Protest and Organization in the Alternative Globalization Era
* Book: Heather Gautney, Protest and Organization in the Alternative Globalization Era: NGOs, Social Movements, and Political Parties, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Review
Ariel Salleh:
"Gautney delivers an assessment of the World Social Forum phenomenon from its beginnings to the present. Each Forum*Porto Alegre 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, Mumbai 2004, Caracas, Bamako, and Karachi 2006, Nairobi 2007, Bele´m 2009 was colored and often constrained by its unique regional and social character, but the Indian gathering elicited an especially positive response. The author notes that it marked ‘‘the broadening of issues to include fundamentalism, caste, and women’s concerns, the expansion of the WSF to include dalits and other disenfranchized groups, and the spread of the process beyond the Western hemisphere to another major region of the world’’ (143).
The main body of the book is given over to examining the respective roles played by NGOs, anarchist or autonomist elements, and political parties inside the alternative globalization movement. Gautney teases out the strengths and weaknesses of each political mode, and her treatment is generally a balanced one. NGOs like ATTAC,1 she finds, manifest a kind of ‘‘embedded liberalism.’’ The WSF Charter of Principles is likewise compromised, as she puts it: ‘‘with its emphasis on personal responsibility and individual rights, [it] actually utilizes some of the same logics as neoliberalism, despite the Forum’s ostensible opposition to it’’ (88). Conversely, the other key WSF document, the Bamako Declaration, suffers from a rather top down Marxist line. An ongoing structural weakness of the Forum is lack of transparency concerning the activities of its International Council.
The conflict of political styles and WSF ideologies is usually summed up as a tension between ‘‘verticals versus laterals.’’ And if the laterals, led by Chico Whitaker, are keen to preserve the WSF as an ‘‘open space’’ for the exchange of ideas and networking, the verticals would prefer a tighter structure, a clearly articulated political position, and a capacity for making strategic interventions in the global order. Verticals such as Walden Bello want to mount a direct challenge to neoliberal institutions like the IMF (Bello 2002). The WSF Charter of Principles rules out participation by formally constituted vertical groupings like political parties, but this has never been adhered to. In fact, the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) was instrumental in founding the WSF, and others have made substantial contributions without co-opting it. Moreover, President Lula may have been subject to catcalls at some events, but his $50 million check towards the 2009 forum in Bele´m was gratefully received.
Gautney’s book, with its crash course in Economics 101, handy Glossary and Appendices, will be especially useful to teachers of political science and sociology, particularly since the analysis of movement organization is studded with vignettes from relevant social theory. Thus the reader is treated to Arendt on violence, Gramsci on civil institutions, Habermas on discourse ethics, Bookchin on the pitfalls of consensus, Hardt and Negri on the multitude, and Lenin versus Luxemburg on the role of the party. Habermas’ argument for deliberative process seems to support WSF laterals and advocates of ‘‘open space,’’ but his emphasis on decision-making and renewal of the public sphere is closer to the verticals’ perception of a proactive Forum. In an ideal world, however, the two ‘‘approaches’’ might surely function alongside each other as distinct ‘‘phases’’ of the WSF." (http://arielsalleh.info/theory/book-reviews/gautney-rev.pdf)
More Information
Other books:
- Tom Mertes in The Movement of Movements;
- Jackie Smith, et al. in Global Democracy and the World Social Forums;
- Judith Blau and Marina Karides in The World and U.S. Social Forums.