Linking below, across and against:

Publication date: Monday 11 June 2007

Can we learn to conceive, theoretically and politically, of a ‘grassroots’ that
would be not local, communal, and authentic, but worldly, well-connected,
and opportunistic? Are we ready for social movements that fight not ‘from
below’ but ‘across’, using their ‘foreign policy’ to fight struggles not against
‘the state’ but against that hydra-headed transnational apparatus of banks,
international agencies, and market institutions through which
contemporary capitalist domination functions?
James Ferguson, Global Shadows

We learnt a great deal about the divergent ways forward for global justice
movement political strategy at the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi. One of
the most influential commentators and activists, Walden Bello, found the Nairobi
WSF to be:
disappointing, since its politics was so diluted and big business interests
linked to the Kenyan ruling elite were so brazen in commercializing it…
There was a strong sense of going backward rather than forward in Nairobi.
The WSF is at a crossroads. Hugo Chavez captured the essence of the
conjuncture when he warned delegates in January 2006 about the danger of
the WSF becoming simply a forum of ideas with no agenda for action. He
told participants that they had no choice but to address the question of
power: “We must have a strategy of ‘counter-power.’ We, the social
movements and political movements, must be able to move into spaces of
power at the local, national, and regional level.”
Developing a strategy of counter-power or counter-hegemony need
not mean lapsing back into the old hierarchical and centralized modes of
organizing characteristic of the old left. Such a strategy can, in fact, be best
advanced through the multilevel and horizontal networking that the
movements and organizations represented in the WSF have excelled in
advancing their particular struggles. Articulating their struggles in action
will mean forging a common strategy while drawing strength from and
respecting diversity. After the disappointment that was Nairobi, many longstanding
participants in the Forum are asking themselves: Is the WSF still
the most appropriate vehicle for the new stage in the struggle of the global
justice and peace movement? Or, having fulfilled its historic function of
aggregating and linking the diverse counter-movements spawned by global
capitalism, is it time for the WSF to fold up its tent and give way to new
modes of global organization of resistance and transformation?

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full article can be downloaded from:

http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/files/Bond%20Gyeongsang%20Univ%2025%20May.pdf