Jan Dumolyn, University of Ghent
Programmes and strategies of the Belgian
alternative globalisation movement: a Gramscian perspective.
In this paper I take into consideration aspects
of the composition, ‘ideology’ and ‘programmes’ of the Belgian ‘anti-‘ or
‘alternative globalisation movement’. Though at first sight this ‘movement of
movements’ seems very heterogeneous and composed of groups and individuals with
often very different ideas, methods and political culture I want to argue that
to a certain degree we can discern a strategy and programme which they hold in
common and to which I refer to as ‘reconquering the public space’. In Gramscian
terminology we could consider this as the construction of a ‘counter-hegemony’.
The ‘alternative globalisation movement’
(hereafter referred to as ‘the movement’) in Belgium consists of very different
and heterogeneous groups and individuals. One could even ask the question
whether this is more than just a virtual ‘movement of movements’ or ‘network of
networks’. However, the fact that a self-confident general movement against
neoliberalism has put a critique of capitalist society back on the agenda,
represents a clear qualitative change in comparison with the decade between
roughly 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall)
and 1999 (Seattle), a period during which any idea of an alternative to
capitalism seemed inconceivable and a neoliberal pensée unique was forged,
trumpetting ‘the end of history’. Though it largely remains a middle class
phenomenon, the alternative globalisation movement has mobilised new layers of
youth and has brought together groups and organisations which for a long time
have worked in relative isolation from each other.
First of all I want to make clear that I am not
a political scientist and I have done no systematical surveys, source study or
any other firmly methodologically grounded empirical investigation. What
follows has been observed by participant observation (or perhaps we should call
it ‘observing participation’) in the role I played in co-organising
manifestations in Bruges, Ghent and Brussels during the Belgian presidency of
the European Union in the latter half of 2001, in meetings preparing the
Belgian Social Forum and in an organisation like Attac in Flanders. Moreover I
have on different occasions questioned so called ‘key organisers’ and
‘pioneers’ (terms I use reticently because many of them would not like to be
considered within such hierarchic classifications) on different levels (another
tricky word!) and in different parts of the movement in order to obtain more
systematic information. Though this is an insiders’ point of view and not the
result of systematic research in the social or political sciences, it is not
theoretically naive standpoint either – or at least so I hope. With two
co-authors I have published a book on the Belgian movement in the international
context, which contains a journalistic history of its origins and actions as
well as some chapters on the social and organisational structure and on
practice, theory and tactics of the movement. Of course, ‘value free’
approaches of what in this conference is apparently called an ‘extremist’
movement of which I am a part, are unthinkable, impossible and undesirable.
This does not mean however that I will speak only as a partisan. Critical
theorists – if they want to meet the criteria of their own claims – who are
part of social movements should always maintain as much self-criticism as
possible, in order to tham forward as well as to gain scientific insight on
society and the role of the movement in bringing about potential change.
First, let’s have a look at the organisational
composition of the Belgian movement. Schematically, we might list the composing
parts of the movement as follows.
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Volunteers
of tiersmondist NGO’s who are
particularly numerous in Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of Belgium that
represents 60% of the population). When organisations like 11 11 11 – CNCD
(respectively the Flemish and French speaking platforms of NGO’s) or ‘Oxfam –
Wereldwinkels’ (a network of fair trade shops which exist all over the country
and in a lot of smaller towns form a local meeting point of activists and
progressive people) mobilise, they are sometimes able to get ten thousand
people on the streets. The sometimes rather formalistic organisation structures
of the major NGO’s (and their links to institutionalised power structures)
often make it difficult to engage these organisations in swift mobilisation but
local groups and activists often can play a decisive role.
-
Less
well structured neighbourhood committees and small or local social and cultural
movements of all kinds mobilise people as well. With the exception of more
radical youngsters, ecologist movements have largely staid absent from Belgian
anti-globalist mobilisations. Immigrant organisations, which are in Belgium
with few exceptions not very strong or completely dependent of the government,
are also very poorly represented in the movement and the same goes for
autonomous organisations of the poor, the unemployed or the homeless
(indicating the predominant ‘educated middle class’ character of the movement…)
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Trade
Unionists are only ‘halfway’ in the movement. Clearly, they share a lot of
common goals with the ‘alternative globalists’ but different traditions and the
vested interests of their leadership who sometimes seem to consider NGO’s and
others as potential rivals or who are so embedded in the power structure (the
‘consultation model’ to achieve social peace is very strong in Belgium and on
top of that unions are very closely connected to the social democrat an
christian democrat parties) often hold them back from participating or have
them march on a different day (e.g. in Laeken). Of course, as is shown in Italy
or Spain, when the trade unions join in the movements its mobilising potential
and its impact on society grow dramatically. This even appears to be the conditio sine qua non for the movement
to gain any real social weight beyond momentary symbolic media attention.
However, it seems that this has to be analysed in the context of rather radical
right wing governments.
-
Radical
left political currents including Leninist, reformed communist and anarchist
organisations and parties have always been rather marginal in Belgian political
life, though some of them recently attracted young and recently politicised
people. Their members seem to have more impact working within larger
organisations and structures. Many of them however are necessarily too
sectarian to break out of their small social worlds and countercultures and
primarily consider that they have to be present in the movement to recruit new
forces. Nevertheless as far as Leninist organisations are concerned, their
style of organisation and discourse – centralised and all knowing as opposed to
the decentralisation and theoretical uncertainty of the movement - are
impediments to gain youngsters and actually keep them within their ranks.
-
The
vast majority of young people in the movement have actually no affiliation at
all. They often make somewhat vague anti-capitalist analyses (including
anti-corporate, anti-state, anti-police, anti-war sentiments, solidarity with
the poor and oppressed throughout the world…) and sympathise with
libertarian-anarchic forms of organisation like network structures, basic
democracy and non violent direct action. Some of them – in Belgium this a tiny
minority indeed – consider ‘symbolic vandalism’ or even violence against police
forces as a legitimate means of struggle. However, the emphasis which the press
lay on this phenomenon is completely disproportionate with its actual relevance
(which in my view is in fact non whatsoever). Average young antiglobalists in
Belgium are typically parts of social networks of friends, classmates of fellow
students, people who are active in local youth centres, ‘alternative
subcultures’, even some scouting or catholic youth groups, school parliaments
and so on. They can quickly mobilise using e-mail communication and cellular
phones. Not being formally organised their flexibility is sometimes a great advantage
but on the other hand often shows little continuity or thorough social or
political analysis.
I once tried to estimate the sheer number of
‘antiglobalists’ or sympathisers with the ideas of this movement basing myself
on the numbers of demonstrators in the major manifestations against
neoliberalism and against the latest war in Iraq (in fact, in Belgium the peace
movement overlaps to a very high degree with the alternative globalisation
movement). Of course methodologically this is a extremely hazardous undertaking
but it could give us some idea, for what it’s worth. I think it’s a safe guess
to count about 100 to 200 000 progressive people who have taken the streets the
last years and might be considered somewhat active sympathisers with the idea that
‘another world is possible’. Political consciousness of course is a very
unstable and volatile thing. Workers might for example temporarily radicalise
in the context of massive layoffs and briefly consider the antiglobalists as
their allies. This has happened in Laeken on December 13h and 14th when Sabena
workers demonstrated with them. Belgium has millions of trade union members
(this is a country with almost the highest rate of trade union membership in
the world), some of whom might never demonstrate but would show some sympathy
with the ideas of the movement when properly explained how these could relate
to their own life-world. Again this is quite immeasurable and I speak from some
personal experiences dicussing the subject of neoliberal globalisation for a
public of socialist union members. On the other hand, from their own
experiences many of them perhaps may consider a vague and unstructured movement
such as this as something which lacks seriousness and potential impact on
society, a transitory hobby of bored students and sympathetic but ultimately
useless intellectuals and do-gooders. Such, in any case, seems to be the
evaluation many workers made of the student movements in the late sixties.
To conclude as far as the composition of the
movement is concerned, we might remark that the activists in the alternative
globalisation movement are mostly young, but certainly not all of them (which
is an important difference with the movement of the sixties and seventies, some
of whose ‘veterans’ now are active again). The youngsters in the movement
mostly enter the political scene for the first time. Most of the less younger
people are part of organised progressive civil society and are not new
activists at all. They are for a large part middle class intellectuals or well
educated workers with progressive world views. Only a minority actually belongs
to the most oppressed classes of society.
Since this session deals with the relation of
‘extremism’ people to ‘democracy’, I should stress the importance of exactly
the idea of democracy within the movement. Actually, democracy is a key word in
the discourse of the movement. Some alternative globalists in Belgium prefer to
be called ‘democratic globalists’ instead of ‘anti-globalists’. They claim that
democracy does not go hand in hand with the so called ‘free market’ at all but
is actually an opposing force to capitalism. Some classically reject capitalism
in general as an undemocratic system, while the majority of the movement would
have capitalism be ‘corrected’ by democratic reform the same way social and
ecological corrections are necessary. However, this divergence is not exactly
the same as the classical opposition between ‘reformists’ and
‘revolutionaries’. That distinction is much more vague and unclear in this
post-modern period, makes one wonder if it ever was a useful political category
at all.
The idea of a ‘programme’ can be considered in
a restrictive manner as a set of explicitly formulated demands responding to
the discursive norms of a specific field of society, for instance
institutionalised politics. It is not my aim here to discuss what we might call
the actual ‘common minimum programme’ of the alternative globalisation
movement: the Tobin Tax, the abolition of the Third World debt, ‘WTO: sink or
shrink’, ‘fair trade’, global peace etcetera. The programme of the movement
goes further than these ‘minimal’ demands (which already seem unrealisable in
themselves given the present political balance of forces. Besides, I believe my
colleagues Bursens and Sinardet will treat this topic in more detail in this
conference. I want to argue that under these direct demands their is a somewhat
integrated world vision or ideology that is not as clear as previous socialist
or revolutionary ideologies have been but nevertheless shows a number of
specific features which might be summarised in a position to go beyond existing
neoliberal society and, if not to change it completely, to recover some of the
power and advantages which have been lost during the last three decades of
systemic capitalist crisis.
Starting from the concept of ‘reconquering the
public space’ used by many alternative globalist organisations and individuals
use in some way or another, I try to
sketch a largely implicit Gramscian model in the programmes and practices of
the different components of the movement. For the sake of my argument ‘public
space’ can be considered in a variety of different but paradigmatically
connected meanings such as ‘the streets’, ‘the commons’, ‘the forum/the agora’,
‘democratic political power’ but also ‘natural resources’, ‘public services’ or
even the ‘cultural heritage’. In short, it is everything, material or
immaterial, that is privatised, being privatised or not yet privatised, the
classic opposition between ‘the private’ and ‘the public’ articulated in the
age of mass commodification of the natural and the social world and the
colonisation of the subjective. Of course, I draw here heavily on the Marxist
theory of alienation and neo-Gramscian cultural studies perspectives.
In this conflict theory of society, public
space is of course an object of struggle. Moreover, I argue that public space
is the foremost object of democratic
struggle and that the vagueness of this metaphor only reflects the
indeterminacy of the objectives and demands of the movement.
So what do I exactly want to regroup in this
concept?
-
First
of all, public space can be a very literal idea. The actual idea of taking back
or ‘reclaiming’ the streets (for instance in demonstrations against ‘the
privatisation of the streets’: the commercialisation of mass events or city
summer festivals) as a form of reclaiming the commons.
-
Entering
forbidden zones as has happened in the Belgian military base of Kleine Brogel
where at one occasion more than 1500 people, definitely from broad layers of
society, crossed the fences doing ‘citizen’s inspections’ to find the nuclear
weapons of mass destruction stocked there by the US.
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Occupying
forests – or what is left of them in the very densely populated area of Flanders
– as has happened for years in the British Road Protest movement, seems
recently to have spread in Holland and Belgium. In Bruges, the Lappersfort
forest occupation, which I have witnessed very regularly during more than a
year, managed to make an important impact on the media, on local and national
politics and on public opinion in the town of Bruges itself (population of
about 115 000 people).
-
Denouncing
private lobby organisations which try to influence public institutions, like
Attac has done again and again, or even symbolically occupying their offices in
Brussels, which has been done by young radical ecologists and anarchists, is
another act of reclaiming the public sphere.
-
Trying
to block a European, G8 or WTO summit by actually physically preventing it is
since Seattle of course the ‘classic’ in this ‘genre’. Political leaders have
dismissed this form of action as ‘undemocratic means’ – and some political
scientists seem to be inclined to follow them in this legalist form of
reasoning – but they reply that they these institutions have lost all
democratic legitimacy if they ever had it. As I have already mentioned, Black
Block tactics are absolutely not widespread in Belgium (and it must be
admitted, police violence on protesters is also more ‘reasonable’ than in Italy
or Spain for instance).
-
The
cultural, discursive and semiotic ‘guerrilla’, originating from the old
situationist tradition and these days practised by groups like the ‘adbusters’
have had some following in Belgium as well, but this has not really been a big
trend.
-
Alternative
media are growing, especially on the World Wide Web, a virtual public space par
excellence, which is also subjected to the struggle between private profitable
initiative and a community of users.
-
Finally,
the ‘recapture’ of political structures is not yet on the agenda, though social
democratic and green politicians have at least paid a lot of lip service to the
movement, some of which is certainly genuinely motivated to bring about
structural changes, but political space and balance of forces seems to be
lacking for this. Neither is there a political alternative emanating from the
movement itself. Of course, within the movement some marginal political parties
of the Leninist left (and even one in co-operation with a Muslim and Arab
nationalist organisation) have tried to present themselves as political
representatives of the movement, but they have scored less than one percent and
even less than they did during the last elections while they had thought they
could have capitalised on the movement. The sympathisers of the movement seem
primarily to have voted for the greens (who have suffered a terrible defeat in
the 2003 elections) and especially for the social democrats which they consider
as ‘the lesser evils’.
It must be clear that all this has nothing to
do with a so called ‘extremism’, a concept, by the way, that I consider totally
uncritical, chaotic and utterly useless for political analysis. Perhaps what
‘extremism’ has in common with the other term to which the organisers of this
session want to find the relation, ‘democracy’, is that they are ‘empty
signifiers’, complete meaningless words which have been thoroughly perverted by
the dominant discourse of power structures. Ultimately, speaking from today’s dominant
discourse, this means that ‘democracy’ means being in power, and ‘extremism’
means contesting this power. To put it bluntly, 40 000 children who die
uselessly because of complex effects of the global economy and who could easily
have been saved with some food, clean water and medical treatment, are
reasonably argued a more ‘extreme’ case than smashing the windows of some bank
office or even burning a Macdonald’s ‘restaurant’. If anything, the alternative
globalisation movement should try to reclaim, recover and subvert the word
democracy and give it back a more ‘direct’ meaning of ‘power to the people’.
‘Democracy’ is not inextricably bound up with the so called ‘free market’ –
let’s just call it capitalism now that this word is acceptable again in academic
circles. Democracy opposes corporate power, the erosion of national
parliaments, the utterly undemocratic structures of the European Union or,
worse, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. Democracy should mean empowerment
and not mass mind control through privatised media. It seems a rhetoric
question to ask if the Italian Black Block activists really are a more serious
threat to ‘democracy’ than the ‘democratically’ elected prime minister Sylvio
Berlusconi…
As a social historian trying to be a historical
sociologist I have studied long term processes such as the rise of capitalism
and the modern state. Reading mainstream political analyses I am often shocked
in disbelief noticing the still so widespread lack of the historical dimension
in this field of study. Though it seems almost taboo to say this, it is a clear
historical absurdity to consider liberal bourgeois democracy as the ultimate
point of political evolution, an idealist Hegelian illusion in the style of
Francis Fukuyama’s end of history. It is not only the question if Florida’s
election laws are up to date. In my view liberal Democracy should not be
‘protected’ from so called ‘extremism’ but any constructive criticism should be
taken seriously and the enormous social and economic evolutions of the last two
centuries since the outlining of its constitutional and political theory,
should be met with far reaching improvements of the democratic system. Narrow,
legalistic conceptions of ‘democracy’ – or even ‘liberal democracy’ if
‘liberal’ stands for the defence of the rights of men and not necessarily for
neoliberal economic dogmas – in the end are just legitimations of fundamental
inequalities in society. A truer, more participatory and fuller vision of
democracy should consider democracy as a verb, not as a noun, not as a frozen
reality, and should apply it on more and more levels of life and society,
including of course the major economic decision making processes.
All this however can clearly only be achieved
as the result of a social and political struggle. Movements that are
‘revolutionary’ in the sense that they aim for major structural changes in
society of course need a large social base, but this social base is also partly
the result of its own discursive construction. Constructing a ‘counter
hegemony’ within the existing structures of society seems the only directly
useful way in the absence of both a fully elaborated revolutionary Grand
Narrative and a model for a post capitalist society. Forming a new ‘historical
block’ against hegemonic capitalist power now seems even more difficult and
complicated. Unlike in Gramsci’s time, the central position of the workers’
movement in a possible global ‘popular front against neoliberalism’ is no
longer obvious. Rather, unity in diversity should be sought in a process of
dialogical construction of solidarities between different oppressed or revolted
groups in society. Existing practices and theories must be tested and
exchanged. ‘Autonomous Marxists’ from different perspectives like Antonio Negri
or John Halloway or discourse theorists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
try to theorise such efforts in creating ‘chains of equivalence’ between
different emancipatory discourses of different subordinated groups in
decentralised coalitions and to move to a radically pluralist democracy. Today,
all this seems very vague, voluntaristic and idealist, but so were human rights
and general elections in 1788. Often today’s ‘extremists’ are tomorrow’s
‘democrats’.
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