The Myth of the Multitude: The Endogenous Demiseof Alter-Globalist Politics

JOHN GIBSON1

Approaches to protests at global economic institutions and Social Forum

events have focused on their counter-hegemonic potential and the

commonality articulated through such metaphors as “one no, many yeses”

and “we are everywhere”, in which the diversity of activism is contained within

a common understanding of the system to be rejected. Recent trends,

however, suggest that these assessments are far from satisfactory, and

oblivious to the fragility and precariousness surrounding such global

subjectivity. This paper explores the existing literature supportive of such

political activity, and introduces alternative approaches that question the

claims of activists to global political significance, probing the pluralistic

global subject imagined in images of a global multitude in a critical fashion.

It then reports back to the notion of global society, considering how

continuing injustices and difficulties within alter-globalist spaces prevent the

creation of ethical identifications with marginalised peoples.2

1

Introduction

This article analyses aspects of the development of

alter-globalism (often misleadingly known as ‘the anti-

globalisation movement’), one of a number of recent

phenomena that have challenged the initial certainties of

the post-Cold War era into significant questions,

revealing continuing ideological and political

contestation beyond the “end of history”.3 Rather than

celebrate the pluralism and participatory democracy

therein as a source of hope for a future mode of global

political life, the shallowness of participants’ social

bonds, their failure to articulate a significant

political programme, and the use of disciplinary

mechanisms that codify intra-movement rituals represent

significant failings on the part of activists. Questions

can be asked concerning the hubris of such aphorisms as

“we are everywhere” and “one no, many yeses” as

references to the imagined global reach and significance

of protest and Social Forum activism.4 By subjecting such

practices to critical reflection, this article contests

interpretations that emphasise both the automaticity of a

Polanyian reaction against a particularly virile form of

2

transnational capitalism, and the voluntarism of the

modes of social association therein. It pinpoints

episodes within protest spaces that serve as windows into

more convincing political actions that point the way

towards the realisation of a more sustained and concrete

form of global society, and away from the present atrophy

that haunts alter-globalist events.

The Birth of Global Subjects as the Negation of

Neoliberalism? Activists and Academics Theorise the

‘Movement of Movements’

Activists and sympathetic academics place alter-globalism

in Polanyian terms as part of a wider and automatic

public disaffection with the precariousness, insecurity

and injustices of neoliberalism. Naomi Klein’s well-

known declaration of the Seattle protest at the Third

World Trade Organisation Ministerial Meeting in 1999 as

the ‘coming-out party’ for a movement long in gestation

conveys an image of shared alienation emanating from a

neoliberal machine that privatises and commodifies all

3

aspects of everyday life, generating a mass public

backlash manifested in protests at its summit sites.5

Critical globalisation theorist James Mittelmann has

interpreted the ‘Battle in Seattle’ as a major turning

point in the post-Cold War international order, exposing

significant discontent with unaccountable neoliberal

practices.6 Similarly, Kevin Danaher of the San Francisco

fair trade and human rights campaign group Global

Exchange argues that the arrogant unaccountability of a1 This article emerged from a PhD thesis and a postdoctoral fellowship, both of which were generously funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), to whom I extend thanks for their crucial support. 2 Alter-globalism is becoming a preferred term vis-à-vis anti-globalisation as a signifier for such activism, although not in a linear, uncontested fashion.3 In such narratives, the fall of the USSR was often held as evidenceof the final reconciliation of major ideological fissures at a globallevel, and the permanent triumph of liberal democratic capitalism. Such an assessment now appears wide of the mark, as demonstrated by such affairs as the Palestinian Intifada, September 11, 2001 and the refusal of the G20 countries to advance the Doha Development Agenda at Cancun. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).4 Paul Kingsnorth, One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement (London: Simon and Schuster, 2003); Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere (London: Verso, 2003).5 See, in particular, the work of Kevin Danaher and Jason Mark, whichviews the discourses prevalent in Seattle as a variant of a ‘People v. Elites’ framework evident in earlier anti-corporate campaigns fromthe early nineteenth century onwards. Here, the escape of capital from social regulation generates an automatic backlash that is identical in a trans-historical fashion. The critical variant then becomes the degree to which it is politicised. However, the specific reaction against untrammelled corporate rights is viewed as omnipotent. Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power (London: Routledge, 2003), pp.23-65. Naomi Klein, ‘Seattle: The Coming-Out Party of a Movement,’ Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (London: Flamingo, 2002), pp.3-6.

4

dominant alliance of state and capital interests splits

global society into increasingly irreconcilable value-

spheres of commerce over life (the corporate sphere), and

those of life over commerce (protest and Forum spaces).7

In such accounts, alter-globalism produces a planetary

clash of competing political imaginations.

To further this ‘life values’ sphere, much is made

of the practice of radical cultural and ideological

inclusivity within alter-globalist spaces as a vivid

contrast to the desultory rituals of neoliberal

capitalist society. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s

notion of global multitude is predicated on an

infinitesimal plurality of subjectivities (Southern

indigenous movements, environmental campaigners, labour

unions, debt relief groups) that resist the

institutionalisation of disciplinary Party structures so

as to embody a radically alternative form of social

association entirely beyond the aegis of neoliberalism.8

6 James Mittleman, “Whither Globalization? The Vortex of Knowledge and Identity,” lecture delivered at Newcastle University, 18 October 2004.7 Interview conduced at the Global Exchange office, San Francisco, 16July 2004.8 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (London: Harvard University Press, 2000); Multitude (London: Penguin, 2004).

5

This grassroots democracy is sustained by the creation of

radically participatory convergence spaces, the use of

digital mobilisation networks, and the absence of leaders

or spokespeople.9 Likewise, Graeme Chesters and Ian Welsh

view the carnivals that characterise protest spaces as

the embodiment of a Spinozan sense of becoming that

contrasts a powerful and exuberant sense of life with the

social death of mass consumerism.10 Social solidarity is

communicated through music, dance and rhythm, rather than

conventional speech and writing, and is defined by

critical reflections on the links between personal life

and social, political and cultural ends, fostering cross-

cultural identifications with extant struggles well

beyond the streets of American or European cities.

These principles are epitomised in the hallmarks of

the movement’s umbrella People’s Global Action (PGA),

which embraces decentralisation and autonomy, rejecting

9 These tactics are generally the use of inventive imagery (sea-turtle costumes, giant puppets, the occupation of streets through theimmobilisation of groups of protesters); teach-in and workshop eventsto cultivate a sense of shared purpose among a diverse range of attendees; the direct blockade of targeted institutions, rather than undertake conventional marches; non-hierarchical, networked modes of organisation devoid of institutionalised leaders. 10 Graeme Chesters and Ian Welsh, “Complexity and Social Movement(s): Process and Emergence in Planetary Action Systems,” Theory, Culture and Society Vol. 22:5 (2005), pp.187-211.

6

any fixed definition of the identity and interests of its

adherents.11 Such practices intend to empower sub-alterns

to articulate discourses of disfranchisement and

envisions alternative modes of existence outside of

potentially dominant Eurocentric frames.12 In its more

extreme moments, this vision of radically fluid and open

spaces of politics has bequeathed claims that there are

no significant geographically distinctions between

specific hubs of activism, that all struggles, no matter

how localised, are ultimately fought against the same

neoliberal order, hence the renowned “one no, many yeses”

of Paul Kingsnorth.13

Such arguments combine a Marxian negation of a mode

of production (neoliberalism) with a Foucauldian

plurality of resistances against increasingly intrusive,

Panoptic modes of transnational governmentality.14

11 “People’s Global Action Hallmarks”, available: <http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/en/index.html#hallmarks> 12 WTO – Shrink or Sink, Our World Is Not for Sale, and A People’s Guide to the WTO and FTAA are all signed by hundreds of diverse civil society groups, in an attempt to materialise shared affinity for such critiques across avast diversity of political and social actors. See also Klein’s reports from Seattle, Washington DC and Porto Alegre, op. cit., pp.3-6, 7-13, 193-207.13 Kingsnorth, op. cit.14 Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power,’ Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp.211-228.

7

Protest is interpreted as a production site of

multitudinal consciousness, using the logic of post-

Fordist employment (its performative, affective and

social bases) to construct a global life in common that

challenges the biopolitical agenda of Empire, but which

is refracted back into localised struggles and campaigns.

Experiments with guerrilla-esque affinities and temporary

forms of collective identification are undertaken to

further the autonomy of the movement’s spaces and

practices, preventing easy co-optation by neoliberal

elites by creating social norms beyond the direct control

of corporate globalisation.15 Its practices thus attack

not only the hard edges of transnational neoliberal

capitalism, but also the biopolitics that regulate

everyday life by producing models of normality and

deviance that create global consuming agents.16

Crucially, such assessments view the rhizomatic

structures and reflexive capacities of alter-globalist

agents as also negating the internal antagonism and

factionalism often associated with social movements.

Hardt understands the World Social Forum as fulfilling

8

the promise of anti-hierarchical politics – an

infinitesimally open-ended collection of struggles

converging around a basic commitment to resist

neoliberalism, in which ideological differences cease to

produce significant schisms.17 Stephen Gill has argued

that alter-globalist practices counter long-standing

differences between ‘new’ and ‘old’ social movements,

creating a radically fluid “postmodern Prince” in the

process.18 Similarly, Jackie Smith has argued that the

demand for ‘democracy,’ functioning as an open signifier

for the desire for greater personal control over

15 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, op. cit., pp. 70-99. 16 See William Connolly, Identity/Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp.1-35 for what remains the single best summary of these features of contemporary socio-political life. The current stream of work on governmentality also makes use of such ideas. See Wendy Larner and William Walters, Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004). The very recent Adam Curtis television documentary, The Trap, has discussed the self-regulation of emotional life in contemporary society very effectively. Here, the multitude moves towards consciousness; but itwas already in itself a de facto structural unity of sorts. Seattle thus becomes a moment of confirmation as much as one of creation, which bestows upon the multitude a longer-term teleology that precedes and post-dates this particular moment. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, op. cit., pp. 196-202; 285-288. See also Stephen Gill, “Toward a Postmodern Prince? The Battle in Seattle as a Moment in the New Politics of Globalisation,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies vol. 29:3 (2000), pp.131-140. As evidence, he cites such NGO networks as Mobilization for Global Justice, which explicitly links the Zapatistas, the civil war in the Congo and the suicide threat of U’watribespeople directly to the common threat of neoliberalism. See also Gill, “Constitutionalising Inequality and the Clash of Globalisations,” International Studies Review vol. 4:1 (2002), pp.47-65.

9

biopolitics, is the sole commonality in otherwise plural

alter-globalist spaces.19 Such claims resemble Laclau and

Mouffe’s model of a Logic of Equivalence, in which a vast

collection of particular social movements and political

demands resonate in accordance with one another through

the use of a central empty signifier (in this case,

‘democracy’) as an open point for infinite re-

inscriptions, and whose ontological closure is

permanently resisted.20 In such interpretations, the

pronoun ‘we’ in alter-globalist contexts is devoid of any

fixed subjective content and is radically democratic.

The political moment is defined within such discourses by

Kingsnorth’s ‘one no’. Unity is structured around a

shared rejection of transnational neoliberal capitalism,

facilitating cross-cultural forms of identification and

epistemic exchange, resisting any fixed meaning of the

collective subject that undertakes activism. The central

dilemma for activist life becomes whether the ‘many

yeses’ arising in its wake can exert counter-hegemonic

power in a long-term war of position.21

10

However, although such accounts appear to present

sources of optimism that dominant technocratic and

individualist frames of global politics can be countered

successfully, there are reasons to doubt their claims.

After reaching an early apogee of 250,000 protesters at

the Genoa G8 meeting in 2001, in the wake of September

11, 2001 summit protests have declined significantly,

both in terms of frequency and attendees. The protest in

Miami against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)

agreement in November 2003, advertised within movement

circles as an event that would exceed the importance of

Seattle, drew a crowd of below 10,000, and failed to

generate any significant media coverage.22 The 2004 G8

summit in Georgia was met by hundreds, rather than

thousands of protesters, and planned solidarity actions

elsewhere failed to materialise.23 Likewise, the 2004

London May Day gathering was cancelled after poorly

attended planning meetings, and in 2005 fewer than two

dozen self-declared anti-capitalists played cricket on

the lawn south of the House of Commons.24 The direct

action protests conducted around the Gleneagles G8 summit

11

were undertaken by only a few thousand, and controversial

protest tactics, including acts of vandalism in

Auchterarder, generated considerable internal schisms.25

Social Forums have also become beset by

difficulties. Intra-movement concerns reflect a growing

atrophy; the absence of a venue for the prospective fifth

European Social Forum reflects a scenario in which “there

is no more cooperation between our forces than there was

before Florence [in 2002].”26 To compound matters, some

activists have complained that such events are becoming

dominated by resource-heavy NGOs.27 The World Social

Forum has become frequented by political elites. Gerhard

Schröder and Jacques Chirac both attended the 2003 event,

transgressing its Charter of Principles, in which the WSF

exists in “opposition to a process of globalisation

commanded by the large multinational corporations and by

17 Hardt, ‘Today’s Bandung?’, Tom Hertes (ed.), A Movement of Movements (London: Verso, 2004), pp.230-236.18 Gill, “Toward a Postmodern Prince? The Battle in Seattle as a Moment in the New Politics of Globalisation,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies vol. 29:3 (2000), p.137.19 Jackie Smith, “Globalizing Resistance: The Battle of Seattle and the Future of Social Movements,” in Jackie Smith and Hank Johnston (ed.), Globalization and Resistance: Transnational Dimensions of Social Movements (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), p.209. 20 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), pp.131-3; 170-81.21 Kingsnorth, op. cit.

12

the governments and international institutions at the

service of those corporations' interests, with the

complicity of national governments.”28

Activists often assert that the current impasse is

temporary, that as new ways of pushing forward are

imagined there will be a corresponding resurgence of

anti-neoliberal politics. However, rather than the

current lull representing a temporary period of torpor

for alter-globalist politics, a number of entrenched

weaknesses within the dominant myths of alter-globalist

networks stymie its capacity to embody radical democracy.

Caution is required against the hubris evident in the

prevailing accounts of a fluid subject, conscious of its

counter-hegemonic potential as a source of the

dissolution of the neoliberal world order. Such

mythology is ridden with inherent deficiencies that are

rarely addressed by participants. Rather than a global

multitude taking shape, in many respects we see only the

phantasm of such a polis, and one that depends upon the

active repression of contradictions and flaws in order to

maintain the idealised image of the multitude presented

13

by such prominent movement commentators as Klein and

Kingsnorth.

The analysis proceeds through three sections,

introducing alternative theoretico-normative approaches

by which alter-globalism can be understood. The first

uses a critical cosmopolitan approach to discuss the

logic of protest actions that are imagined as

consciousness-raising exercises, but which can also be

viewed as forestalling critical interactions with a

depoliticised and disengaged wider public. The second

considers the current production of discourses of

alterity and antagonism within alter-globalist spaces

22 The veteran feminist and environmental activist Starhawk, in October 2003, described the forthcoming Miami protest as having “the potential to surpass Seattle in the breadth and depth of a mobilisation that can reunite ‘teamsters and turtles’ and link different facets of the movement, forge new alliances and strengthen old ones, deepen the commitment of those awakened to activism by the Iraq War and re-energise those who have been on the front lines for years.” Starhawk, “From Cancun to the Miami FTAA Mobilization: Victory’s Strategic Momentum”, available: <http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=03/10/10/2186141> 23 For an account of the failed G8 mobilisation of 2004 see Media Mouse, “Do Lackluster G8 Protests Represent the End of the Anti-Globalization Movement?”, available: <http://www.mediamouse.org/static/do_lackluster_g8_protests_represent_the_end_of_the_antiglobalization_movement.php>24 See the photos of the 2004 London event at the archive of activist clearing-house Urban 75, available: <http://www.urban75.org/photos/protest/mayday04.html> 25 Tom Allan, “The Voices and the Violence in Auchterarder,” available: <http://scotland.indymedia.org/newswire/display/1885/index.php>

14

(the oft-cited reform/revolution split) from a Lacanian

psychoanalytical angle that explores the materialisation

of such alterity within particular disciplinary rituals

and practices. This section concludes by highlighting

possible ways forward for a politics of the global,

focusing briefly on specific examples from the Miami

protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas

(FTAA) agreement in November 2003 as containing the

potential to harbour a wider and much-needed

transformation within the alter-globalist political

imagination.

26 Tina Becker, “Dangers of Disintegration,” Weekly Worker (27 April 2006), available: <http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/622/esf.htm> 27 In an interview with activist Max (surname withheld) in New York City, 21 June 2004, the interviewee complained that “Over the last two years the more grassroots anti-capitalist forces on the ground have been increasingly marginalised in those forums. We’re organising a conference to create a space for anti-capitalists withinNGO-dominated Social Forums where we could continue to refine our politics without having to listen to speeches by reform-minded NGOs and politicians, even business leaders.” As Audrey Vanderford has argued, the discursive articulation of a field of protest defined by unity-in-difference is itself a performative act that unsuccessfully attempts to conceal internally destructive tendencies. “‘Whose Streets? Our Streets! Whose World? Our World!’ Narratives and Negotiation after the WTO,” available: <www.uoregon.edu/~audreylv/WTO/wto_protest.htm> 28 World Social Forum Charter of Principles, approved by the World Social Forum International Council, 10 June 2001, available: <http://www.wsfindia.org/?q=node/3>

15

Zygmunt Bauman, the Cloakroom Community and the Problem

of Summit-Hopping

The value of both shifting forms of subjectivity and the

spectacle of protest as a consciousness-raising tool

within alter-globalism is thrown into question by the

critical cosmopolitanism of Zygmunt Bauman. Rather than

celebrate subjective multiplicity in a post-territorial

era as aiding the production of a multitudinal political

subject, this approach views the obliteration of

libidinal social solidarity in contemporary societies as

a source of profound anxiety and personal insecurity for

the majority.29 Bauman argues that anxiety is inherent in

a framework of fluidity and indeterminacy as a result of

the lingering desire for both the security of a solid

identity, and the investment of life with a

transcendental dimension, both of which are stymied by

fluid modes of subjectivity. Consequently, collective

engagement becomes either hysterical (as in

fundamentalism, an excessive reaction against the absence

of broad affective frames based upon a crude

29 Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualised Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2001); Society under Siege (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).

16

Inside/Outside rhetoric), or sporadic and temporary

(‘cloakroom communities’, that is, brief moments of mass

identification with specific sporting events or celebrity

marriages which dissipate immediately afterwards).30 The

unavailability of stable relationships, both political

and personal, leads not simply to an exhilarating freedom

of choice, but more often to the unsatisfactory

cultivation of very shallow commitments to others in

order to forestall fear of loneliness.31 The pursuit of

unsatisfactory connections is endemic to post-Fordism.

Not only are conventional sources of affect such as the

nation absent, but the very economic structure prevents

the circulation of comparable replacements by demanding

flexibility and personal re-invention in social life.32

Critically, in contrast to Hardt and Negri et al.,

Bauman views such phenomena as a constitutive symptom of

the current political moment, rather than a hangover from

an earlier era destined to fade as time progresses.

Consequently, the successful renewal of visions of a

socially equitable future in an ethical drive towards a

30 Bauman, Identity, op. cit., pp.30-31; 46; 62-66.31 Ibid, p.69.32 Bauman, Society under Siege, op. cit., pp.43-49; 152-157.

17

Kantian global community will require the possibility of

creating more stable relationships and norms than are

available within temporary affinity groups. There are

thus four qualities well beyond the scope of temporary

affinities and open-ended identification that Bauman

identifies as essential for an ethical cosmopolitan

political project:

Systemic critiques, rather than polemics against

specific political individuals.

The painstaking construction of shared norms and

values that create affect through open-ended and

reciprocal dialogic processes resistant to the

imposition of any pre-emptive societal blueprint.

The development of institutions sufficiently strong

and socially legitimate to act as the focal point

for those norms and values.

The active cultivation of mass empathy with the vast

swathes of under-privileged, permanently

marginalised peoples that haunt the neoliberal

project in every corner of the planet.33

18

A shared understanding of an adversary that is to be

opposed (Kingsnorth’s ‘one no’) is not necessary for this

project. Rather, it should aim to articulate principles

of justice or empathy for the weak, creating bonds of

trust and drawing attention to the inter-connectedness of

the fates of all living beings on the planet. Its

execution is not the sole responsibility of political

elites alone, but of all of its subjects in the minutiae

of social life. Rather than protest and Social Forum

spaces being its central vehicle, it should be pursued

primarily as an ethic within everyday life.34 Even then,

Bauman’s final ethical lesson is that such a community is

not destined to achieve its aims. All it can do is

inspire wider dialogue among the broader field of

humanity that does not necessarily identify with it, and

that may choose to reject it.35

33 Bauman, The Individualised Society, op. cit., p.90; Society under Siege, pp.217-221.34 This can be contrasted with David Held’s model of a top-down, elite-governed global social democracy. David Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).35 Bauman, Society under Siege, op. cit., p.221.

19

Some activists have acted in accordance with aspects

of Bauman’s ethics. Teams of voluntary translators from

organisations such as Babels have ensured that Forum

workshops are available to a plethora of language

communities. Likewise, teach-in spaces have allowed

activists from diverse backgrounds to mingle and share

experiences that can be used as forms of common affinity

for future affairs.36 The cultivation of gift economies

and food sharing in convergence spaces is intended to

encourage a sense of collective ownership over the

enterprise.37 Critiques of a sophisticated and systemic

nature exist within hundreds of relevant documents.

Groups such as Global Exchange produce regular

assessments of the global economy that resist the obvious

temptation to attack individual corporate actors,

focusing instead on the involuntary and systemic nature

of transnational capitalism.38 A common rejection of a

singular adversary is of less relevance in such practices

than the cultivation of ethics of social association that

locate Hardt and Negri’s life in common.

20

However, the culmination of protest and Forum events

in spectacular and cathartic actions of mass protest and

blockades fosters tendencies towards the unsatisfactory

‘cloakroom’ mode of identification, of which the aphorism

‘one no’ is symptomatic.39 The condensation of a plethora

of struggles through such metaphors as ‘you are G8, we

are six billion,’ although intended to cultivate the

image of a global confrontation between competing social

imaginaries, obscures the necessity for critical forms of

36 Lee Sustar’s account of the Miami gala events in November 2003 is particularly instructive here. Lee Sustar, “Defying the Police Statein Miami,” CounterPunch (7 December 2003), available: <www.counterpunch.org/sustar12062003.html> 37 Paul Routledge, “Convergence Space: Process Geographies of Grassroots Globalization Networks,” Transnational Institute of British Geographers vol. 28 (2003), pp. 333-349, is an excellent summary of the potential and ambiguities of convergence spaces in terms of theircapacity to enable a multiplicity of voices locate common cause without abandoning their valued singularity as specific movements.38 See, for example, <http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/cafta/> for a detailed and sophisticated analysis of the proposed Central American Free Trade Area, or CAFTA. However, in person, some of these campaigners sometimes struggle to retain this systemic form of critique, often lapsing into more personal attacks of rage against both corporations and political elites. This rage has undoubtedly become more extant in anti-war protests, in which Bush and Blair are the targets of more personal verbal assaults. Furthermore, Social Forum processes do provide evidence of critical reflection. Accordingto one eye-witness, the London ESF was notable for the predominance of systemic critiques, rather than ritual attacks against neoliberalism, or against Bush or Blair. Alex Callinicos, “Building on the Success of the London ESF,” available: <http://www.resist.org.uk/reports/archive/esf2004/esf04_07.php>39 The work of Susan George, and of the International Forum on Globalization, is entirely systemic. See Susan George, The Lugano Report: Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Pluto, 2003); John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander, Another World Is Possible: Alternatives to Economic Globalization (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004).

21

dialogue, exposing a dependence on the aphorism and drama

of efforts to blockade the entry points to summits as

signs of the agency of ordinary people excluded from

crucial decision-making procedures. Rather than

successfully drawing a viewing audience into multitudinal

forms of praxis, the assertion of the automatic relevance

of spectacular protest has prevented significant efforts

to interact with that imagined constituency beyond the

assumption that media images of protest will

automatically mobilise millions toward the ‘life values’

pole. When this assumed audience is proved to be lacking

(or ungrateful), many activists have responded with fits

of pique: “The middle class didn’t give a toss about [the

protest in] Miami [in 2003] – but since when did a

revolution begin in the middle class? We shouldn’t waste

too much time trying to court the middle class right now,

it’s organising on the street that counts.”40 Such

discourses externalise low turnouts as merely the

function of certain tactical failures on the part of protest

organisers, rather than an absence of dialogical

40 Luke from DC, contribution to FTAA Indymedia discussion (10 January2004), available: <http://www.ftaaimc.org/or/index.shtml>

22

interactions with a public that may be rather less

concerned with economic injustice than is assumed within

such networks.41

Soren Ambrose of Washington DC pressure group 50

Years Is Enough, one of the more perspicacious

commentators on alter-globalist politics, argues that

Miami was a failure because it was simply too far from

where the bulk of ‘multitudinal’ direct action

participants live in the US (mostly in the North-East and

the West coast).42 The continuing conviction that the

mere existence of a transnational neoliberal Ministerial

meeting is sufficient to generate a large-scale protest,

requiring only minimal work to mobilise large numbers of

those who find contemporary multitudinal existence

anxious and stressful, is thus exposed as a fantasy. To

compound matters, the logic of direct action, of

attempting to blockade Ministerial sites, requires large

41 In Miami, the low turnout, combined with the less favourable urban geography surrounding the FTAA Ministerial Meeting, prevented any prospect of shutting down the trade summit. Nikki Hartman, a direct action participant, concluded afterwards, “the general ‘Fox News’ public has no clue. They don’t even know that on 20 November, 2003 there was an FTAA conference, much less a protest or police violence.” Nikki Hartman, interviewed by e-mail, autumn 2004.42 Soren Ambrose of 50 Years Is Enough, interviewed in Brooklands, Washington DC, 25 June 2004.

23

numbers of bodies to be successful since their absence

leads to the easy neutralisation of such efforts on the

part of police forces and the prevention of such

blockades minimises the major media coverage that such

affairs generate.

Such weaknesses are related to a foundational myth

concerning the power of multitudinal affinity groups to

disrupt the WTO in Seattle. In that specific case, the

successful use of temporary affinity groups that

dissolved upon the completion of the protest served as an

interesting metaphor for the inadequate democratisation

of decision-making and greater autonomy over the

definition of personal, subjective life. However,

subsequent attempts to repeat the same strategy have

become stymied by a failure to understand the confluence

of contingent factors that mobilised such large numbers,

from the choice to host the WTO Ministerial in Seattle

rather than San Diego, to the close geographical

proximity to large numbers of radical ecological

activists who had adopted existing tactics in the urban

space of Seattle.43 These factors have not existed in

24

subsequent theatres. Consequently, the multitudinal

discourse contains a crippling absence of sensitivity to

the specific challenges of different protest

environments. Direct action participant Nikki Hartman

explained, in relation to Miami, that the refusal among

activists to discuss the increasingly ritualistic nature

of protest, and an emerging cadre of ‘summit-hoppers,’ was

alarming and disempowering.44 As Chuck Morse has

presciently argued, greater reflection on the use of

temporary affinities does not mean the automatic

reversion to the structures of an ideologically rigid

political Party. However, it does require recognition

that the pursuit of the spectacle inhibits the movement’s

capacity to produce ideas for wider public evaluation and

discussion.45

Furthermore, there are significant weaknesses in

terms of cultivating empathy with marginalised

43 Again, Ambrose is instructive, noting that Seattle was a “unique” situation unlikely to be repeated successfully.44 Nikki Hartman, interviewed by e-mail, autumn 2004. 45 Marina Sitrin and Chuck Morse, “The Life – or Death – of the Anti-Globalisation Movement,” Left Turn (2 June 2004), available: <http://www.leftturn.org/Articles/Viewer.aspx?id=523&type=W> The authors are members of the Institute for Anarchist Studies and both have written extensively on the topic of mass mobilisations and the global economy for some time, thus qualifying as activists rather than as observers speaking from a detached position.

25

populations, particularly within urban spaces in the

North. Ostensibly, the conduct of carnival actions has

featured extensive references and allusions to historical

injustice, identifying with the experience of indigenous

movements such as the EZLN in Mexico.46 However, such

expressions of affinity are both shallow and fleeting.

Bill Aal, a non-white member of People for Fair Trade

(PFT), the local umbrella group that became the central

hub of the wider organisational effort in Seattle, has

contended that images of unity-in-difference around a

nodal point of trade “ignore the particular organising

challenges that people have with communities of color and

poor people in general. When you do that, your message

is made bland and aimed at the middle class as opposed to

poor people, and working people and people of color as a

group kind of get left out of the picture.”47 In Miami,

a city with high rates of poverty, the Root Cause

coalition between three African-American and Latino

46 In Miami, references to a 500 year struggle for indigenous rights against the greed of successive forms of conquistador, including the US corporate lobby pushing for an inflexible FTAA that would significantly undercut the sovereignty of its member states, were predominant features of costumes worn by direct action protesters. See the Lake Worth Global Justice Group website, available: <http://www.mediamouse.org/fcaa/>

26

employment rights campaign groups, was written-off by

some direct action activists as another hierarchical

mobilisation akin to a trade union and thus

insufficiently multitudinal.48 Although exactly the sort

of concretely-grounded movement that André Drainville has

acclaimed as being located within a consciously-

recognised and specific context that does not reduce the

sources of injustice to a single, neoliberal Other, Root

Cause avoided the events conducted within Miami itself,

conducting its own autonomous campaign instead.49

Consequently, the Miami protest was a largely white

affair in a city that is 65% Latino/Hispanic and 22%

black.50

Such incidents are symptomatic of a widespread

failure to enable economically-depressed groups to

articulate a specific voice within alter-globalist

settings, particularly within the global North. Carolina

Delgado, a member of South Floridians for Fair Trade and

Global Justice (SFFTGJ), has argued that the

participation of economically marginalised non-whites in

the Miami protests could have been much greater, but that

27

they would require a Martin Luther King-type leader to

empower community members to articulate concrete concerns

within the purview of a comprehensive social movement

agenda.51 Delgado thus reveals that multitudinal models

are ultimately of greater relevance to particular middle-

class viewpoints, rather than those struggling to make

ends meet in an everyday context. The argument that the

measure of the success of the movement lies in the way in

which NGOs and Social Movement Organisations (SMOs)

47 Bill Aal, interviewed by Miguel Bocanegra, WTO History Project (11 November 2000), available: <http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/interviews/Aal.pdf> See also Elizabeth Martinez, “Where Was the Color in Seattle?”, Color Lines (January/February 2000), available: <http://www.arc.org/C_Lines/CLArchive/story3_1_02.html>48 US Census Bureau, “State and County Quick Facts: Miami-Dade County,Florida”, available: <http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/12/12086.html> According tothe data, the City of Miami, as of 2003 (the year of the anti-FTAA protest) had a poverty rate of 28%, compared with 13% for the state as a whole. Overtown and Coconut Grove, the areas with the bulk of the city’s African-American population, are particularly poverty-stricken. The organisations behind Root Cause were the Miami WorkersCentre, Power-U (two African-American organisations organised to fight police oppression and urban degradation in Overtown, a poor African-American neighbourhood), and the Coalition of Immokallee Workers (CIW), an unrecognised union fighting for the rights of Latino-American farm labourers in southern Florida. Crimethinc, “Bringing the Heat in Miami”, Miami Indymedia (24 January 2004), available: <http://miami.indymedia.org/news/2004/01/55.php> Exactly who, or what, Crimethinc constitutes is an open question. There is no membership list or structure, no formal initiation rite, and is simply predicated on the notion of thinking the unthinkable. As an organisation, it exists only in virtual space.49 André Drainville, Contesting Globalization (London: Routledge, 2004), p.52.50 US Census Bureau, op. cit.

28

increasingly mimic the rhizomatic format of the multitude

is thus deeply problematic, obscuring a significant

demographic absence.52

The value of spectacular actions as a means of

cementing a globally-shared antipathy towards neoliberal

and biopolitical mechanisms of impoverishment, insecurity

and control is thus exposed as an insufficient means of

translating alter-globalist sentiments to a wider, less

engaged polis. The common metaphor of a ‘movement of

movements’ that co-exists within alter-globalist spaces,

and whose underlying forms of commonality outweigh

instances and experiences of antagonism, itself tends

towards a silent repression that masks its particular

social bias. Debordian notions of the spectacle point

less towards a new mode of political life, and more

towards a cloakroom community that vanishes upon the

completion of each act, preventing any significant

affective action, and contributing directly to its own

demise.53 Hence, from Bauman’s perspective, alter-

51 Carolina Delgado, interviewed by telephone, 11 August 2004.52 This is precisely the argument made by Marina Sitrin, op. cit., that the growing hegemony of participatory, grassroots tendencies within the movements demonstrates the conyinuing deepening of its moral action.

29

globalism amounts to an unsatisfactory response to the

decreasing availability on secure frames for social

existence, naively viewing subjective fluidity as the

basis for an infinite Logic of Equivalence against a

neoliberal order whose injustice is thoroughly

appreciated by a viewing audience. A truly ethical

global project, predicated on deep dialogue among all of

the planetary population, and particularly those from

marginalised communities within the developed world (as

opposed to the mere name-dropping of the EZLN or the

Bolivian water privatisation riots among Northern

activist groups), is largely absent.

The critique is timely. In advance of the 2007

Heiligendamm G8 summit, one organiser spoke of the affair

as an important potential catalyst for the renewal of an

alter-globalist protest in Western Europe after a

relatively dormant phase, akin to waking a sleeping

animal.54 However, such pre-emptive discourses are

53 The term “Debordian” is a reference to the work of French poststructural philosopher Guy Debord, whose work, La Société du Spectacle (Paris: Buchet, 1967), emphasising the complete dissolution of any real/virtual dichotomy in contemporary social life, and the affectivepower of momentous media images, is a significant theoretical reference point for many alter-globalist activists, particularly those engaged in direct action.

30

entirely dependent upon the Polanyian interpretation of

such activism as the consequence of a wider, popular

clamour for the socialisation of a private economy

rampantly out of control, and in which the demise of one

manifestation of this desire simply leads to its

replacement by another.55 The experience of recent alter-

globalist events, particularly in the wake of September

11, 2001, in which attendances have greatly declined and

political dynamism has ground to a halt, is indicative of

a failure to think beyond the logic of the spectacle.

Rather than a de-subjectivised multitude that is open to

a discourse of ‘one no,’ and which instinctively pursues

life in common, the task of alter-globalist actors is

altogether more challenging, requiring an understanding

of the apparent indifference of its assumed audience that

resists descent into diatribe. The scope of the ‘many

yeses’ implied in activist fantasies is itself restricted

in advance by a demand to recognise the neoliberal

identity of a common adversary as a litmus test for entry

into such political spaces.

31

Lacanian Theory and Movement Identifications: The

Uncritical Repetition of Schism and the Disciplinarity of

Unity-in-Difference

Although Bauman’s work is valuable in drawing attention

to the weaknesses of the spectacle, and the ‘one no’

discourse, he is less capable of explaining the

proliferation of increasingly polarised identifications

within the ‘movement of movements’ that also undercut the

multitudinal model. The performance of protest tends

towards the two different poles of conventional political

marches, usually held some distance from the Ministerial

site, and efforts to hinder the entrance to transnational

summits through direct actions such as blockades. Such

performances, far from being the preserve of a radically

fluid field of subjects, have in practice tended to be

conducted separately with little crossover between the

participants. This format was established as early as

54 As these comments were ‘off-the-record’, the activist will remain anonymous.55 See, in particular, Danaher and Mark, op. cit., pp.23-65, who view thediscourses prevalent in Seattle as a variant of a ‘People v Elites’ framework evident in earlier anti-corporate campaigns from the early nineteenth century onwards. Here, the escape of capital from social regulation generates an automatic backlash.

32

the Seattle event itself, in which a labour-dominated

mobilisation of some 30-40,000 people attended a rally

and march event at the Memorial Stadium near the Space

Needle, some two miles from the Convention Center,

complete with lengthy speeches by long-established

leaders. This event did not merge with the blockade of

the WTO in the downtown area, nor adopt the participatory

democratic practices of the latter, and represented an

orthodox effort to influence the Clinton administration

into pushing for labour and environmental reforms within

the WTO framework.56 This distinction has become cemented

over time. During the Make Poverty History march in

Edinburgh in July 2005, several radicals stood aside the

official route, dressed either in red or black,

inscribing a clear difference from those dressed in

white, wielding banners proclaiming ‘Revolucion’

(emphasising an imagined solidarity with Latin American

movements through the deliberate use of Spanish spelling)

and ‘Make Capitalism History’.57 Furthermore, the march

was conducted entirely separately from the subsequent

56 ‘This is what democracy looks like’ was a common chant in the downtown area.

33

direct action protest at the site of the Ministerial

meeting.

Rather than variable aspects of a multitudinal

formation, these phenomena are more consistent with the

emergence of explicitly antagonistic relationships within

the non-hierarchical contexts of such affairs. Here, an

angle that draws upon theorists indebted to Lacanian

psychoanalysis (such as Yannis Stavrakakis, Ernesto

Laclau and Slavoj Zizek) aids an understanding of the

solidification of particular performances in order to

produce a relatively stable field of meaning from

contingent and unfamiliar turns of events.

The Lacanian triad of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real

results in a theorisation of Sameness and Difference that

is inherently fragile and incomplete, as it is for Hardt

and Negri et al. Critically, however, this instability is

countered by a desire to secure foundations for such

phenomena.58 In the production of the Imaginary Other,

certain qualities are projected onto a person(s) that

subjects consider as being similar to their own.

57 Spiros, “Anarchist Triangle…Black Bloc Is Everywhere!” (4 July 2005), Indymedia UK, available: <http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/07/315522.html?c=on#c120084>

34

However, the ultimate indeterminacy of meaning that

haunts social life renders such structures interpassive,

rather than interactive. It is impossible to see

directly into the mind of the Imaginary Other, or to

confirm that he or she is truly committed to the causes

claimed. The notion that he/she is ‘one of us’ is

inherently fragile. Hence, Zizek’s argument that social

agents act not according to the way they are viewed by

the Other, but in terms of how they imagine they are

viewed by the Other.59

The Real Other is one with whom no prospect of

meaningful dialogue is considered possible, and who is

thus entirely different.60 However, just as the

identification of the Imaginary Other is interpassive,

the same also holds true for the identification of

absolute alterity. The notion that another is

definitively not ‘one of us’ has no meaning beyond its

articulation and subsequent manifestation in discursive,

material and institutional practices.

The Symbolic ‘big Other’ is the impersonal field of

differential meaning that co-ordinates social existence,

35

and in which discursive representation exists. Hence, it

is within the Symbolic that subjective life is conducted,

and in which performances are undertaken in order to

guarantee the consistency of that existence. However,

the constitutive lack in the Symbolic (that is never

complete, that anomalies always emerge, and that

contradictions are inherent to its texture) tends to

result in efforts to conceal its deficiencies.61

Furthermore, these dimensions (Imaginary, Symbolic,

Real) are present simultaneously within every social

58 There are two forms of identification in the Lacanian approach, both of which represent an effort to recover an assumed ‘lost unity’ that is linked to the Lacanian theme of jouissance – the overwhelming sense of enjoyment stemming from the original child-mother unity. Although the two modes (Imaginary, which is with an image of completeness akin to a mirror image and Symbolic, the identification with a particular role in symbolic life, and which is performed for the assumed approval of someone else’s Gaze) inter-relate with one another in social contexts, Slavoj Zizek in particular argues that the Symbolic dominates the Imaginary in the socio-political field. The desire to perform a symbolic role tends to outweigh and contaminate idealistic projections of the unitary Self. The ego of imaginary identification is not autonomous in itself, but itself becomes acted out in order to satisfy the symbolic gaze. Identification is thus a function of a desire to be, and to ground Being in some form of ontological Truth. The symbolic order (or ‘bigOther’) in which identification occurs is lacking in foundations, failing to provide the consistent and full identity desired, bequeathing strategies that aim to conceal the inherent emptiness at the heart of human social existence. The exposure of the absent foundations of these identifications is traumatic and cannot be represented directly. This lack is known as the Real. Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political (London: Verso, 1999). Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), pp.105-6.59 Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do (2nd edition, London: Verso, 2002),p.15.60 Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), p.163.

36

interaction, rather than representing different modes of

interaction with separate actors. A neighbour can

perform the role of Imaginary Other, but whose

irreducibly alien (Real) qualities must be repressed in

order for such an identification to function. Such

estranged aspects always threaten to re-emerge,

disrupting the Imaginary and potentially causing trauma

to the subject.62 Symbolic community and commonality is

permanently threatened by the exposure of its own

constitutive lack (the Real). This constant presence of

the Real in social life is the basis of antagonism, a

consequence of the inherent emptiness of social

existence. Any declaration of social or political

identity requires the production of a discourse of the

context in which it is situated, which necessarily

involves a leap of faith that such a context is accurate.

When the mythical certainties of such discourses are

shattered by contingent encounters with the Real,

antagonism is experienced. Rather than a simple conflict

between different groups in the manner of a conventional

61 Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p.30.

37

Self/Other confrontation, antagonism is thus primarily

rooted in the sudden realisation that other actors have

radically incommensurable understandings compared to our

own of the nature of the Symbolic ‘big Other’ and the

relationship of the Imaginary and the alien Real to this

order.63 Hence, sameness and difference require constant

re-articulation and performance in order to accrue an air

of naturalisation, dependent upon the repression of

elements that disrupt their stabilisation as a series of

symbols and discourses of Self/Other. At the same time,

this relationship is always mythical, prone to traumatic

encounters with the Real. An articulation of the

multitude as Sameness and a neoliberal order as

Difference thus encounters its own inherent lack,

requiring the use of repressive measures as part of a

strategic effort to materialise itself as the sole

measure of Self/Other in alter-globalist spaces.

Here, it is worth referring to Marc Williams and

Lucy Ford’s distinction between reform and rejection as

different ideological strategies to the secretive nature

of institutions such as the WTO.64 This provides the

38

basis for alternative articulations of Sameness and

Difference within alter-globalist spaces that undercut

the image of the multitude, and which cannot simply be

read as a ‘lower’ form of difference vis-à-vis the more

fundamental rejection of neoliberalism. After the

Seattle protest, Alexander Cockburn, a veteran

commentator from the radical journal CounterPunch, offered

an interpretation of the protest that pointed towards a

fundamental point of discord within the protest, which

Cockburn divided into two essential, and mutually

exclusive, components, politicising a particular schism

and rendering its differences in starker relief to the

image of a fluid multitude. In this interpretation, the

first component is derided as “lib-lab pundits,”

consisting of the leaders of the larger US trade unions

(John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO and James Hoffa of the

Teamsters), “middle-of-the-road greens, Michael Moore, a

recycle binful of policy wonks from the Economic Policy

62 A clear example of this would be the case of John Wayne Gacy, held in high esteem by his neighbours as an active and reliable member of the local Chicago community in the mid-1970s, who secretly murdered at least thirty-three young men inside his house. However, such extreme cases are not the only examples. 63 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso,1990) p.7.

39

Institute” and a host of other suspicious characters.

These groups are deemed to be self-interested moderate

whose key aim at Seattle was to silence other, more

radical voices and then present themselves as being a

kind of ‘official’ voice of the Left. Ranged in direct

opposition to this are the “real heroes” of the Battle in

Seattle – “street warriors, the Ruckus Society, the

Anarchists, Earth Firsters, anti-biotech activists,

French farmers, radical labor militants…who disgustedly

abandoned the respectable, police-sanctioned official

AFL-CIO parade and joined the street warriors at the

barricades in downtown.”65 In Cockburn’s estimation,

rather than the multitude, Seattle consisted of a

dichotomous and irreconcilable split between two

completely different activist ensembles, one of which

monopolised media coverage to serve its own interests,

minimising the role played by grassroots activists whose

lock down actions presented the key physical barrier to

the Ministerial Meeting’s entry point. This is furthered

by the efforts of moderates to articulate a difference

between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ forms of protest, the

40

latter conflating property destruction and non-violent

civil disobedience which was the dominant practice of the

direct action participants.66 For Cockburn, such

moderates are entirely conducive to neoliberalism,

campaigning for the inclusion of tokenistic lip service

to activist concerns, principally the inclusion of

meaningless labour standards clauses within WTO decision-

making mechanisms.

However, rather than read this reform/rejection

distinction as comprising the two oppositional wings of a

single movement, their production can be understood as an

ultimately unsuccessful effort to create stable frontiers

between identified groups of activists in an interpassive

fashion, and which are materialised in inherently

contingent and asymmetric fashion. First, the

distinction is articulated accordingly to entirely

different criteria, in which the location of the dividing

line, and thus the declaration of the camp to which the

speaker belongs, varies enormously. A staff member from

Canadian NGO Common Frontiers, an organisation that would

64 Marc Williams and Lucy Ford, “The World Trade Organisation and Global Environmental Management,” Environmental Politics, Vol. 8 (1999), pp.277-284.

41

qualify as ‘lib-lab pundits’ in Cockburn’s vitriolic

estimation, is adamant that his is an uncompromisingly

anti-free trade agenda that can be differentiated from

the mild agenda of NGOs such as the International

Institute for Sustainable Development, which attend

officially sanctioned WTO and FTAA ‘civil society’

meetings inside the security perimeters.67 In contrast,

in an interview conducted prior to Seattle, Mike Dolan

(one of the key organisers), distinguished between his

own multitudinal “tent,” based on a Logic of Equivalence

between its members (the Direct Action Network, the

Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO labour union and dozens of

others), sharing concern with trade issues, against three

Others, namely, corporate globalisation (the Other of

‘one no’), a neo-populist right (a rival ideological

response to the emergence of an unaccountable,

excessively powerful bloc of transnational capitalist

interests in the world of neo-Gramscian IPE) and Seattle

Anarchist Response (SAR), a movement of around thirty

65 Alexander Cockburn, “Who Won?” Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair and Allan Sekula, Five Days That Shook the World, (London: Verso, 2000), p.59.66 Ibid, p.60.

42

explicitly anarchist and anti-capitalist activists who

“wanted nothing to do with a reformer like me.”68 These

Others were articulated with varying degrees of alterity;

whereas the gap between his progressive Leftist coalition

and the neo-populist Right remained open (the arch-

populist Pat Buchanan shared a stage with labour leaders

at the major protest rally on November 30th 1999, the N30

of movement folklore), the differentiation between the

fair trade ‘tent’ and such radicals was more radically

immutable, and the anarchists therein portrayed as

rejecting overtures from reformists, responsible for

their own marginalisation.

Many radical discourses contain a strong

teleological and evangelical dimension. During a meeting

in Chicago in October 2003, one radical voice argued that

the Miami events should be structured around a concern to

“highlight political differences between the failing

liberal/electoral/bureaucratic social movements and

direct action and anti-capitalist ones in an ideological

battle among workers, students and the poor.”69 Similar

concerns were aired in the aftermath of divisive

43

anarchist incidents during the 2004 European Social

Forum, including an attempt by the notorious anarchist

group the Wombles to storm the stage where London Mayor

Ken Livingstone was scheduled to deliver a lecture to

anti-war campaigners.70

The stability of these frontiers is always prone to

displacement. David Solnit of the Direct Action Network

has rejected Dolan’s account of a multitudinal ‘tent’,

arguing that the major labour unions therein were unhappy

with the prospect of direct action occurring

contemporaneously with their march, and refused to

mention the DAN event in any pre-protest literature.71

67 Interview with Rick Arnold of Common Frontiers, Cobourg, Ontario, 8July 2004.68 Mike Dolan, interviewed by Jeremy Simer, WTO History Project (3 March 2000), available: <http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/interviews/Dolan_Simer.pdf> 69 “Chicago DAN-Labor Call to Action”, Infoshop (13 October 2003), available: <http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=03/09/11/1793886>70 A number of trade union, anti-war, NUS and CND campaigners signed asubsequent declaration condemning this action, stating that the anarchists responsible represented less than 0.5% of the attendees present, and had taken it upon themselves to declare the ESF to be a tool of authoritarian domination in its reproduction of hierarchical movement structures. “Statement on the Third European Social Forum” (29 October 2004), available: <http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages//Politics/Esf.html> 71 David Solnit, interviewed by Jeremy Simer, WTO History Project (23 March 2000), available: <http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/interviews/Solnit.pdf> Note that the eight activists from whom the DAN idea ultimately emerged only began meeting in June 1999, and that the name DAN was only produced in September, well after the plans for the major march had been finalised. Chronologically, it was something of an interloper.

44

Critically, such disruption is countered through the use

of disciplinary procedures within such formations. Another

member of Dolan’s tent, Lydia Cabasco, complained that

her ‘No 2 WTO’ poster in the office window in downtown

Seattle in August 1999 was explicitly censored by Dolan,

who was adamant that PFT should not call for the

abolition of the institution under any circumstances.72

Likewise, in Miami there are accusations that labour

stewards deliberately prevented non-labour activists from

attending the large union rally during the height of the

protests on November 20th 2003 (N20) in order to maintain

the identity of the affair as a specific labour union

event, rather than one predicated on multitudinal

fluidity.73 Hence, the claim of internal inclusivity

within the multitude obscures power relations within

activist spaces that produce particular barriers to

‘undesirable’ discourse or behaviour.

Although some authors have argued that there is

scope to integrate the reform/radical distinction, this72 Lydia Cabasco, interviewed by Monica Ghosh, WTO History Project (15 August 2000), available: <http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/interviews/Cabasco%20(Ghosh).pdf> 73 Two activists conveyed this information to me in interviews. They wished that their comments here be ascribed anonymously.

45

does not square with certain attachments to a symbolic

universe that produces alterity between reform and

radical positions as an anchor for otherwise contingent

and non-foundational political identities.74 Such

alterity is not constituted by debates about whether the

Enemy is a specific, neoliberal variant of capitalism, or

Capital itself, but is predicated on the production of

differences where the very articulation of difference

(that is,. the nature of the identities, disagreements

and differences between particular actors within alter-

globalist spaces) takes on radically incommensurable

forms, reading the political moment in which these

relationships are embedded in entirely incommensurable

ways. Such asymmetric articulations of antagonism

inhibit both the notion of a fluid multitude of unity-in-

difference, and Bauman’s project of ethical existence as

a series of agreed-upon norms and values of concrete

relevance to a diverse and anxious global population.

Thus, alongside the unsatisfactory dependence on

spectacular actions as presumed consciousness-raising

74 The notion of ‘radical reformism’ is associated with Ronaldo Munck,Globalisation and Labour: The New Great Transformation (New York: Zed Books, 2002), p.191.

46

exercises, the construction and performance of certain

polarities and antagonistic relationships in alter-

globalist spaces has become a source of much energy

therein, focusing attention on wasteful practices that

are attached to narcissistic and self-obsessed

tendencies. Discourses of confrontation between bounded

actors attempt to institute a corpus of behaviour in

which activists can be sorted into respective categories,

encouraging conformity with unspoken but quietly

effective disciplinary measures that perpetuate dominant

modes of reform and radical identity, sedimenting roles

for future reference. It is no accident that the Make

Poverty History campaign increasingly focused on winning

recognition as a meaningful and representative political

actor as its organisational stages proceeded,

distinguishing itself from efforts to blockade the G8 in

Gleneagles, not as a consequence of ethical concerns in

the mould of Bauman, but simply to denote its own

difference.

For Zizek, the fetish for a non-antagonistic

multitude amounts to wishful thinking for a transparent

47

human subject predicated on unity-in-difference that

would fragment if ever it came into actual political

power because of the repressed antagonism that flows

through it.75 He dismisses multitudinal images as

suppressing the constant presence of the Real Other in

such spaces, and that movements based on shifting forms

of identity consequently deny the existence of the

disciplinary measures used to produce an image of a

radically fluid polis.76 The global human subject imagined

by Hardt and Negri proceeds only through a number of

silent exclusions.77

If identity is inherently incomplete, and always

antagonistic at some level, then counter-hegemonic (and

multitudinal) forms of identification will, by their

nature, be difficult to sustain.78 What, then, of an

ethic that transgresses disciplinary practices? For

Zizek, any multitude should involve experiments in which

75 Zizek, “The Ideology of Empire and Its Traps”, in Paul A. Passavantand Jodi Dean (eds.), Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (London: Routledge, 2004), pp.258-263. 76 Ibid, p.258. 77 The exposure of the constitutive lack within Politics is what Laclau refers to as the political. Its concealment in a new system of spatially-arranged identity formations is known as Politics. See Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, op. cit., p.18. 78 Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999), p.201.

48

antagonism is accepted as an irreducible feature of

social existence, rather than repressed through the quiet

discipline of ostensibly rhizomatic structures.79 Rather

than materialise antagonism in the performance of

Self/Other relationships that mask their own contingency,

it ought to be recognised as a fundamental aspect of

social existence that cannot be entirely repressed. For

Zizek, practices that achieve this end can be linked to

clinical aspects of psychoanalysis. He has proposed that

any project laying claim to critical politics should

avoid the pitfalls of earlier leftist interventions:

Hysterical anarchism that is satisfied only by

separating itself from the existing order so that it

can perpetually criticise it without ever truly

threatening it (as he has argued on several

occasions, a ‘being-against’ is hardly a ‘being-for’

something else, and can easily become a superego

79 Ben Wright, Slavoj Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual (filmed lecture, LSE, 2005). In this respect, Zizek follows the well-established argument of Connolly, op. cit., in which both the mastery over nature of the liberal tradition, and the ‘living with human nature’ discourse of communitarianism must be resisted in order to allow a new form of political thinking, one that appreciates the limits of human endeavour without resorting to reified forms of ethnic community.

49

impulse of its own). The anarchist position of

exteriority from a phantasm of mainstream reformism

is consistent with this symptom.

The obsessive nature of social democratic ideology,

which is fixated upon reducing public political

desires to a coherent list of demands. In reality,

such desires are more fragmented, and less knowable

than such discourses assume. Discourses associated

with many high-profile campaigns conducted in the

name of Global Civil Society, especially media-

centric examples such as Make Poverty History, are

obsessed with fulfilling the presumed gaze of such a

watching audience.

The perversion of Stalinism, in which sublime

historical laws are inherently embodied in a

particular Party, which subsequently leads to the

annihilation of undesirable impediments to the

smooth functioning of its master narrative.

Zizek has proposed a fourth alternative, the marking of

historical traumas repressed by the neoliberal discourses

50

of the End of History, in order to maintain the drive

necessary to see a leftist project through to its

conclusion. Such tombstones function as reminders of the

hidden social consequences and antagonisms generated by

liberal capitalism, without reviving those movements in

some derisory, literal re-enactment of historical

episodes long since closed. Thus, memory itself becomes

a critical weapon against the post-political order.80

One episode in particular demonstrates the weakness

of antagonistic identities within protest space

frontiers, that is the reactions within to the death of

Carlo Giuliani during the Genoa protest.81 Whilst certain

radical anti-capitalists identified the incident as a

wake-up call for reformers to abandon their derisory

‘seat at the table’ concerns (an interpassive discourse

that presupposes a solid bloc of reformers with fixed

political interests), a more satisfactory response was

evident with the widespread adoption of black armbands as

a general signifier of loss, including among many of80 Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do, op. cit., p.272.81 On her 2004 Rettet die Wale album, Austrian songwriter Gustav composed a song (‘Genua’) about the protest in Genoa, complete with the line “our revolution Carlo/Is just beginning”; likewise the activist volume On Fire: The Battle of Genoa and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (London: AK Distribution, 2002) contains numerous references to Giuliani’s death.

51

those castigated by radicals as being purely self-

interested.82 Here, discourses of confrontation were

momentarily transcended, providing a glimpse into an

alternative mode of intra-movement interaction and

affinity.83 The use of such armbands transcended any

Self/Other boundary within protest spaces, exposing

certain common points of identification that could

represent significant sources of a genuinely

‘multitudinal’ concern. Such practices have more

potential than the retreat to a unity-in-difference

metaphor simply to conceal the very real existence of

intra-protest antagonism. It is critical that such

common identifications emerge out of concrete

experiences, rather than abstractions of ‘one no.’

However, this also means that if the spark of alter-

globalism first witnessed in the streets of Seattle has

run its course and has given way to the emptiness of the

82 Richard K. Moore, WWill a Death in the Family Breath Life into the Movement?”, Notes from Nowhere, op. cit., pp.368-9. Moore wrote that “those who feel the ‘violent anarchists’ are curbing their successes should maybe look at how successful their own tactics are. It is no coincidence that Tony Blair ‘welcomes’ peaceful calls for debt reform…nothing changes, and the global carve-up getting mapped in theOval Office doesn’t miss a step.” 83 Rory Carroll, ‘Protesters Hail Their Martyr,’ The Guardian (23 July 2001), available: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,,525878,00.html>

52

spectacle, and the solidification of certain polarities,

then perhaps there is a need to inscribe alter-globalism

with its own tombstone that traverses the fantasy of a

multitude sutured by its relationship to a presumed

consistent exterior order. Here, the Lacanian maxim that

‘there is no Other’ (that is, the symbolic order that is

presumed to give consistency to our own identifications

lacks the rigidity assumed and is itself inherently

lacking), that the Other is part of a regulatory fiction,

rather than an objective entity, becomes critical.84 This

does not mean that structures do not exist, or that there

is no such thing as neoliberalism, or transnational

Capitalism. However, it does mean becoming conscious of

the discontinuous and more contingent links between

various forms of injustice and that different groups and

individuals articulate injustice in means entirely beyond

the ideological strait-jacket of ‘one no.’ The scope of

injustice cannot be contained within a monolithic figure

of neoliberalism, or (as some authors have argued more84 Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do, op. cit., p.109. This might seem rather a strange statement to make, given that the WTO and FTAA quiteclearly do ‘actually exist’; the point of ‘I posit the Other’ is not that this Other fails to exist in a blandly material sense. It is more that the meaning attributed to this Other lacks any ultimate ontological foundation.

53

recently), a simple combination of neoliberal and

imperialist forces.85 For Zizek, as with Bauman, the

central ethical imperative of the present is to identify

with the symptoms of the late capitalist order such as

illegal immigrants, the permanently unemployed and the

homeless. Although Zizek uses the aphorism 'we are all

illegal immigrants” to illustrate the ideal form of this

identification, such an identification should be the

culmination of an ethical process of dialogue and

exposure to the plight of the ‘have-not,’ rather than a

symbolic prop by which some of the ‘haves’ can

momentarily establish a degree of distance between

themselves and the prevailing order, simply so that they

can assuage certain egotistical impulses.86 This means

that activists need to be more flexible and open to a

range of articulations of injustice, without resorting to

such Master-Signifiers as neoliberalism in order to

produce an Imaginary identification with a common project

85 In his recent work, Robert Cox has written of a nexus of neoliberaland imperial forces as comprising the dominant historic bloc on the global political stage in the contemporary era. This imperial angle somewhat transgresses his earlier vision of a transnational capitalist class being the dominant bloc. Robert Cox, “Beyond Empireand Terror: Critical Reflections on the Political Economy of World Order,” New Political Economy, Vol. 9:3 (2004), pp.307-323.86 Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, op. cit., p.228-30; 267.

54

that is ultimately exclusionary. Such a refusal to

identify oneself against a fixed adversary amounts to

what is known as subjective destitution, in which the inability

of the symbolic order to provide an anchor for the Self

is accepted, and, as a consequence, conventional,

sovereign subjectivity is jettisoned.87 Here, the

distance between a Lacanian approach and the critical

cosmopolitanism of Bauman is greatly reduced.

The absences in and around alter-globalist spaces,

particularly in terms of participation of marginalised

and low-income groups within the global North, are not

unnoticed by activists. One comments that: “The whole

aesthetics of having a highly militarised police force

and a huge fence and demonstrators who are just trying to

get access to the debate is interesting; I think, though,

such creative protest in and of itself is a few steps

behind where we really need to go in terms of a real

commitment to community building. In the United States

that really means multi-racial community-building. Some

of the direct action models are isolating to certain

communities.”88 In the Miami case, grassroots anarchists,87 Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, op. cit, p.230.

55

environmentalists and students converged in a site in the

African-American community of Overtown. Although there

are accounts of mutual tension between activists and

locals in the initial stages, during the subsequent

police assault many were sheltered by local people and

protected from the pepper spray and tear gas “as if the

population had pressed the ‘mute’ button on their TVs (or

the rest of the media), saw what was happening and

reached their own conclusions…”89 Furthermore, prior to

the Miami protests, the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and

the Environment (ASJE), a coalition of radical grassroots

environmentalists and US Steelworkers, undertook a

caravan campaign through various steel towns and farming

communities in the American interior which had a history

of low participation in summit protests. By emphasising

direct audience participation as a core element,

particularly narratives of disempowerment and job loss by

those most directly affected, the campaign avoided

reproducing a rigid Speaker/Audience dynamic

disempowering to poor people. Organiser Dan Leahy argues

that such ethnographic-leaning groundwork is sadly

56

missing from the ‘summit-hopping’ phenomenon, a fetish

inevitably restricted to those who can spare both the

time and money to attend successive protests.90

Here, there is room for some cautious optimism.

Important examples of ethical work within alter-globalist

spaces do exist, in which activists have rejected the

notion that the multitude simply ‘is’. Such campaigns

represent a model for community-based organising that

retains an air of the spectacle, but which abandons its

more speculative aspects in favour of a more concrete

approach to social movement activism reminiscent of that

undertaken in the early days of the Civil Rights

Movement.91

88 Max, interviewed at the corner of Housten and Stanton Streets, Lower East Side, New York City, 21 June 2004. Max did not reveal hissurname. Likewise, Fern Feto Spring of the Ruckus Society, responsible for training hundreds of activists in the art of non-violent direct action prior to Seattle, opted out of participation inMiami on similar grounds: “I think that there has been a strong presence of people of color at the mobilisations, but what’s happenedis that the white leadership hasn’t done as great a job of communicating to the people that have shown up and there’s been a lotof miscommunication, not being very respectful of the communities we’ve gone into because we haven’t prioritised those communications.”Interview at the Ruckus Society, 15th Street, Oakland CA, 15 July 2004.89 Starhawk, “A Dangerous Victory”, FTAA Indymedia (15 January 2004), available: <http://www.ftaaimc.org/or/index.shtml>.90 Dan Leahy, interviewed by telephone, 2 December 2004.

57

Conclusion

Both the Bauman and Lacanian approaches problematise the

crude affirmation of radical subjective fluidity as a

source of hope for a future, post-neoliberal world order.

Such unsatisfactory articulations of global subjectivity

obliterate the persistence of significant and current

difficulties within alter-globalist spaces. These are,

firstly, the over-dependence on the spectacle as an

unsuccessful mode of consciousness-raising, secondly, a

weak dialogue between predominantly middle-class, well-

educated and highly employable protesters who choose to

disidentify with neoliberalism, and the inhabitants of

poor urban areas who rank among its victims and finally,

the maintenance of certain polarities within alter-

globalist spaces, all throw such models as the postmodern91 Caravan campaigns are not unknown in the relevant academic literature and have themselves received substantial attention therein. See, for example, David Featherstone, “Spatialities of Transnational Resistance to Globalization: The Maps of Grievance of the Inter-Continental Caravan,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers vol. 28 (2003), pp. 404-421. Leahy has argued that the March to Miami was predicated directly on what, in a classic assessment of the roots of civil rights activism in African-American communities in the South in the mid-1950s, Aldon Morris terms ‘local movement centres’: existing community institutions (the Baptist church; local unions; informal workplace affiliations) ideologically re-oriented towards enduring civil rights campaigns. Aldon Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Free Press, 1984), pp.1-17.

58

Prince and the multitude against Empire into significant

disarray. Such images are dependent on the imagining of

a fixed watershed, usually the Seattle affair, after

which fluid convergence politics becomes a permanent and

irreducible feature of global society. An endogenous

critique of protest space is absent, except in the demand

that NGOs emulate participatory structures, rather than

seek reforms from within the system.92 Such reliance upon

a binary contrast between grassroots democracy and

hierarchy as ordering principles precludes the real

possibility that forms of exclusion and domination occur

in all protest settings, including those professing to a

leaderless structure.

Such weaknesses have pervaded alter-globalism from

the outset, rather than emerging as more recent

developments, and continue to haunt its spaces. Rather

than simple errors, they will not be rectified without

significant changes in the mentalities, discourses and

practices of activists and their intellectual supporters.

92 Hardt and Negri suggest that NGOs such as Oxfam International and Medicins sans Frontières, whatever their noble intentions, ultimatelyassist the deepening of imperial sovereignty and biopower. Empire, op. cit., p.311.

59

The critical investigation undertaken in this article

contests common claims surrounding the absence of

internal frontiers, antagonisms or power relations within

alter-globalism. The idea of a postmodern Prince is

simply a foundational myth that obscures the very real

and complex challenges surrounding any effort to

construct a global form of subjectivity around empathy

for the wretched of the Earth. The intense soul-

searching generated by the internal failures in such

theatres as Miami has intensified in more recent protest

events, hence the growing attacks against hierarchical

and exclusionary processes that currently pervade the

Social Forum process.93

There is, however, an even more critical weakness in

such theories, which is the assumption that subjects

automatically become prone to affective modes of social

life, simply because rhizomatic structures facilitate

93 Max (surname withheld), an interviewee approached for this researchin New York in June 2004, has argued that the World Social Forum is increasingly excluding openly anti-capitalist discourses from its charters and plenaries, and that grassroots organisers are having to organise their own fora adjunct to, but not formally part of, the WSFin order to have a voice. At the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi,complaints were raised that the admission fee to the event was considerably higher than local people could afford, and that the foodservice outlets, despite their ‘communal’ image, were charging similarly outrageous prices.

60

greater communicative ethics. This is an unsatisfactory

conflation of ideology and structure. Just as modernist

civil society was haunted by its ‘uncivil’ element, so

the multitude has its own uninvited guests whose

existence is a reminder that structures alone cannot be

read as a guarantee of emancipatory or moral action. The

fluid rhizome that eschews internal bureaucracy, which

expands over an infinite geographical surface, and whose

participants act autonomously within the same structure,

finds arguably its greatest expression in al-Qaeda, a

movement which mirrors Hardt and Negri’s mode to a tee,

albeit as a life-depriving, rather than life-creating

entity. Its training camps are convergences of

singularities, complete with sources of social affect.

Its sleeper cells act like affinity groups, intent on

spectacular action and in Osama bin Laden there is an

empty signifier, a surface of inscription for a plethora

of singular concerns, all directed against the Judeo-

American conspiracy. The ideal al-Qaeda slogan could

very easily be ‘we are everywhere’.

61

Both Bauman and Zizek argue that any movement of

significant social change cannot function in the purely

negative sense alone (that is, as negation), but must

always already contain some positive element. The

question is how. For Bauman, there is an urgent need for

critical reflection and a movement from the cloakroom

identifications of the spectacle towards a more genuine

empathy for the global poor. For Zizek, lamenting the

demise of previous revolutions into factions and

authoritarianism, such movements must continue the very

act of utopian thinking, of learning to desire and desire

anew, in order to prevent sedimented identities and power

structures from dominating the social field in its wake,

to accept that social subjects are made and remade as

events unfold.94 These different approaches subject the

field of alter-globalism and the attendant theory of the

multitude to much-needed criticism, without jettisoning

the acknowledgment of the existence of vast injustices in

contemporary global society. Although neither represents

a panacea to the ills that beset contemporary alter-

62

globalist spaces, in their different ways they both

gravitate towards a concern with grounding a movement for

global justice beyond the logic of the spectacle.

Activists could do considerably worse than heed their

respective calls.

94 Zizek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2004), pp.196-213.

63