Elsewhere I provided a brief report about the self-managed Hub space that took place duriong but external to the European Social Forum in November. As is frequently the case here in Italy people were anxious to move on to the next ten things as opposed to engaging in some serious dissection and reflection on the experince, to the extent that the notes documenting related to the closing plenary were never in fact completed. What was producved can be found here:
Key problems were:
- a miscalculation as to the extent of the impact of the Official Forum
- inadequate organisation
- a low level of self-organisation that meant that the Italians, to their credit, effectively put on a show for the rest.
- insufficient social space, too activist-centred
- an inability to interven on the level of disruptive actions that could pose the difference between our perspectives and those of the institutionalised left, including the NGOs.
- persistence of crypto-hierarchies in the decision making structure
- failure to generate new tools for documenting discussion and pivital decision moments
- the total absence of any follow up, whether of the sessions themselves or the conclusions of the discussiona nd workshops (what happened in the democracy workshop for example!)
That Acrobax have issued this call is extremely positive as the need for propagating a practice and culture of self-management is sharpened rather than dissipated by the onward march of the process of social democratic recomposition known as the Social Forum and the leninist disobeddienti.
Self-organisation must pose itself as a constitutive political proposition, as a choice open to application and capable of delivering real gains. The real critique of the WSF process is the critique of actions. As Jamie put it elsewhere:
The movement must solve the question of how to 'represent the unrepresentable' to prevent future WSFs from occuring. The questions of knowledge sharing, community decision making, possible infrastructures for many-to-many and peer-to-peer communications, and the status of free circulation of information against privacy and security, are critical in this respect, since it seems likely that the movement will have to pose multitudinous political involution against spectacular representality in order to depotentiate attempts by sovereigntists to close down avenues for such representation that are anyway inimical to its form.
How to tackle the sunk networks of power, deeply imbricated in the personal relations of protagonists of recent years and the relative weight accorded to individuals views based on the most unpredictable variables, means by definition that this problem is only addressable in part through technical and dsicursive means: elements are too rooted culturally to be amenaple to prefunctory expiation by enraged hierarachy-trashers.
"Indeed, those discussions are necessary at every level, both to fight the emergence of the crypto-hierarchies that are troubling the movement at a variety of levels, and to begin to find ways of creating a public decision-making structure that can truly enact the distributed will of the multitude that Negri once spoke of so optimistically."
(Jamie)
Social movements have some hierarchies that have passed untroubled by the egalitarian wave, particularly those intellectual vectors that have always exercised a guidance function over sections of the street movement and thgis is all particularly evident in the cobntext of the disobeddienti-posse-negri nexus. The hazard in addressing this is the temptation to lapse into a crude anti-intellectualism rather than positing the problem as one of recognition for the social authorship of ideas and events. Plumbing the depths of the anti-copyright argument to its logiocal conclusion means not only a rejection of the proprietary luxuries afforded to the few stars of the system but also the socialisation of the cultural capital that accrues in other cuurencies. A GPL for ideas, thus, a change in perspective and the abolition of the individual/collectivity tension, no less. Otherwsie our diviusions, ruptyres, the gold of our international, is of no use to us, influenced as it is by the most abject gossip, manipulation, ego-clashes and sexual intrigue. These are all beautufukl aspects of our humanity but are no less inimical to our ambitions for that.
