead-ends. The point of doing this is not to engage another debate along the lines of ‘less’ or ‘more’ horizontality, or horizontality versus verticality; the idea is rather to render these very notions problematic, and by affirming their problematic nature, to argue for a democratic practice that tackles this nature head on.

In the Wake… After the G20

Dave Antagonism

So what happened at the G20 in Melbourne? On one hand it was business as usual. The G20 met and seemed to function as planned with both agreement and disagreement within the continual entrenchment of the capitalist global order. Predictably, despite the boosterism of groups like Make Poverty History, the G20 did nothing to ameliorate even the most horrific consequences of capitalism. Yet something happened outside: a relatively small group of protesters produced a political event, a moment on rupture that is full of possibilities and dangers. What we do now after that event, how we trace the lines of struggle that it opened up is crucial. There are both opportunities and pitfalls ahead and the telling of the tale, the reflection on our experiences and the sharing of stories is crucial. Because there is not just one version of what happened: indeed part of the power and joy experiencing something like the mobilization is being part of collective moment that has many points of origins and many experiences. In the normally daily life of capitalism we have only two views: that of the machinery of public opinion, and that of the isolated individual. In moments of upsurge something else happens. Let's find a richness and continues to enrich this.

But there are forces that work to close down the possibilities that have been opened by such an event. In this case, they are police repression, the implemented of a simulation of the events by the media, and division and recrimination amongst those that took part. It is understandable that those that have gone beyond the law want to protect themselves, it is also understandable that the power of the media is so great that even those who took part in the actions can feel disorientated by the way there own participation is reflected back on them, and in a movement that is both small and diverse, that lacks a common language of communication differences can often become divisions – especially when so much is on the line. This does not take away from how important it is to resist these things, to keep the space open, that these struggles opened and try to connect it with others and other struggles.

Memoirs of a Video Activist

Joanne Richardson, Subsol

I left Bucharest when I was 9. My parents were political refugees. We
received political asylum in Austria and later moved to New York. I grew
up poor but privileged, in the sense that I had an education at some of
the best schools in America, social factories for the production of
Marxist intellectuals. And then I dropped out of my PhD, left the US, and
returned to Romania to become a video activist. For many years I was
weaned on the same canon and rules of etiquette as most Western media
activists. But they always seemed strange to me, as if I was seeing them
outside their frame and hearing them in a foreign language that I only
partly understood.

What does video activism mean today? From large demonstrations against the
World Trade Organization to small protests against Sky TV in Rome, you can
see almost as many people with video cameras as protestors. They go where
television cameras don't, providing live news about events that are
neglected or misrepresented, documenting police abuse, or challenging the
neutrality of the mass-media. Recent video activism has its roots in the
alternative media movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Although an
oppositional press with an alternative content has existed since the
nineteenth century, it privileged intellectuals as experts and maintained
structural hierarchies of knowledge. What was different about many of the
social movements of the 1960s and 1970s was the desire to provoke social
change not through alternative ideas but through the process of production
itself, by turning spectators into producers and eliminating the
difference between experts who create culture and its passive consumers.

"Immaterial Civil War

Prototypes of Conflict within Cognitive Capitalism"

Matteo Pasquinelli

We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast
physical construct of artificially linked
nervous systems. Invisible. We cannot touch it.
— William Gibson, "In the visegrips of Dr. Satan"

Conflict is not a commodity. On the contrary,
commodity is above all conflict.
— guerrigliamarketing.it

1. A revival of the Creative Industries

In early 2006 the term Creative Industries (CI) pops up in the
mailboxes and mailing lists of many cultural workers, artists,
activists and researchers across Europe, as well as in the calls for
seminars and events. An old question spins back: curiously, for the
first time, a term is picked up from institutional jargon and brought
unchanged into alt culture, used so far to debate other keywords
(that may deserve an acronym as well!) and other post-structures like
network culture (NC), knowledge economy (KE), immaterial labour (IL),
general intellect (GI) and of course Free Software (FS), Creative
Commons (CC) etc. The original 1998 definition adopted by the
Creative Industries Task Force set up by Tony Blair stated: "Those
industries that have their origin in individual creativity, skill and
talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through
the generation and exploitation of intellectual property".1 As you
can see, social creativity remains largely left out of that
definition: after many years Tony Blair is still stealing your ideas.
Let's try to do another backstory.

Peter Waterman writes:

The International Union Merger of November 2006:
Top-Down, Eurocentric and…Invisible?
Peter Waterman

At a conference in Vienna, early November, 2006, there will take place the unification of most of the major international and of certain national trade unions in a new organisation. Unlike previous such launchings, however, this is occurring without any general global upsurge of union protest or expressions of labour self-confidence, and without public knowledge. Although the parties involved talk about the creation of a new union international, the word ‘merger’ seems rather more appropriate. This for two reasons.

Erdogan_Mayayo writes:

"The Saturated Generic Identity of the Working Class"

An Interview with Alain Badiou

[Alain Badiou gave this interview on the occasion of a conference titled "Is a History of the Cultural Revolution Possible?" The conference was held at the University of Washington in February, 2006. Most of the following questions were prepared by Nicolas Veroli, who could not be present. Diana George conducted the interview.]

Q: I'd like to ask you about your political and intellectual trajectory from the mid 60s until today. How have your views about revolutionary politics, Marxism, and Maoism changed since then?

Badiou: During the first years of my political activity, there were two fundamental events. The first was the fight against the colonial war in Algeria at the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s. I learned during this fight that political conviction is not a question of numbers, of majority. Because at the beginning of the Algerian war, we were really very few against the war. It was a lesson for me; you have to do something when you think it's a necessity, when it's right, without caring about the numbers.

The second event was May 68. During May 68, I learned that we have to organize direct relations between intellectuals and workers. We cannot do that only by the mediation of parties, associations, and so on. We have to directly experience the relation with the political. My interest in Maoism and the Cultural Revolution during the end of 60s and the beginning of the 70s, was this: a political conviction that organizes something like direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

I'll recapitulate, if you like. There were two great lessons: It's my conviction today that political action has to be a process which is a process of principles, convictions, and not of a majority. So there is a practical dimension. And secondly, there is the necessity of direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

Coveting the Holocaust

Chris Hedges

From TruthDig

I sent my New York University journalism students out to write stories based on any one of the themes in the Ten Commandments. A woman of Armenian descent came back with an article about how Armenians she had interviewed were covetous of the Jewish Holocaust. The idea that one people who suffered near decimation could be covetous of another that also suffered near decimation was, to say the least, different. And when the French lower house of parliament approved a bill earlier this month making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide I began to wonder what it was she, and those she had interviewed, actually coveted.

She was not writing about the Holocaust itself—no one covets the suffering of another—but how it has become a potent political and ideological weapon in the hands of the Israeli government and many in the American Jewish community. While Armenians are still fighting to have the genocide of some 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks accepted as historical fact, many Jews have found in the Nazi Holocaust a useful instrument to deflect criticism of Israel and the dubious actions of the pro-Israeli lobby as well as many Jewish groups in the United States.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Decline of the American Empire"

John Chuckman

The rise now of China, Japan, Europe, and others – India, Korea, and to some extent Russia and Brazil – means the United States must be relatively diminished on the world stage, much as an only child whose mother just gave birth to quintuplets.

The United States is loosing its capacity as supplier of many useful things to the world. This role is being seized by China and others. The American working class, which briefly achieved the status of world's working-class aristocracy after World War II — industrial workers who enjoyed homes, cars, long vacations, and even boats — has seen real wages declining for many years. It works against rising competitors who can now deliver the benefits of their much lower costs to the world owing to the phenomenon of globalization. American manufacturing jobs are moving to the lower-cost places, replaced at home if at all by relatively low-wage service jobs.

"Toward a Post-Post-Critical Future"

Trebor Scholz, Institute for Distributed Creativity

How can we overcome global social problems if we see them as secondary
in relation to technology? How can we divorce political and
technological discourses? The technological future cannot be discussed
in terms of de-contextualized (networked) objects because they are
everything but autonomous players.

It is equally unhelpful to create a dichotomy between two camps: those
with conformist views of technology and others who see technology as a
monster that swallows us. Marcuse as well as Foucault analyze society as
a life-draining machinery fueled by dominated people. The question about
technology is not whether "to take it or leave it." While the assembly
line was the long arm of management in 1913, today machines are powered
by networked technological systems. In 1941 the Ford Motor Company
experienced its first general strike at the River Rouge Plant and a
survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project predicts a movement
of "tech refuseniks" who live completely off the network and "will
commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change"
in 2020. [1]

We could link such pessimism back to the late 1970s when
Langdon Winner and Jacques Ellul ask how technology has improved human
dignity, well-being, and freedom. Marx, who is otherwise sometimes
perceived as a technological determinist, writes in Manuscripts that
"The more the worker expends himself in the work the more powerful
becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the
poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to
himself." (Marx, p 122)

"Economies of Affectivity"

Juan Martín Prada

Life and Biopolitics

It is no longer an exaggeration to claim that we are in the "biological
century", judging by the intense development and the dimension of the
achievements attained in recent years in some of the life sciences, such as
Genomics and Biotechnology. However, let us not forget that the increasingly
more efficient knowledge of the biological processes or genetic
determinations of life and its functional mechanisms is only a small part of
biopolitical action, whose real capacity for regulation is much more
extensive, spanning all of the vital processes that ultimately make up the
collective production of subjectivity. Thus, the capacity to improve or
transform bodies or the biological conditions of a life are no longer
prevalent among the keys of biopolitics but rather, more than anything else,
the production and reproduction of ways of living.

Therefore, the permanent questioning of the limits of what is natural and of
human ethics as regards genetic manipulation or the fact that the scientific
industries aimed at these areas of work should be the most probable
environment for the future capitalism revolutions[1] to take place, are just
a minimum number of problems within the extremely complex series of
biopolitical practices with which any exercise of power is integrated with
the logics of vitality (and from which it would be non-differentiable).