Networked Politics: conclusion

Contents

Lingering thoughts and unanswered questions

At the end of the Barcelona seminar, we agreed to write
down the two most vivid thoughts and the two unanswered
questions that remained with us. Here is a summary of
what people said and also an indication of how we hope
to develop this project as a resource for similar or related
discussions doubtless happening all over the world.
There was an unusual intensity about these discussions.
This was influenced, perhaps, by the unusual mix of common
values, very different histories and involvements combined
with a shared sense of the risks and possibilities of
trying to move forward on a very uncertain terrain. Branka
Curcic saw it as: “a struggle for new solutions and new
models of political organisation – models or forms that do
not yet exist or are necessarily to come. It is a struggle that
does not say what these new models are but tries to identify
intermediate solutions and the potential that exists, and to
do so bears in mind the heritage of what social and political
movements have achieved or hoped to achieve in the past”.

As far as potential is concerned, several people’s memories
focused on different dimensions of what Marco Berlinguer
described as “A stronger sensibility and a more ‘dramatic’
perception about what I would call the world of de-institutionalised
relationships, growing everywhere outside formal,
institutional, organised relations, far away from the official
world of politics”. Ezequiel Adamovsky referred specifically
to what he saw as “a clear pattern of spontaneously noncapitalist
behaviour in the new forms of social interaction
that new technologies enable. Activists do not usually pay
attention to apparently ‘non-political’ behaviour. I think we
have a lot to learn from that.” Joan Subirats’ memories from
the seminar, influenced particularly by movements around
housing becoming strong in many parts of Spain, focused
on a broader potential. He observed that: “the emergence of
new tensions that could favour new waves of mobilisation,
taking advantage of the ‘resilience’ that exists in different
‘nodes’ of the network; tensions in circumstances of daily
life that call into question the foundations of the system, for
example, the movement for decent, worthy housing in Spain
and France”. Angel Calle sensed potential in the way that
“in addition to organising protests, social movements build
up autonomous spaces for organising daily social life with
alternative values – through social centres, community organisations
and co-operative, social economic initiatives.”

Most people pointed to potential sources of transformatory
action against the background of an assessment, which
Franco Berardi (“Bifo”) characterised as “the end of cycle
of the movement started in 1999”. It has been a successful
experience because it destroyed the consensus on neo-liberal
ideology. According to Bifo, though, it has also been a
“failure because it has been unable to act effectively in the
field of production of value. Hundred thousands people were
marching every Saturday afternoon and protesting against
exploitation and war, but on Monday morning the demonstrators
were back in their places of work, unable to transfer
the political strength of the demos from the sphere of social
production. This has created a strange situation: a strong
movement has been unable to fulfil any of its goals… The
beginning of the infinite war has changed the scenario so
deeply”, Bifo concludes, “that since February 15th 2003 the
movement has lost its strength and its hope”.

Most people highlighted, as we did in our introduction,
sources of resistances and alternatives still flowing over
a rocky terrain and often beneath the ground – movimenti
carsici, as the Italians describe the process, using the
metaphor of rivers in the mountains that disappear for long
stretches, only to reappear somewhere else.

Bifo’s understanding, however, led him in the opposite
direction. While he starts from a recognition that “the unpredictable
is the most important force”, he believes that
the present state of social relationships does not offer any
grounded source of hope. He developed the arguments he
put in the seminar (see Challenges section) about the destruction
of autonomy, the life blood of the imagination to
argue that, “the effects of hyper capitalism are irreversible
at the level of the environment, at the level of military proliferation,
at the level of the social disaggregation of labour,
and – most discouragingly – at the level of the human
mind”. He stays very much on the alert, though, waiting
for the unpredictable to emerge.

Others pointed to the dispersal of sources of hope and
resistance, and the search in different ways for new forms
of connection. Ines Pereira from Lisbon, a young activist
in the fair trade and free software movements and a
member of the radical left party, Bloco Esquerda, stressed
the importance of developing more effective tools for coordination
and networking among different groups and organisations
at a global level, avoiding vertical approaches.
She also argued that consensus and horizontality should
be rethought because they aren’t always suitable for big
groups: “It’s necessary”, she says, “to make use of central
nodes, without falling into verticality”.

Adamovsky stresses the importance of connecting presently
disconnected levels of ‘radicalism’. One of his unanswered
questions was how to connect the spontaneously ‘radical’
behaviour of people building autonomous spaces and having
non-capitalistic relationships, in p2p exchanges or through
the Wikipedia for example, with the “activists” and social
movements. Connections between social movements and
parts of the trade union movement were discussed in depth in
Manchester. What can be learnt from large networks like “Our
World is Not For Sale” and the Hemispheric Social Alliance? Or
from smaller networks like local alliances against privatisation
in the UK or local chambers of labour in Italy, where trade unions
and social movements appear to have created something
more than the sum of their parts?

Jamie King, drawing on informatic metaphors, wanted to
explore how the many nodes of the Internet have become
an inter-network, and how this might relate to “binding” and
interaction within and between political formations. Mayo
Fuster’s stress on the importance of systematising social
movement knowledge points to a tool for connection that
provides a shared memory, a source of continuity and cumulative
experience. This makes possible a significant flexibility
in organisational form while also offering a fundamental tool
of connection and a source of common language. The question
of a new language of politics is a recurring theme. Berlinguer,
reinforcing a challenge of Curcic’s (see Challenges)
raised the unanswered question of how to find a language
to articulate the unfolding new politics beyond the traditional
political culture reflected in mass media representations.

Another type of question concerning communication and
connections arose when contrasts were made between
the impact of dissent in different social spheres. Bifo contrasted
the strength on the streets in the early days of the
war on Iraq with the weakness of resistance in the daily
reproduction of capitalism. Others pointed to the gap between
the strength of cultural dissent, and the weakness of
dissent and alternatives within political institutions. Several
unanswered questions had to do with how to relate to political
institutions. How to build on the transformative processes
that people observe in daily life? How to achieve
sustained challenges to “hard power”, the enduring institutions
of capitalist political and economic power?

Both Adamovsky and Pereira raised this issue. Adamovsky
observed that one of the biggest dilemmas that movements
now face is that not to participate in electoral politics leaves
state power to the right (with catastrophic consequences),
while participation usually ends up subverting the very principles
of the movements (with catastrophic consequences).
How do we move beyond this lose-lose situation? Pereira
commented that parties, institutions and movements tend to
be considered separate entities with their own models, languages,
supporters and spheres of action. But, she asked, is
this really effective? Parties and institutions need to change,
to learn from the tools and ways of organising common
among social movements. On the other hand, she noted,
social movements should be more explicit and self-confident
about their own role as political actors and interlocutors. This
takes us from the sphere of transformative action in micropolitics
– within social and cultural relations, the spheres
where people have sufficient autonomy to daily create new
social exchanges and connections – to the institutions, the
level of hard power, the concentrated, embedded institutions
of domination. Alex Foti is an elected councillor for the
Green Party in Milan but at the same time his roots are in
movements firmly independent of political institutions – most
notably EuroMayday, a European wide organisation of precarious
workers. So his views on parties are of interest: “The
principles that have emerged after the end of the cold war
are horizontality and self-organisation”. That means post-
Leninism, and that’s clear. So even if we talk about parties,
then it cannot be about Leninist parties. In addition, there is
the emergence of an ecological consciousness – which is
a rejection of the industrialist left – and the way the many of
the new movements keep faith with the struggles for social
equality and global solidarity of the sixties and the seventies
which are still very much alive especially in Latin America.

Throughout the seminar, Berlinguer and others stressed a
process of fragmentation and de-institutionalisation, both
for good and for ill, changing rather than destroying “hard
power”. For Hilary Wainwright, the thought that lingered
was of “a more powerful sense of the force of de-institutionalisation
and fragmentation than I had ever had before.

The micro-politics in the UK of struggling to defend from
the latest wave of neo-liberalism public services or other
still progressive institutions, sometimes makes me a little
myopic, not fully comprehending the full force of the ocean
and the speed at which it is sweeping traditional institutions
– progressive and some reactionary too – away in its path”.
What are the implications of this process for how the movements
relate to the institutions? What are the implications
for the strategies to achieve the independence of the movements
from governement discussed by Alessandra Mecozzi
from the Italian metalworkers’ union or Melissa Pomeroy
active around participatory democracy in Brazil? (see Challenges)
One of the central challenges of a new politics is the
creation of new kinds of institutions, institutions that do not
become ‘hard’. This was an underlying theme made explicit
in the discussion of Linux. Is the idea of transformative institutions
a contradiction in terms? What conclusions for future
engagement with political institutions can be drawn from the
German Greens’ experiment to refound their party on new
institutional principles? To understand in depth the character
of these would-be institutions, several people raised the
“mother of all questions”: Why do we need institutions? For
what purposes do we need institutions?

Joan Subirats opened up one direction for an answer in
posing a question about property and “the commons”.
He presented his lingering thought as an insight from
the discussion of the Linux metaphor of “a collective
construction without a master or leader but capable of
gathering together people and entities in its daily and
creative function”. In this context, he talked of the recovery
of “communalism” from an understanding of property that
is neither individual nor collective but “common” to all of
us together and each of us alone. He asked whether it is
possible, drawing from the tradition of “the commons”
to configure institutional rules of property that manage to
make access equal and free while doing it in such a way
as to ensure the future sustainability of these principles?

It is clear, as the questions multiply, that our work has just
begun. We should perhaps explain why we are reporting
conversations and not conclusions. This pamphlet is unlike
most reports in this sense. There are no bullet point
conclusions, no measurable “outputs”. There is good
reason for this, one that is intrinsic to our search. Like
many activists and activist researchers we are in a
moment of exploration and this pamphlet is simply “work
in progress”. But we are also in a moment of urgency.
As Lluc Peláez says, “If the social movements’ diagnosis
of the world situation is correct, we have no time to
lose. What must be the emergency strategy?” That’s a
question for everyone. But effective strategies need regular
moments and resources of collaborative reflective
work. Surely that is the lesson of Frieder Otto Wolf’s
analysis of the experience of the German Greens.

We hope this project, as well as providing such moments
for us, will also contribute to a broader discussion in which
others will participate. We intend to continue the discussion
both on our collaborative website (www.networkedpolitics.
info) and through occasional seminars. We are
working on case studies on several aspects raised in these
seminars: the insights of feminism for rethinking politics; the
organisational principles and methods of the free software
movement; the nature, possibilities and problems facing
social movement trade unionism; global internet governance
(in comparison with other institutional logics like the UN or
WTO); the Hemispheric Social Alliance as a global network,
and more. We hope you‘ll contact us, if only to keep the
connections alive within the galaxy of interconnected
activision – thinking and action – in which we are all
engaged.