Chaotic, dispersive, unknowable—Michael Hardt’s uncertainty in the face of the multilingual mass of global oppositionists—‘a sea of people’—thronging to Porto Alegre for the World Social Forum last spring is entirely understandable.footnote1 There were anywhere between fifty thousand and eighty thousand participants, and at least ten thousand official delegates—activists, students, intellectuals, trade unionists, environmentalists, rural workers, Argentinian piqueteros, plus the representatives of scores of NGOs—crowding into seminars, round-table sessions and workshops, or marching through the sweltering streets in celebratory parades or ad-hoc protest demonstrations. Twenty-seven conferences on broad socio-economic themes were running simultaneously, together with over a hundred seminars on more specific questions—food sovereignty, ‘the illusion of development’, the World Bank and IMF, indigenous peoples and sustainability—and more than five hundred specialist workshops; not to mention the music, the films, the plays.
The first question, in Hardt’s view, is how such a widely differentiated mass can begin to work together—for the various movements ‘cannot simply connect to each other as they are, but must rather be transformed through the encounter by a sort of mutual adequation . . . not to become the same, or even to unite, but to link together in an expanding network’. The second is to distinguish the major issues they confront. For Hardt, the opponents of neoliberal globalization are faced with a choice between two primary positions: ‘either one can work to reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and global capital, or one can strive towards a non-national alternative to the present form of globalization that is equally global’.footnote2
Hardt and Negri have already made a passionate case against the first position in the pages of Empire. The modern state—born as a counter-revolutionary, absolutist response to Renaissance humanism, boosted with the toxic ideology of an exclusionary, homogenizing nationalism—has always been a tool for repression, even when posing as the champion of anti-colonial liberation. Over the past two decades, however, the powers of this reactionary instrument have been drained away by the flow of global networks of production and exchange across its borders, while sovereignty is reconstituted at the higher level of a (still somewhat misty) ‘Empire’. The authors resolutely refuse any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded the global age. Strategies of local resistance—dreams of liberated zones, outside Empire—‘misidentify and thus mask the enemy’, just as they obscure the potential for liberation within it. The national-sovereignty defence against the forces of international capital, Hardt now suggests, presents ‘an obstacle’ to global democracy.footnote3
But it was this position, he claims, that dominated the official platforms and plenary sessions at Porto Alegre, promoted above all by the officials of the Brazilian PT and by the chevènementiste leaders of the French ATTAC. The other side—the ‘democratic-globalization’ viewpoint—was represented by the North Atlantic anti-WTO networks, by the more radical base of ATTAC groups and, emblematically, by the Argentinian neighbourhood committees that have sprung up in response to their country’s financial collapse. Hardt describes these lastas antagonistic to all proposals of national sovereignty, their slogan—que se vayan todos—calling for the abolition of the whole political class. To further illustrate the gulf between the two positions he suggests that, if a ‘democratic-globalization’ solution to the Argentinian crisis exists, it would reject any national defiance of the IMF in favour of seeking a ‘continuity’ between the practical experiments in democracy going on at barrio level—the villa miseria in Argentina—and the democratization of the global system.
Is he right? There were certainly plenty of memento mori at Porto Alegre in the form of Euro-Socialist politicians looking for photo opportunities; but most of these are ardent proponents of the neoliberal cause. Similarly, in the run-up to the Brazilian elections the PT leadership—which certainly hijacked a number of the sessions at Porto Alegre, but did not succeed in controlling its agenda—has been notable not so much for demanding sovereign control over capital flows as for its alacrity in complying with IMF demands on debt repayment. But the experience presented by activists at Porto Alegre—especially those from Latin America, where the neoliberal crisis is at its most intense—proposed a more modulated view of the specific units and gradations of power than Hardt’s ‘all or nothing’ approach. Rather than an intuitive uprising of the multitude against Empire, they suggested a more differentiated field.
The nation-state, precisely because of its role in pushing through the social engineering required by neoliberalism, remains an essential instrument for global capital—and hence a key zone of contestation. It is against their own governments that both South Africans and Latin Americans have been mobilizing to fight against water and electricity privatizations. Peruvians successfully resisted an electricity sell-off—this time at local-state level, in Arequipa—earlier this year; Bolivian ‘water wars’ rattled Banzer’s regime in April 2000; ‘Vivendi, go home!’ is the cry in Argentina. CONAIE, the national confederation of indigenous peoples, brought down the Ecuadorian government early in 2000, and after broken promises from the military and the new regime were back on the streets a year later to oppose austerity measures, deforestation, privatization of electricity and oil pipelines. There have been protests along similar lines in El Salvador, India, Nigeria, Ghana, Papua New Guinea. Last spring, the shantytowns of Caracas rallied to the defence of Chávez in order to fight US-backed plans for the privatization of their oil and the still greater reduction of their living standards.
‘The first question of political philosophy today’, write Hardt and Negri, ‘is not if or even why there will be resistance and rebellion, but rather how to determine the enemy against which to rebel’.footnote4 The Latin American mobilizations of the past few years display not a faith in the transcendent power of national sovereignty but, precisely, a grasp of the immediate enemy—and, often, a clear intuition of the forces that stand behind him. The architecture alone of most Third World US embassies—those massive, reinforced blocks that loom more ominously than any national government buildings—not to mention the plain facts of the local USAF military base, is evidence enough. It is a common enough contradiction today that a willingness to pursue ‘the radiant horizons of capitalist wealth’ can sit quite easily with a sour dose of home-grown cynicism about the uses of Yanqui power.